👨‍👩‍👧‍👦Population Rules - Reset or Remove Records from Population

Population rules fall into the class of “membership” rules in Slate. Membership rules are where a record is enrolled when they meet the criteria, and existing records leave when they no longer meet the criteria of the rule. (KB - Populations)

Important – records will only leave the population if they are queued for a rule run or are manually refreshed.

I’ve seen Deliver Populations that include “old” records on accident, because the records were never refreshed after the rule was updated!

Other membership rules include Checklist Groups and Transcript Checklist Items. Membership rules can be helpful to maintain a record, and they can also be tricky to use well.

If your population rule allows for a record to temporarily leave the population and re-enter, the student’s population days value will reset to 0, and the population timestamp will be today’s date.

However, we can use this to our advantage if you need to manually reset a batch of records to Day 0, or to remove a set of records that once met the criteria but now need to leave the population and stop receiving the email campaign.

Step 1 - Temporarily Change Rule Filters

Change the rule filters to not include the records you want to reset.

Example: For a “Senior Inquiry” population, there may be a term filter for “Term = Fall 2026”. Change this to “Term = Fall 2027”. 

Make sure you hit save!

Step 2 - Retroactive Refresh

Run a query for your Fall 2026 students you need to reset or remove, and perform a Retroactive Refresh. Within a few minutes, these records will leave the population.

Step 3 - Reset

If you need to reset, go back to your rule and change the term filter back to Term = Fall 2026 and hit save. Repeat Step 2’s Retroactive Refresh – except this time, this enrolls the records in the population with a timestamp of today.