After an Advanced Outreach program is published, Journey Orchestrator is unable to make changes to a query for participants. If we wish to change the fields and/or filters on a query to incorporate new fields to tokenize for a template update or if we wish to expand/narrow the participant list, we have to stop the program, make a duplicate, update the query, and republish the program.

This is an extreme inconvenience for us within our instance, especially if the program involves multiple steps and multiple emails. We often build programs and later find that we need to make a change to a participant. As an example, our organization works with schools and school districts and occasionally a district will ask us to remove them from a specific type of communication (but not all communications broadly). If I want to remove anyone from within a district from a specific program or set of programs, I cannot simply make the update in the journey to exclude based on email domain or company while the program is either paused or active.

In this situation, I have to stop the existing program from pulling in new participants and have to duplicate the program to make changes. In many instances, I end up having to set up an additional filter within the new program to check to see if emails were sent to other participants in companies that should remain in the new program and make exclusions based on previous emails sent to contacts to ensure they don’t receive the same message twice from what are now different JO programs in Gainsight. This is extremely time intensive and can be tricky to set up properly. Further, if the existing program had multiple steps, then I often cannot simply end the program but have to stop it from publishing every day and keep it active until all current participants have completed each step of the program. This means I end up with duplicate active programs for a given journey running in parallel until all participants have finished the initial journey. This creates additional confusion and clutter within the system.