My Task/Message/Automation should have run but it didn't

Here is a helpful list of possible issues to check for if your Task/Message/Automation didn’t run. If your situation doesn’t fit into these scenarios or you are unsure, feel free to contact help@dadohr.com with additional questions.

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Compare the Participant’s Profile Data and the Target Audience Rules

The first step is to compare the Participant’s data against the rules for the Target Audience that you expected them to match. For example, if your Target Audience is set up to match anyone with the role of Project Coordinator and the Participant’s role is Project Control Coordinator, it will not be a match. You will need to check both the Participant's Profile Data and the Target Audience Rules.


To view the Participant's Profile Data. Click on Employees in the top menu bar (1). In the side menu, make sure that Employee List is selected (2). Then use the search bar to find the Participant (3). Click on the Participant’s row to view their Profile Data (4). If Employees menu option doesn’t appear in the top navigation, this means you do not have sufficient permissions to access this page. You can ask a colleague with higher permissions to check this for you.

Viewing the Participant’s Profile Data below, you can see that Lily’s Role is Project Control Coordinator.

Next,  check the Rules for our Task/Message/Automation and compare them with the Participant’s Profile Data found above. Open the Task/Message/Automation and click Edit for the Target Audiences (1).

Now all the Target Audiences are listed on the left side panel. Click Edit for the Target Audience you expected the Participant to be assigned to (2). In this example, you will investigate the Project Coordinator Target Audience.

Now that you have opened the Target Audience Rules, you can see that the Role must be Project Coordinator for a Participant to match with this Target Audience. 

The example Participant above, Lily Ray, has the Role of Project Control Coordinator. The Roles are different, so Lily will not be part of the Target Audience. Additionally, you can further investigate by clicking on Preview matching employees to see who will be matched with this Audience.


If you find that the value in the Participant’s Profile Data is different than the Target Audience Rule, there are two possible issues:

  1. The Target Audience was set incorrectly and needs to be updated.
  2. The Profile Data of the Participant is incorrect.

If the issue is the latter, you will need to investigate the import source for that particular Data Field. This may involve examining the data in your HRIS, ATS, spreadsheet, or other import source.

Check for similar but different Data Fields for the Target Audience

Confirm that there are no Data Fields that are being confused within the Target Audience. Data may be entered accidentally in the wrong field, particularly if the fields have similar names. For example, Location vs Work Location could be two separate data fields, which would be easily confused. The data may be imported to the wrong Data Field or the wrong Data Field is being referenced in the Target Audience.


Follow a similar process as shown in the first step of this document to compare both the Participant’s Profile Data and the Target Audience Rules. 


Below, you can see the Profile Data for Lily has both a Location and Work Location Data Field. Her Location is the United States. However, her Work Location is not set.

Now we can compare this with the Target Audience settings for the particular Task/Message/Automation. In the below example, the Target Audience Rules are configured such that Work Location must match United States. 

Lily will not be a match for this Target Audience based on the value in her Profile Data for Work Location.


To solve this configuration error,  the Target Audience needs to be updated to use Location or the imported data for employees should be assigned to Work Location instead of Location.

Check the spelling and capitalization of the Target Audience rules

Rules are case sensitive. It is easy to miss a capital or lowercase letter in a Participant's Data. Be sure to double-check that the capitalization is a perfect match and there are no tricky typos.


You will need to compare the Target Audience Rules with the Participant’s Profile Data in the same way as the earlier checks in this document. 


In this example, you can see that a Target Audience has been created for all Participants with the Employment Type of “full-time”.

Below is the Profile Data of the participant we expected to match with the Task/Message/Automation. Their Employment Type is set to “Full-Time”.

The two values do not match because Target Audience Rules are case sensitive. Therefore, “full-time” and “Full-Time” are evaluated as two different values.

Participants are only ever matched into one Target Audience 

If you have multiple audiences for your Task/Message/Automation, each participant will only be put into one audience – regardless of whether they match the rules for multiple audiences. 


The Target Audiences are evaluated in the order you see them in the Task/Message/Automation. For instance, in the example below, Dado will check if the Participant matches the Project Coordinator Target Audience first. If they don’t match the Project Coordinator audience, Dado will then check to see if they match the Contractor Target Audience, and so on.

For the above example, if a Participant is both a Project Coordinator and a Contractor, the message will not be sent to them. This is because the first Target Audience they match with is the Project Coordinators Target Audience, which does not receive this Message. Even if they are a match for the Contractors Target Audience, it will never be evaluated. Once a match is found, no other Target Audiences are checked.


You can read more about customization and configuring your Target Audiences here.

Using Match Any for Negative Rules

When using negative statements, generally, the desired outcome is for the participant to match all of the rules, not just one.


Here is an example where a negative Match Any Target Audience may seem correct when building the Experience. However, it will not behave as expected.


Susie is an employee with her Location set to “US”. We are building a Target Audience to exclude all non-North American employees. Since Susie is located in the US she should receive the Message. Here is how the two audience blocks appear. The first is to exclude all Non-North American Employees. As you can see, no message will be sent for the Non-North American Target Audience while Everyone Else will receive the message. Employees in the US should be part of the Everyone Else Target Audience.

We set the Non-North American Target Audience to Match Any of these rules:

  • Location is not US
  • Location is not Canada

Susie’s Location is “US” - will she match this Target Audience?


Yes, Susie will be a match because her location is not “Canada”. The Match Any rule only needs to match one rule to be considered a match. In this case, the match for Susie is "Location is not Canada".

Instead, the Non-North American Target Audience should use Match All, which requires the Participant to match every rule listed.

There is one non-match for Susie when building the Target Audience using Match All. Therefore, Susie will not be included in the Non-North America Target Audience which is our expected outcome.


For a more in-depth look at Match Any vs Match All read our additional documentation here.

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