EMP defines a set number of stages: Prospect, Inquiry, Applicant, Accepted, Enrolled, Withdrawn and Denied. Often times, you may need to utilize a sub-stage, indicating partial graduation between stages pending specific conditions being met. An example is when a record has an incomplete application—you may want to monitor this sub-stage of students to target messaging to them. Although you cannot program a specific stage within EMP’s stage set, you can create groups that would reflect these conditions and use those groups to generate reports, automated to-dos and also to make your year-end statistics more granular.
As your needs and definitions of substages may vary, it would be impossible to give a precise step-by-step overview of every possible configuration. So, we will begin with a general example of incomplete applicants in a way that would allow you to apply to process to your own needs.
Creating an Incomplete Application Group using Spectrum’s Savable Application
If you are using Spectrum’s Savable Application, tracking and grouping incomplete applications is easy.
1. Create a Group of students located in the Inquiry stage (Spectrum automatically graduates records to Applicant once all application materials on the Savable App).
2. In the Interactions section of the Group Builder, select the following conditions: Did -> Logins -> Application Logins. Select your preferred time range, or leave blank for all records.
3. Since the parameters of this group show Inquiries who have logged into the application, you can determine that these records can be considered Incomplete Applicants and follow up with members of that group accordingly to encourage them to complete their application.
Creating an Incomplete Application Group using your own application or a third party application
If you are using a non-Spectrum application, stages will not automatically update unless you manually change them or import them. However, you can use EMP to keep track of application materials through fields and touch points.
1. Create Fields or Touchpoints corresponding to your application requirements (what you need in order to consider an application complete and ready for review). This may include “Application Received” “Deposit Received” “Counselor Letter Received” and more.
2. Create a Group for complete applications, where all of these Fields or Touchpoints are marked in some affirmative way with the stage set to Inquiry—this group will show you which Inquiry records are ready to be upgraded to Applicant.
3. To track Incomplete Applications, make other groups where certain conditions are met (like “Submitted Application”) but other are not (like “Submitted Application Fee”) and name accordingly.
Once these groups have been created, you can create daily exports, reports and automated to-dos based on them, as well as subdividing them by rep to create a follow-up to-do.