Declarative data
Declarative data is information participants state about themselves explicitly — job title, company, industry, interests, and what they're looking to buy or achieve — typically collected through registration forms and profile fields. It's the foundational input for matchmaking, as opposed to behavioural data inferred from what people actually do.
Declarative data has one great strength and two familiar weaknesses. The strength: it's available from day one, before anyone has clicked anything, which makes it the only possible basis for early matching and for first-time events with no behavioural history. The weaknesses: people fill forms in a hurry, and they describe themselves aspirationally or vaguely. "Director" at a two-person company, interests copied from whatever the first dropdown offered, a company description pasted from a website — every matchmaking manager has seen the pattern. That's why form design is genuinely a matchmaking activity, not an admin chore. Structured fields beat free text (algorithms can't reliably compare two hand-written paragraphs), controlled vocabularies beat open tags, and required-but-short beats optional-but-thorough, because an 80% completion rate on five sharp questions produces far more usable signal than 30% completion on twenty. The common mistake is asking questions nobody downstream uses: every field should map to a matching rule, a segment, or a report, and anything that doesn't earns deletion. One honest nuance: declarative data ages quietly. Returning attendees carry last year's profile — job changed, priorities changed — so prompt a review at each new registration rather than silently reusing stale answers.
Direct answer
Declarative data is information participants state about themselves explicitly — job title, company, industry, interests, and what they're looking to buy or achieve — typically collected through registration forms and profile fields. It's the foundational input for matchmaking, as opposed to behavioural data inferred from what people actually do.
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