Tracking Participant Progress
Once your Study is live and underway, you'll be needing to track participant progress across the various aspects of your community as part of your moderation and participant management efforts. Depending on whether people are staying on track or falling behind, you'll also need to perform follow-ups and reach out to people accordingly.
Response Summary Tables
Similar to other dynamic tables in the platform you can filter and sort the table in the following manners:
- Filter by Segment or Activity completion status (i.e. Completed, Started, Incomplete, Not Started)
- Sort by table column (i.e. Name, Status, Last Edited)
This table allows you to see the Task progression for each participant visually with the Task numbers accompanied by colored dots to reflect the completion status. The Review Status column (the checkmark icon) will show whether the full Activity response has been reviewed or not. There's also columns for Excerpts, Comments and Ratings which will show the numeric counts respectively for each participant as it pertains to the chosen Activity.
Tracking Activity Completions
In terms of tracking Activity progress across your participants, the Activity that you'll use as your check point will change as your Study rolls out. The activity you want to use as your check point is the last Activity in your sequence that participants should have completed at that time (either based on the forced order or release and due dates).
Simply click into the appropriate Activity and scroll down to the Response Summary table on the Participants tab. Use the completion status filter to drill down on the people who are:
- Completed: They've completed all Tasks in the Activity
- Started: They've started the Activity but haven't completed all Tasks yet
- Incomplete: They started the Activity but didn't complete it and it's now past the due date
- Not Started: They've yet to start the Activity
A general best practice is to filter on the individuals who have completed the Activity and then use the Send Message bulk action to draft a message to be sent to those participants. The message should acknowledge and thank those participants for staying on schedule, remind them to keep an eye out for any follow-up questions from the moderator(s) and / or socialize over the other completed responses if your project is social.
Likewise, you'll want to filter on the people who are incomplete and send a message that nudges them to come back online. Depending on your project timeline and how many reminders you've already sent, your message verbiage may need to be a bit more to the point to let participants know that they'll be considered for removal. In most cases however, a friendly reminder to come back online re-iterating the value and importance of what they have to say is usually sufficient.
When filtering on the completion statuses of Incomplete or Not Started, a Remove From Study bulk option is also made available. If you've already reached out multiple times to participants and they've gone radio silent, this option always you to easily free up active participants spaces in your Study (while still keeping any response data you've collected prior to the removal).
Reporting on Participant Progress
Beyond the flow outlined above, there's also the ability to pull reports on various things in your Study. From a participant management and moderation perspective, the Participation Report is great to get an overall sense of participant actions on the platform and who are the main contributors versus the people who are lacking.
If you're using the Discussions area in your community, you can filter on Discussions contributions to track participation in this respect (as there are no completion statuses tied to Topic posting).
Another valuable report for follow-up purposes is the Activities Report. This report gives a breakdown of Activity completion status across the chosen Activities and participants. This report is great for producing a deliverable that can be handed off to a recruiter or team member who's responsible for following up with participants and making sure they're staying on track.