Database stewardship (formerly cycle prep) is the regular and ongoing process of ensuring that all Slate-based operations will remain effective during the next admissions cycle, academic term, or business year.
If you do not already have an annual process in place to refresh your ongoing Campaigns in Deliver, you should. There is a happy medium between building new Deliver mailings each year and never setting an end date on your campaigns, and it starts with knowing how to refresh them.
Ensuring campaign conclusion
Always set an end date for drip marketing campaigns in Deliver. If your mailings are running indefinitely, then your first step is to deactivate your campaigns.
Go to Deliver.
Select Campaigns.
Select any campaign with a number greater than
0in the Running column.For each mailing in the campaign, select Stop Mailing twice to stop the message.
💡 Mailings can also be stopped in batch:ctrl/cmd + clickmailings in Deliver and follow the prompts.
Deactivating campaign rules
Once the desired campaign mailings have been stopped:
Go to Database → Rules.
Select a rule associated with the target campaign’s population.
Select Edit.
Set status to Inactive.
Select Save.
Select Save on the rule overall
Repeat for each rule associated with the population for the campaign you are refreshing.
⭐ Now is an excellent opportunity to migrate your rules from Local/Slate Template Library to Configurable Joins. Keep old rules inactive.
Retroactively refresh the rules
The next step will be to run a retroactive refresh on all records currently in the population to push them out, clearing the population out completely in preparation for the refresh.
Select the rule you want to clear out.
Select New Query.
Add a Person Reference ID export.
Select Run Query.
From the Output list, select Retroactive Refresh.
Select Export.
Repeat for each rule associated with the campaign’s population.
The number of records within the Population will drop to 0. Note that this can take anywhere from a few minutes to a couple hours depending on a variety of factors.
You can check that the retroactive refresh is finished by using a quick query to bring in the population filter. Point the filter to your Population, and you will know that the retroactive refresh is complete when it returns 0.
Updating rules for a new mailing cycle
Once the retroactive refresh is complete, update your rules for the new mailing cycle.
Update the name of the rule to indicate the current cycle. For example, change the name from Set to Senior Search 2026 to Set to Senior Search 2027.
Update the necessary filters. For example, change the Entry Term filter from Fall 2026 to Fall 2027.
Select Save at the bottom of the page.
Update Deliver mailings
Now that your rule is ready, the next step is to make sure that your campaign mailings are ready. We recommend copying over mailings for the new cycle and archiving the ones from the last cycle. Review your mailings and make any necessary updates for the new cycle/term/year, and make sure that each mailing makes sense with any changes you may have made to the rule(s).
As each mailing within the campaign is updated, you can go ahead and activate them using the Send Mailing button. They will not send to anyone yet because the Population rule is still inactive, but the mailings must be activated before the rule for a Deliver campaign to work as expected.
Once all of the mailings in your campaign are active and running, you will want to activate your updated rule/population.
Launch your refreshed campaign
Go to your updated rule.
Select Edit.
Set the Status to Active.
Select New Query.
Add a Person Reference ID export.
From the Output list, select Retroactive Refresh.
Select Export.
Note that this can take anywhere from a few minutes to a couple hours depending on a variety of factors. You can check the retroactive refresh by using a quick query to bring in the Population filter, point it to your Population, and verify that the number of matching rows matches the number displayed in the rule.
💡 Note
The day of the retroactive refresh will always be Day 0, with Day 1 being the following day. As such, if you wish to have mailings begin on a Tuesday, you should go through the steps above on the previous day (Monday). A campaign with a targeted start date of a Monday would need to be activated on a Sunday. If you wait to go through these steps until the targeted start date, no mailings will be sent out until the next day.