Data retention rules
By setting data retention rules, you can schedule when contact and respondent data are automatically and permanently deleted from your surveys in our system. Only the account administrator can set these rules for the entire account, meaning that the same rules will apply to ALL surveys in the account.
These rules can be overridden at the survey level for the account administrator. This can be useful if most of your surveys only need to keep the data for a short period, but you have a couple longitudinal surveys with a long running benchmark. In that case, you can set a global account level rule that applies to a majority of your surveys, and then set different rules specifically for those surveys. Additionally, you can allow survey owners set override rules for their own surveys.
Setting data retention rules for the entire account
Only account administrators have access to this section in the account.
You can schedule when contact and respondent data are automatically and permanently deleted from your surveys in Medallia Agile Research. These rules will be continuously applied to all existing and future surveys from all users in your account even those with the status 'Live'.
The data will be removed permanently from your surveys during a nightly process and cannot be restored.
First, select Account > Legal & Compliance. You will see the following options.
Purging contacts
Schedule the automatic nightly removal of contacts added to surveys after a certain number of days. Their responses will remain available in the reporting and you will lose access to any metadata in the surveys in question, such as custom fields.
Data retention rules do not affect your contact lists. You must clean up your contact lists separately.
Purging respondents
Schedule the automatic nightly removal of respondents that answered more than a certain number of days ago. This will delete both the answers as well as any contacts that are associated with these respondents from the relevant surveys.
Override
These rules can be overridden at the survey level.
When data retention rules are set for an individual survey, they have priority over the rules set at the account level, including any rules that were set at the survey level before the account level settings were made.
When you activate the override rules, only the survey owners will be able to override the data retention rules set at account level.
Click Save and confirm your settings one last time to activate the data retention rules.
Setting data retention rules for a specific survey
If the account administrator has activated the override, each survey owner will be able to set specific data retention rules for their surveys. These will apply only to that particular survey, also when it is 'Live'.
The data will be removed permanently during a nightly process and cannot be restored.
To set the data retention rules for a particular survey, select Settings > Options.
Select Data Retention. If this is already selected, this means the account administrator has set data retention rules on account level as well. Deselect this box to completely deactivate the data retention rules for this survey.
Once selected, the following options will appear
Purging contacts
Schedule the nightly removal of contacts added to this survey after a certain number of days (minimum 10 and maximum 3650). Their responses will remain in the reporting but you will lose access to any metadata in the survey, such as custom fields. To avoid this, prefill the meta-data into hidden questions. Note: Data retention rules do not affect your contact lists. You must clean up your contact lists separately. If you only want to purge respondents, and no contacts, you can leave this field empty.
Purging respondents
Schedule the nightly removal of respondents that answered to this survey more than a certain number of days ago (minimum 10 and maximum 3650). This will delete both the answers to the survey as well as any contacts that are associated with these respondents. If you only want to purge contacts, and no respondents, you can leave this field empty.
Viewing surveys with data retention rules
The account administrator can get a list of all surveys that have different data retention rules from the ones set up for the account. To get this list, follow the steps below:
- Select Account > Legal & Compliance.
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Select Data retention rules.
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Select View surveys with data retention rules.
You can download this list in different file formats or go directly to that survey by clicking on it.
Viewing data retention logs
All changes to the data retention rules as well as all purge actions are logged.
You can find these by going to your account's activity log and searching for "retention".
Or you can go Account > Legal & Compliance, selecting Data Retention rules, and selecting View data retention log.
