Creating a Project

What is a project?

In the Dialog Insight app, a project is a database that contains your contacts, your messages and the results of your sendings and campaigns. In a project, the data about your contacts is presented in fields that you define. Your company account may host one or several projects. When a user logs into the Dialog Insight app, he must necessarily open a project, and if none exists, start by creating one. Also, depending on your account's configuration, enabled modules and granted permissions, a project can be associated with messages, campaigns, forms and various statistical and configuration options.

Each project has one primary key (composed of one or several fields). Normally, you will use only one field, but you may use more than one, depending on your needs. If the primary key is defined as required, it will be next to this symbol: .The primary key prevents the existence of duplicate contacts in your database and ensures that a contact does not receive the same message twice. If there were the same contact twice, the system would keep the first occurrence of that contact in the import file and ignore the other occurrences. The email address is most commonly used as the primary key, but you may choose any other field, such as a client number or a combination of fields. Some other fields might be set as required , so these fields must be filled when a new contact is created. Defining the required fields and primary key from the beginning is recommended, as there are some constraints to modifying the fields after the project is online (when the tables are built). 

Each project can only have one contact list. However, it is possible to create, for one project, multiple groups to divide the contact list (see Creating a Group of Contacts).

In most cases, you'll have a main project for all your main contacts and maybe a few others, smaller, to manage contacts for other purposes, such as draws or contests. For example, you could have a project for employees, and another for your newsletter subscribers, as the information to collect differs for these two groups.

Before Starting

It is recommended to configure your account before creating a project. Please refer to the basic configuration steps, if it is not done yet. 

Where to Start a New Project?

The starting point for project creation is to click on New project: 

Step 1 - Set the Basic Structure of the Project

Start by identifying the project with a name and a label, indicating how to handle duplicate contacts, and choosing the basic fields to hold your contact information. 

1. Under the Identification section, specify the name and labels of the project. The name is the ID of the project, as the label identifies the project for users in the available languages (we will add languages in a further step). 

2. To specify your primary key, select among these 3 choices in Contact Management: 

   Email	Client or member number	Other
   The Email field will be the primary key of the project.	The ClientNo field will be added as the primary key.	In the next step, you will need to define the field you wish to use as the primary key of the project.
   Any choice you make, the Email, FirstName, and LastName fields will be added as default. The Email field is always required. The FirstName and LastName fields are not required. After the project creation, the primary key is locked, and it is impossible to set any fields as required.

3. You may use the Field library (optional) to add new fields rapidly. The corresponding fields will be added to the project. These fields are predefined and configured, but they may be modified later. You may choose one or several groups:

   Contact informations	Contact information of your contacts, such as full address and phone numbers.
   Work informations	Contact's work information, such as the company he works for and phone numbers at work.
   Social medias	Fields for the contact's social media identifiers. Here's how to enter the identifiers:
   	Facebook	The identifier is the user name that follows www.facebook.com/, (yourname.123).
   	Twitter	The identifier is what follows the @ when you are on your Twitter profile.
   	LinkedIn	The identifier equals the name that follows www.linkedin.com/in/, when you are on your profile page.

Step 2 - Add Project Fields

In addition to the default fields of the app, you may add fields, as many as you need, to hold all the information about your contacts. You may either use predefined fields from the Library or configure custom fields. Fields are embedded in sections, which allow you to group similar information and help you keep a clear structure in your project. You may organize the fields and sections as you want by dragging them to the desired location.  

Step 3 - Define Field Availability

Decide which fields are to be displayed on various pages of the application (field availability), as you might not need to display all fields everywhere.

Step 4 - Define Available Languages

If you wish to use other languages in your project, you have to set the available languages. This will impact some elements of the application, like the fields you add.

Step 5 - Define the Applicable Time Zone

Select the time zone to be used in planned mailings, automated tasks and marketing automation scenarios. The default will be applied if you do not change the time zone. You will get Montreal time for the Canadian platform and GMT for the European platform.  

Step 6 - Build the Project

This is the final step, where the project structure is generated. Once the structure of the project has been defined and all the fields to be included in the project are set in the desired format, the project must be built so that data is compiled and the project becomes available. Click on Build tables by getting first to Project fields: 

The only times you need to build tables are when the project is created or when the list of contacts has been deleted and you want to reuse that project. Once the tables of fields are built, the project's status changes to onlineand is ready to be used. You can see the status by clicking on All projects. 

Results of the Project Creation

Congratulations! You now have a project that allows you to add contacts, send messages and create campaigns. Before sending messages, it is recommended to configure the authorized senders as well as the consent centre and to add Dialog Insight to your whitelist.