Stopping Alerts and ASIs

alert
asi
communication
How to stop sending participant-directed Alerts and ASIs when, for example, a subject withdraws
Published

January 9, 2026

Overview

Problem: A subject withdraws from a longitudinal study and wants you to stop sending them emails. You have a ton of Alerts and Automated Survey Invitations. Adding and [no_contact] = '0' to all of them would be time-consuming and error-prone.

Solution: Create a calculated email field that’s cleared when a participant is set to withdrawn, and designate it as the project’s email field.

Prerequisites

  • A study with an email address for the participant. In this recipe, it’s email
  • A staff-side tracking form with a field indicating that the participant should not be contacted further. In this recipe, it’s no_contact, a Yes/No on the tracking form.
  • At least one ASI or Alert

Steps

  1. Add a field to your tracking form. Required settings:
    • Field Type: Text Box
    • Validation: email
    • Variable Name: current_email
    • Action Tags: @CALCTEXT(if([no_contact] = '1', '', [email]))
  2. If you have existing data, re-calculate the field
  3. In Project Setup > Designate an email field for communications, use current_email
  4. If desired, add @HIDDEN to the current_email field.

Notes

This relies on calculated fields being updated whenever their referenced fields change, even across forms that have never been saved. You can verify in Data Export that current_email gets calculated as soon as email has a value, before the tracking form is ever saved.

In Survey Distribution Tools you may get a warning like “The designated email field does not exist on the first survey.” Don’t worry about it — current_email will get a value as soon as email does.