The OpenWater Blog

Capture Demographic Data with Entrant Profiles

If you’ve been digging through the advanced settings in the OpenWater admin panel during the last few weeks, you might have seen a new option to set up the User Profile.

You can setup the User Profile to track additional data for both entrants and judges. This feature is available to all customers, however we don’t want to rush you into it, so the default setting is to keep things the way they were.

At a minimum, we suggest that you collect the person’s name, Job Title, and Company. However we have created several other default fields that may be of interest like address, phone number, salutation, and gender.

Just like the regular form builder, you have the option of adding in additional fields that might make sense for your awards program.

Here is a sample profile definition in the admin section:

Now when someone is registering for the first time, they are asked additional questions that will be tracked in the system.

There is also a new option for entrants called “My Profile” which allows them to make updates to these fields at any time.

Finally, one of the most commonly requested features for us has been to allow forms to be pre-filled with data from the entrant’s profile. We have the “Clone an Entry” feature, but this copies over an entry 100%, when sometimes we just want to speed up a by pre-filling few demographic questions.

To make use of this function, drag over the Base Profile field into your submission form. From here you can choose any field that is in the User’s Profile. The entrant can still change this data (e.g. if they are filling out 10 entries for 10 different people) giving you the best of both worlds with regards to collecting data and being efficient.

For now, this profile data is exportable to Excel and CSV, in a future update we’ll be sure to add in more features to market your awards programs based on the demographic data you are collecting.

Kunal Johar

Kunal Johar is the OpenWater platform evangelist. He currently manages our development teams and enjoys diving into the fray. Find him in our community chat room.

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