Test

Once you have created your campaign in Plan, the Test environment allows you to check the flow of your campaign for errors and preview the volume of individuals moving through the campaign at that point in time.

Running the campaign through Test produces an output file but does not upload the file or record the information into the Communication History. It is a dummy run; no communication is actually sent.

Should you wish to preview a sample of the output file, select the Requires Manual Approval check box within the Delivery step.

Request Manual Approval

This determines that, when the campaign runs (in the Test or Live environments), you can download and check a sample of records from the output file before proceeding. Options include approving the delivery and transferring the file according to the channel definition(s) or, if you need to modify the campaign, you can reject the delivery and make any required changes before running and publishing the campaign again.

See Manual Approval

Awaiting Approvals Dialogue

To publish your campaign in the Test environment you must first set a schedule on the Audience step whilst in Plan mode:

See Schedule and Automate a Campaign

  • Zoom into the Audience step and switch to the Schedule view
  • Set a Single Instance schedule of Now and, if this is the first time of setting the schedule, click Create
  • Click on the status control icon and Save or Check In to save the changes

To switch into the Test environment:

  • Click on the status control icon, select the Test tab
  • Choose Run

The status control icon changes to reflect that you are in the Test environment, as does the background colour - now a light green.

Campaign Status

The following message appears:

Publish to Test Message

Isolated Test – runs the campaign as though there are no dependencies upon previous Communication History and no Contact Strategy defined for the campaign area. Consequently, an Isolated Test runs faster than a Full Test.

Full Test – runs the campaign based on existing Communication History and considers any other campaigns in the area, together with constraints which have been applied. This allows PeopleStage to produce a volume of individuals equivalent to when this campaign is run in Live mode. A Full Test is slower because more processing must happen in the background to consider other campaigns and constraints.

When a campaign (or campaign stage) run in Test is subsequently run in the Live environment, PeopleStage automatically resets and clears any data from the test database for this campaign.

If the campaign is not subsequently published in Live mode, and is no longer required, it is best practice to manually undertake the cleardown. In the Test dialog:

  • Select Reset

And again, when prompted:

  • Select Reset

Reset Test Message

See Plan and Live