Give each contact a date property, then use one audience rule to release their first survey automatically when that date arrives, all from a single recurring campaign.

A recurring campaign normally surveys a contact soon after they are added, then again on a fixed interval. Sometimes you want more control over that first send. You have a list of contacts, but each one should be surveyed on its own future date, spread across weeks or months, without scheduling anything by hand. You can do this with a single campaign by storing a release date on each contact and adding one audience rule that waits for that date.

A date property on the contact that holds the day you want that contact's first survey to go out. For example, create a property called Survey Release Date.

How you fill that property is entirely up to you. Retently does not care how the date is calculated or where it comes from, only that each contact carries a valid date in it. Common ways to populate it:

That single rule is what schedules the first survey. Here is exactly what it does.

Think of the audience rule as a gate that the campaign checks regularly. The gate only lets a contact through when their Survey Release Date is today or any date in the past. In other words, their release day has already arrived.

A contact whose Survey Release Date is set to a future day does not pass the gate yet. The campaign simply skips them. They still sit in your account, fully imported and ready, but no survey is sent. On the day their release date arrives, they pass the gate, the campaign picks them up, and sends their first survey.

Because every contact carries their own release date, the same single campaign releases each contact exactly when you want, and spreads a large list across as many future dates as you need. New contacts added later behave the same way: give them a release date and they wait for it.

Use a release date of today or earlier for anyone you want surveyed right away, and a future date for anyone you want to hold.

This technique schedules a contact's very first survey. It does not reschedule later, recurring surveys.

Once a contact has received their first survey, the campaign's recurring schedule takes over. Recurring surveys are timed from the contact's last survey date plus the campaign's send interval, not from the Survey Release Date. After the release date has passed it stays in the past, so the rule no longer holds anything back and has no further effect on that contact.

What this means in practice:

So use the release date to control when each contact enters the survey cycle for the first time. From then on, the recurring interval sets the rhythm.