By Mike Margitich, Liaison’s Vice President of Centralized Application Services (CAS™) Products
Liaison International is committed to providing our clients with the greatest possible transparency regarding recent (and planned) Centralized Application Service (CAS™) updates. With that in mind, we’ve compiled this version of our monthly “CAS News and Notes” column to let you know what projects we’ve recently completed and what’s next on our priority list. In this edition, you’ll find a summary of our April accomplishments and expectations.
Applicant PTE Status in WebAdMIT
We now have the ability to show applicants’ paid transcript entry (PTE) statuses in WebAdMIT. This is available as a field that can be turned on in the list manager, the export manager and the applicant header for any CAS that wants to share PTE data with schools or report on it at the association level. This helps schools to guide applicants to the successful completion of their application.
Ability to Blend Organization and Program Questions
This upgrade allows schools to define both organization-level and program-level questions on the same program. The feature is on by default for any school or organization that is tagged to use organization-level questions. The benefit is to eliminate the need to repeat the same set of questions on all programs configured for a school (examples would be state residency questions, financial aid questions, and so on), and to simplify the export of this data for your IT teams.
As a best practice, this should be configured for the start of a new cycle and shouldn’t be turned on mid-cycle because applicants who are not used to seeing school-level questions will suddenly see them.
To make this enhancement possible, the Configuration Portal now has both an organization editor and a program editor. The organization editor includes the questions you want to ask just once at the organization level.
Improved Management of Prerequisites in the Configuration Portal
You can now set a sort order for your list of prerequisites in the Configuration Portal and easily drag and drop to adjust that order. Applicants will then see their prerequisites in that order. There is no feature switch needed; this is standard platform behavior now.
Campaign Source Tracking Via Google Analytics
An upgrade to our Google Analytics integration now allows us to track how applicants are referred to a CAS. When a CAS runs a campaign with different components — email, banner ads etc. —unique links on each of those URLs called UTM tags will signal to the CAS that an applicant came from a specific place. This is a way for associations to quantify the effectiveness of each campaign component.
We also enhanced our Google Analytics account so we can track user activity across any CAS. As a result, we can see how applicants navigate a site and where they might be running into any trouble. That, in turn, allows us to improve the user experience.
Transfer Settings Enhancements
In WebAdMIT, an upgrade to transfer settings now allows schools rolling over exports or lists to automatically transfer over all of their questions, including program-specific (quadrant 4) questions. Additionally, we can now transfer PDF Manager templates in transfer settings to simplify setup work for the new cycle.
Coming Soon
In addition, we have several releases scheduled in the coming months, which include numerous new features. These include:
- Ability to re-order documents in Configuration Portal (Target: Summer)
- Better instructions for schools that don’t require transcripts (Target: Summer)
- Allowing hiding of specific program questions from PDF (Target: Summer)
- WebAdMIT user search filter on institution users (Target: Summer)
- Configuration Portal UX improvements (Target: Summer/Fall)
Thanks for keeping up to date regarding the latest improvements to Liaison’s CASs — and please check this space again next month for more news on additional improvements we’re currently working on.