Respondent data format

To run a selection on OpenDLP you need to provide data on targets (or “categories”) and data on respondents (or “people”).

In each case your data is either a tab in a google sheet, or is a .csv file that you upload onto the system. Whether you use a google sheet or a .csv file, the required format is the same.

Respondent data

A sample respondents file is available to download. The following video goes through the key criteria to which your respondent data file must conform.

These criteria are reproduced below. Note that the format of the respondent data depends on the format of the target data so you may need to check the instructions for target data first.

  1. There is a column (typically the first column) which contains a unique and never-changing ID number for each respondent.
  2. For each of the entries in the category column of the categories file, there is a column in the respondents file with that header.
    1. E.g. in the sample categories file, the category column contains five entries: gender, age_bucket, ethnicity, disability, colour_bucket. In the sample respondents file there are five columns with these headers.
  3. For each column in the respondents file that corresponds to a stratification category, every single entry below the header must correspond to one of the listed values from the categories file.
    1. E.g. We saw above that our sample category file has three values for the gender category: Female / Male / Non-binary or other. If you look at column D in our sample respondents file, you will see that its header is gender and every entry below the header is one of Female / Male / Non-binary or other.
    2. E.g. Likewise in our sample category file, we had an age_bucket category with values 0-17 / 18-24 / 35-34 / etc. If you look at column K in our sample respondents file, you will see that its header is gender and every entry below the header corresponds to one of the values listed in the category file.