Attributes and how they relate to columns and sources

If you're using Pool, we've moved columns to Data > Attributes, but have not touched any existing column mapping. There is no action required and zero changes to your Pool, but this new structure of participant attributes allows us to do a bunch of cool new things like have multiple email addresses for one participant. Here's the short version:

👤 Attribute - this can be any column, question from a screener, identifier, or other attribute of a participant that may change over time. The most common attributes are email, name, and amount paid in incentives for the current year. A participant could have thousands of attributes.

📂 Source - an upload, API import, or anything that contains a bunch of participants, each containing ( you guessed it) multiple attributes that map to columns in your Pool.

⏸️ Columns - the visual container of an attribute. This is literally how you look at attributes in a table. We can't say "drag and drop the order of your attributes," because it doesn't make any sense. But we can say you can show, hide, and save the order of your columns in any Pool view

🆔 Identifiers - for most customers this is simply email address, but it's a unique value to identify each participant. If you upload the same email 5 times, it will always merge into the same participant

⚡️ Smart Attributes - there are three attributes that automatically update to the latest value across any source like studies, screeners, and uploads. Those are name, location, and phone. This means anytime a participant responds with a new name, location, or phone, their unique Pool participant record will update to the latest value

What about groups?

Another object in Pool that is coming soon to help make it easier to contact certain roles within a group, like all the front desk associates at multiple hotels. Groups will have "Properties" like roles or number of family members.