Governance in Rally is a system of rules that ensures proper management of outreach and participant limits to prevent over-contacting and sampling.

Participant Contact Status

Each Participant Profile has a Rally defined property called Contact Status associated with it:

• Free to contact
• In cooldown
• In blocklist
• Do not contact
• Opted out

Free to contact

Participants can be contacted for research purposes.

In cooldown

Participants are currently in an active cooldown period, meaning they cannot be contacted for research. When you select a participant in an active cooldown and attempt to contact them, you will have the option to override the cooldown period and contact them anyway.

In blocklist

Participants have been added to the blocklist and cannot be contacted.

Do not contact

Participants have been added by custom governance rule automation and cannot be contacted.

Opted out

Participants have chosen to opt out or unsubscribe and should not be contacted.

All of Rally’s governance rules are based on these statuses. Governance rules can be accessed in ‘Settings’ and consists of four main sections:

• Default Governance Rules
• Custom Rules
• Manual Cooldowns
• Blocklist

Default Governance Rules

Limits

Study Invitation Limits

You can set a limit on the number of study invitations a participant can receive within a specific rolling time period.

Interview Participation Limits

Set a limit on the number of interviews a person can participate in over a rolling time period.

Survey Participation Limits

Set a limit on the number of surveys a person can complete over a rolling time period.

Unmoderated Testing Limits

Set a limit on the number of unmoderated tests a person can complete over a rolling time period.

Cooldowns

Study Invitation Cooldown

Prevent people from getting too many invites at once. A person that receives an invite is placed on cooldown.

Participant Cooldown

Give participants a break after completing a study. A person that completes a study is placed on cooldown.

Custom Rules

Easily create and store custom rules to put participants in a cooldown or mark them as Do Not Contact.

1. Click ‘New Rule’ in the top right to create a new custom governance rule.
2. Give the new rule a name and optional description.
3. Add Conditions to determine which people in your database will be affected by this rule when it runs. Conditions can be based on any property in Rally.
4. Configure the Actions, which determine what the rule should do to people that match the conditions.
5. Click ‘Apply’ to save the custom governance rule.

Use Cases

You may want to add a custom governance rule to…

👉Add a longer cooldown period for participants in specific panels

👉Mark any participants from specific domains as not contactable

👉Mark participants that hit an annual incentive limit as not contactable for a period of time

👉Mark participants who are up for contract renewal in the next 30 days + have a red customer health score from Salesforce as not contactable until they are in a good state again

👉Add a cooldown period for participants who have recently been contacted by Marketing (via Salesforce or Snowflake integration)

Manual Cooldowns

View participants who have been placed in a manual cooldown. Manual cooldowns allow you to prevent contacting people for a period of time that expires.

1. Place a participant in a manual cooldown:
2. Select a participant in a table.
3. Click on the 3 dots at the top of the table.
4. Select "Create Manual Cooldown".
5. Length of cooldown: Set the duration of the manual cooldown.
6. Reason: Enter the reason for the manual cooldown.

Note: When a participant is in a cooldown, they will not be added to any studies until the cooldown is over when adding them to the study directly, unless you override the contact status filter.

Blocklist

Workspace members can manually add participants to the blocklist for various reasons, such as repeated no-shows, dishonesty, or poor communication during research studies. This allows you to prevent contacting people until they are manually removed from the blocklist.

How to add a participant to the blocklist:

1. Select a participant to add to the blocklist.
2. Click the 3 dots at the top of the table.
3. Click ‘Add to blocklist’.
4. Provide a brief reason for why the participant is being added to the blocklist.

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How are Governance Rules enforced?

Overriding Governance

If someone in your workspace needs to contact a participant who is in a cooldown period, they can manually override the governance rule and provide an override reason. The override details, including reasons, dates, and the person who performed the override, will be recorded in the participant's profile under 'Governance.'

How-to Override Governance:

1. Add the person to your study by selecting them from your participant list or inviting them using their email address.
2. Once the person is added, select them in the participant list.
3. Click on the 'Compose Email' button.
4. Choose the specific email you would like to send to the participant from the available options.
5. A panel will appear on the right side of the screen. In the bottom right corner of the panel, click on 'Override rules’.
6. Enter an override reason in the provided field. This reason should explain why you are overriding the governance rules for this participant.
7. Select the participant you want to override by checking the corresponding box next to their name.
8. Once you have selected the participant, click on 'Continue with override' in the bottom right corner of the panel.

When does a person’s governance status update?

A participant's governance status can be updated in three ways:

1. Whenever an email outreach action is performed for a participant, their governance status is evaluated and updated within several minutes seconds.
2. Whenever workspace governance settings are modified, the governance statuses of all participants in the workspace are re-evaluated and updated over the next several minutes to a few hours depending on the number of participants in your workspace.
3. Custom governance rules will update participant's contact status in a few different scenarios.
   1. When a new person is created, an update will take place within several minutes.
   2. When a person is added to a study, an update will take place within several minutes.
   3. Any time a property for a specific person is updated is used by a custom rule's conditions, an update will take place within several minutes.
   4. Every day a midnight for your workspace and will take a few hours.