Interested families

How parents let us know they're interested

Families who are interested in participating in our research fill out our interested families form. Once this happens, we follow this protocol to ensure we add these families to our contact database and send them a personal thank you note in a reasonable amount of time.

Overview

Here is a simple flow chart to help you keep track of the process.

Below are detailed instructions on how to complete each step in the flow chart.

Step 1: Identify new families

Navigate to the ChildLangLab-Interested-Families log to see if any new families have signed up to participate in our research. Note that permission is required to access this document. If you do not have permission, you should email Katie to let her know.

Families who have already been processed have 1’s in the added to salesforce and emailed columns. The handled by column tells you who did this. These fields will be blank for families who have not been processed, yet.

We need to take two action steps when families sign-up to participate in our studies: (1) add them to our Salesforce database and (2) email them a personal thank you note. The following instructions will explain how to do this.

Step 2: Check Salesforce

First, check whether this participant already exists in our database. You can search our participant records by navigating to the Participants tab and entering search terms into the Search this list… box.

We recommend searching for:

• The parent’s email address (column C)

• The parent’s name (column B)

• The child’s name (column D)

IMPORTANT: Remember that parents may have more than one child in our database. If you find an entry for a parent’s email, make sure you check the child’s information to confirm it is indeed the same child’s record.

Step 3: Add to Salesforce

If they already exist, skip to Step 4. If you don’t find a record for this participant, click on the Participants tab and select the New button.

A New Participant window will appear. You will have the option to enter many fields, but we only collect a few of these on our Interested Families form.

Account information

Under Account Information, you’ll enter values from columns D, E, F and J of the Interested Families log. For Date of Birth, you need to enter an exact date, but we only collect birth month and year. You’ll use the first day of the child’s birth month (e.g. September 2019 = 9/1/2019).

Parents and Contact Details

Under Parents and Contact Details, you’ll enter values from columns B and C of the Interested Families log.

Sibling / Additional Screending Details

Under Sibling / Additional Screening Details, we enter information from columns G and H of the Interested Families form.

Recruitment/Tracking Details

Under Recruitment/Tracking Details, you’ll select “Interested Families Web Form” from the dropdown menu under Recruitment source, and enter the date in the Timestamp column (A) of the Interested Families log as the Recruitment Date.

System Information

We don’t enter any information or make any changes to the System Information section, so you’ll leave that blank/unchanged.

Once you’ve finished, select Save, and the new participant has been added to Salesforce.

Step 4: Say thanks

We send a personal thank you email to every family who signs up to participate. To do this, you

First you need to navigate to our shared email (HubSpot) and add them as a contact to email.

You’ll be asked to enter a few fields:

• Email: Parent’s email

• First name: Parent’s first name (NOT the child’s first name)

• Last name: SKIP this one; we don’t want to store their last name here

• Salesforce Participant ID: Automatic participant ID from Salesforce

There is no risk of adding a person twice; if we’ve emailed this person before, HubSpot will let you know.

Email the interested family using the Thanks for signing-up! template. Your sent email will show up as a conversation “Assigned to me” in the shared inbox. Once you’ve sent the email, you can feel free to mark it closed in Hubspot.

IMPORTANT: Make sure you send all emails through the Conversations > Inbox in HubSpot. This insures that HubSpot uses our shared email account (not your personal sas.upenn.edu account). If you try to send emails from another part of HubSpot, the email option will appear grayed-out.

Step 5: Update the log

On the ChildLangLab-Interested-Families log, enter a 1 in added to salesforce and a 1 in emailed when you have done so. In handled by, type your name, so we know who handled processing this family.