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Hi, 

 

I'm running a research participant network for my organization. When our customers sign up to do product research with us, they provide a number of times they want to be contacted about engaging in a research activity. 

I need an flow automated flow that will 'quarantine' participants when they have met their limit, and that will reset at the end of the year. (a single select field, that I can use to hide them in the view of available participants)

 

Currently I have:

- Availability given by the participant in a form - I'm using a formula to convert that to a number field. 

- A 'engagement status' field to indicate whether a participant is available or currently engaged (used to filter them from view of available participants).

- An automation that switches the above field from 'engaged' back to 'available' once the research as ended. 

I'd like to be abe to count how may times the 'engagement status' field has been changed to 'engaged', then compare that to the availability given to the participant, then 'quarantining' the participant until a set date (EOY), at which the 'quarantine' switches back to 'free'. 

I'm just not sure how to go about it. Any help is appreciated!

Hey @GHR!

If you need to get this out of the way on a lean way, without "big" changes to your data base architecture, you can have a new field created (Number Type) and called "Amount of Engages", and you can have a script within your automation that changes status field that will get the value from Amount of Engages and add 1 each time the automation runs.

However, I do believe that your system could be further improved with some additional changes to the architecture. I would suggest having the following tables:

1. Contacts
2. Engagements
3. Research Activities (optional)

Under the Contacts tables you would have the amount of engagements that contact is willing to have on a given year.
Under the Engagements table you would have one record created for each engagement.
Under the Contacts table you would create a Rollup field with the formula Sum() to sum the amount of Engagements that contact has. Conditions can be set on your Rollup, to sum only engagements from the current year. You can find more information on Rollup fields here.
For last, under your Contacts table you can have a formula to show whether Engagements Willing to Have is still > than the Rollup of actual engagements.

This set up would provide way more details and insights for your data. (e.g. what specific engagements did each contact get, when that happened, and further information on each).

Might be more than what you came looking for, but that would make for a way more interesting system I believe! If you have questions on how to set this up, and/or why this would be beneficial to your network, please feel free to schedule a call using this link and I'd be happy to show you around.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Hey @GHR!

If you need to get this out of the way on a lean way, without "big" changes to your data base architecture, you can have a new field created (Number Type) and called "Amount of Engages", and you can have a script within your automation that changes status field that will get the value from Amount of Engages and add 1 each time the automation runs.

However, I do believe that your system could be further improved with some additional changes to the architecture. I would suggest having the following tables:

1. Contacts
2. Engagements
3. Research Activities (optional)

Under the Contacts tables you would have the amount of engagements that contact is willing to have on a given year.
Under the Engagements table you would have one record created for each engagement.
Under the Contacts table you would create a Rollup field with the formula Sum() to sum the amount of Engagements that contact has. Conditions can be set on your Rollup, to sum only engagements from the current year. You can find more information on Rollup fields here.
For last, under your Contacts table you can have a formula to show whether Engagements Willing to Have is still > than the Rollup of actual engagements.

This set up would provide way more details and insights for your data. (e.g. what specific engagements did each contact get, when that happened, and further information on each).

Might be more than what you came looking for, but that would make for a way more interesting system I believe! If you have questions on how to set this up, and/or why this would be beneficial to your network, please feel free to schedule a call using this link and I'd be happy to show you around.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation


This is great, thank you for the input on the base design as well.

I'm struggling a bit with making the changes though. The thing is, that besides my 'Participants' (contacts) table, I have a 'Research Activities' table. It is used to provide a form in which the user researchers in the company can 'reserve' participants in the network. It links the 'participants' table, and the researchers will most often select more than one participant when completing the form. I could of course have a 'Researcher info' table, but I like keeping track of the individual activities, as a researcher might conduct multiple throughout the year.

 

I'm unsure of how to populate a new table 'engagements' from here. I'd love to have the details on the level of specific engagements for the participant, type, duration as well. I'm thinking an analogy for this is an inventory rental system?

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