Hello,
I am looking for some examples of how other K-12 organizations have designed and managed their XM Directories.
My organization is very new to Qualtrics. We are not quite a month into our license. I am the brand administrator and have been tasked with designing, managing, and governing the XM Directory.
My initial plan was to have a student directory and a legal guardian directory. For the legal guardian directory, I wanted to randomly select a student to represent the survey if the legal guardian had more than one student. It is not working out how I had envisioned.
Example:
I created a contact list based on my legal guardian directory for those whose students participated in a particular program. I was under the impression that the embedded data in the contact list wouldn't change when I updated the directory.
After deploying a survey to this contact list, I updated the directory. The embedded data for LGs with more than one student enrolled changed - specifically the student representing those LGs. The embedded data within the previously created contact list was also updated. This caused some of the students being piped into the program-specific survey to not actually be in the program.
I am now brainstorming new ways to design the directory that doesn't end with parents with 1+ students enrolled receiving a survey invitation for each student enrolled but also takes into account the relationship between directories and their associated contact lists.
How are your directories designed? How are you updating/managing contacts in your directories? How do you ensure others within your organization do not compromise the embedded data when they upload a contact list?
Any and all tips, tricks, and advice are welcome. 🙂
Hi! I know this is an old post but wondering if you received any tips or advice on this, and how you ended up structuring the Directory? Would love to connect and chat it out as I am facing some of the same dilemmas!
I am happy to assist with this request.
What you’re seeing is actually how the XM Directory works — when a contact is updated in the directory, the embedded data for that contact also updates everywhere that contact appears (including older contact lists).
To avoid that, I’d suggest using Transaction Data. This keeps things like student or program info at a “transaction” level, separate from the main contact record, so updates won’t overwrite the embedded data already used in a survey. You don’t need to set this up for every field — just the ones that change per instance.
You could also look into using a Private Mailing List, which keeps a static snapshot of the data when it’s created. But in my experience, the transaction data approach works better long-term, especially if you’re managing student/guardian relationships.
Here’s a quick link about private data if you want to read more: https://www.qualtrics.com/support/iq-directory/lists-tab/creating-mailing-lists/#PrivateListData
Please schedule a meeting at your convenience using the link below:
https://meetings-ap1.hubspot.com/arun-raj
-Arun
XM Solutions Architect
Hi! I know this is an old post but wondering if you received any tips or advice on this, and how you ended up structuring the Directory? Would love to connect and chat it out as I am facing some of the same dilemmas!
What you’re seeing is actually how the XM Directory works — when a contact is updated in the directory, the embedded data for that contact also updates everywhere that contact appears (including older contact lists).
To avoid that, I’d suggest using Transaction Data. This keeps things like student or program info at a “transaction” level, separate from the main contact record, so updates won’t overwrite the embedded data already used in a survey. You don’t need to set this up for every field — just the ones that change per instance.
You could also look into using a Private Mailing List, which keeps a static snapshot of the data when it’s created. But in my experience, the transaction data approach works better long-term, especially if you’re managing student/guardian relationships.
Here’s a quick link about private data if you want to read more:
https://www.qualtrics.com/support/iq-directory/lists-tab/creating-mailing-lists/#PrivateListData
I’ve worked with a few enterprise clients on XM Directory design and happy to share what’s worked best if you’d like more examples.
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