Sending SMS to Applicant when Checklist Items are Received
We know that communicating with applicants in a timely manner can be critical for many student populations. One of those communications is around open checklist items and helping the students to complete their application. Sending SMS is a nice way to quickly communicate updates in a way that is quick and easy to digest as a student. Leveraging TargetX SMS you can send a scheduled bulk sms to students based on the report attached to the bulk message. For more details on setting up a Scheduled Bulk SMS please see the TargetX User Community.
In this blog post, we are going to focus on building the report needed to ensure you are communicating with the appropriate applicants that have completed checklist items.
To get started, you need to ensure you have a complete date on the checklist item itself. If you are already capturing that data point, please replace your institutions field in the report where I use Complete Date. If you don’t have a complete date field being captured yet, please see this blog post on creating a fast field update flow to capture the complete date.
Once you have a complete date field on the Checklist Object, you are now ready to create the following reports:
Applicants who have completed checklists
Applicants who have completed checklist item(s) including the name of the checklist item(s).
There are pros and cons to each of these reports. The first, will be deduped and only show each applicant once in the report. The second, will show the applicant multiple times for each checklist item that was completed.
Report 1 - Applicants who have completed checklists
In this report, we will use the report type of Contacts with Applications and add a cross filter looking at the Checklist Item object. By doing a cross filter, it will only show the Contacts with Applications that meet the criteria of having a Checklist Item completed today. However, you will not be able to merge into the SMS the name of the item that was completed.
Example Report:
With the cross filter report, you can’t see the fields from the checklist items in the report itself. With that in mind, your text would be more general letting them know you have received one or more checklist items, to log in to the application to view the most up to date information. If you are using the ARM # of Checklist Open roll up field, you can merge in the # of open items remaining. Here is an example text:
EXAMPLE TEMPLATE:
Good Evening {{FIRST NAME}}, yesterday we received at least one of the open checklists for your {{START TERM AND YEAR}} application to Violet University. Our records indicate that you have {{# OF OPEN CHECKLIST ITEMS}} open checklist item(s). Please log into your application to see which items are outstanding. (INSERT LINK TO YOUR SCHOOLS APPLICATION)
OUTPUT:
Good Evening Katelyn, yesterday we received at least one of the open checklists for your Fall 2024 application to Violet Consulting. Our records indicate that you have 1 open checklist item(s). Please log into your application to see which items are outstanding. https://www.violetconsulting.net
Report 2 - Applicants who have completed checklist item(s) including the name of the checklist item(s)
In this report, we will use the report type of Contacts with Applications and Checklists. If you don’t see that report type, please follow the instructions in this blog post to create custom report types for Checklist. This report will list Contacts and Applications for every checklist item that meets the criteria. So an applicant can appear multiple times in this report if more than one checklist item meets the criteria.
Example Report:
If you decide that you want applicants to receive a text for every item that was received (which you would want to do if you want to merge in the item that was received), then you will want to toggle on Send duplicate messages to recipients. This is found in the TargetX Documentation under Step 3 in the Sending a Bulk SMS section. In this report example, Katelyn appeared twice, one for Official High School Transcript and one for Official ACT/SAT Score. So she would receive two separate text messages. So make sure that your text message to the applicant makes sense if they receive it twice. Here is an example of a template you could send.
EXAMPLE TEMPLATE:
Good Evening {{FIRST NAME}}, today we received your {{CHECKLIST ITEM}} for your {{START TERM AND YEAR}} application to Violet University. Our records indicate that you have {{# OF OPEN CHECKLIST ITEMS}} open checklist item(s). Please log into your application to see which items are outstanding. (INSERT LINK TO YOUR SCHOOLS APPLICATION)
OUTPUT:
Good Evening Katelyn, yesterday we received your Official High School Transcript for your Fall 2024 application to Violet Consulting. Our records indicate that you have 1 open checklist item(s). Please log into your application to see which items are outstanding. https://www.violetconsulting.net