A research team at major midwestern university was running a large-scale study on how demographic factors influence professional communication. The study design required sending thousands of personalized emails across multiple experimental conditions, tracking every delivery and response, and maintaining audit trails detailed enough to satisfy institutional review boards.

They’d been managing this with spreadsheets and manual tracking. It wasn’t working.

The requirements list was long:

• Send thousands of personalized emails across multiple study conditions
• Track delivery status, opens, and responses in real-time
• Manage complex cross-factorial experimental designs
• Process inbound responses without losing anything
• Keep audit trails with complete history for peer review

The manual approach had hit its ceiling. They needed something purpose-built.

Study Management That Handles Complexity

Cross-factorial study designs get complicated fast. We built a flexible system for configuring experimental conditions, assigning participants, and tracking responses by condition. Researchers can slice the data however they need for analysis—by condition, by response status, by date range. Everything exports cleanly for statistical analysis.

Automated Email Delivery at Scale

The platform integrates with Postmark for reliable delivery. Dynamic templates pull in participant-specific data automatically—names, study conditions, custom variables. Batch sending keeps delivery patterns consistent. Both plain text and HTML supported. Open tracking when you want it.

Behind the scenes, we built an asynchronous processing pipeline with Celery and Redis. When delivery events arrive—sent, delivered, opened, bounced, marked as spam, replied to—the system catches all of it. Automatic retries handle the inevitable hiccups. The web app stays responsive even when webhooks arrive in bursts.

An Admin Interface Researchers Actually Use

Researchers live in the admin panel, so we made it useful. Filter by date ranges, message status, study conditions. Send bulk responses—canned or custom. Export everything for analysis. Read-only protections where they matter.

Complete Audit History

Every modification gets logged with full history. Who changed what, when, and why. IRB compliance sorted.

We separated business logic into dedicated service modules—messaging, email delivery, sender management. Makes testing easier and future changes less painful. Study-wide settings live in the database, so researchers can toggle features without waiting for deployments.