Setup Considerations: Student Engagement Plans
You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of student engagement plans. It explains:
- Why to set it up.
- How it fits into the rest of Workday.
- Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.
- Security requirements and business process configurations.
- Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.
Refer to detailed task instructions for full configuration details.
What It Is
A student engagement plan groups engagement items, such as notifications or emails, and sends them to recipients at scheduled times.
Business Benefits
Student engagement plans save you time and effort by enabling you to schedule related engagement items ahead of time. They also give you the flexibility to customize the recipients of the engagement items. You can use:
- Custom reports to define student audiences to whom the engagement plans apply.
- Recipient types to send engagement items to people affiliated with the students in the audience, such as parents or recommenders.
- Condition rules to send individual engagement items to subsets of the audience.
Use Cases
Use cases for student engagement plans include:
- Marketing for a student recruiting campaign. Advertise your institution, send welcome messages to prospects who connect with you, invite them to apply, and remind them about application deadlines.
- Reminding students about upcoming registration deadlines.
- Supplementing notifications from other frameworks. Example: When configured, Workday notifies students when their financial aid awards disburse. You can use an engagement plan to send followup emails that remind students to accept their awards.
Questions to Consider
Questions | Considerations |
|---|---|
What student audiences do you need to send engagement items to? | Each engagement plan supports a single student audience, and you can use student condition rules to narrow the audience for individual engagement items. Consider creating student audiences that are as broad as possible to increase your options for each item and reduce the number of plans you need to maintain. |
Do you plan to use student condition rules to narrow the audience for individual engagement items? | When you create a student condition rule, ensure that the category and academic unit of the condition rule are consistent with those of the engagement plan. |
How many recipients are you comfortable with receiving an engagement item at the same time without approval? | You can specify a recipient threshold for engagement plans, which is the number of recipients above which Workday requires approval before sending engagement items. Recipient thresholds give you more control over highly visible communications and help you avoid sending out erroneous communications to large numbers of recipients.
You can configure a default threshold for your institution as well as custom thresholds for engagement plans. |
What types of email addresses are your recipients likely to have? (Examples: Institutional, Home, Work) | You can prioritize the email types that an engagement plan sends emails to. When a recipient has multiple email addresses in Workday, Workday sends emails to the first applicable email type on the priority list. The recipient won't receive duplicate emails at each applicable address.
When a recipient doesn't have any of the prioritized email types, they won't receive emails from the engagement plan even if they have other email types in Workday. |
Do you plan to send printed engagement items? | You can only send printed engagement items to people with a recipient type of Student.
Workday doesn't send the printed engagement items to the recipients directly. Instead, when the engagement plan runs Workday sends a task to the mail coordinator's My Tasks. The mail coordinator is responsible for printing and mailing the printed engagement items. |
How often does an engagement plan need to run? | When an engagement plan runs, Workday evaluates all of the engagement items in it and its entire student audience. Workday then sends any active engagement items that eligible recipients haven't received yet.
To optimize performance, evaluate how often you really need to run the plan and consider running the plan only as frequently as necessary. Many communications are fine to run once a day, others might need to run several times a day. Urgent items might require even more frequent runs, such as every 15 minutes. |
When should engagement plans run? | You can schedule an engagement run that evaluates all engagement plans for your institution on a regular basis. Workday recommends configuring only 1 institution-wide schedule. You can also configure schedules for individual engagement plans that need different run frequencies.
To optimize performance, avoid scheduling any engagement runs 1 hour before or after the Student Nightly Job Orchestration. The Student Nightly Job Orchestration begins at 01:00:00 in your time zone, or Pacific Time if you haven't configured a time zone for your tenant. |
Recommendations
- Create student audiences that are as wide as possible while still achieving the goals of the engagement plans. You can always narrow the audience for an individual engagement item in a plan, but you can't expand it. Broad student audiences reduce the number of engagement plans that you need to create and maintain.
- Avoid creating student audiences based on saved searches. Only the creator of a saved search can access it, and if the creator leaves the institution the saved search becomes inaccessible.
- Configure a recipient threshold for your institution to avoid sending out communications in error to large audiences.
- To optimize performance, schedule engagement plans to run only as frequently as needed and avoid scheduling runs 1 hour before or after the Student Nightly Job Orchestration.
Requirements
No impact.
Limitations
No impact.
Tenant Setup
On the
Edit Tenant Setup - Notifications
task, configure various tenant-wide notification settings, including:
- ADefault SMTP Configurationfor email notifications.
- A Student routing rule for push notifications.
Security
Domain | Consideration |
|---|---|
Manage: Student Audiences domain in the Campus Engagement functional area. | Enables you to create, edit, inactivate, and delete student audiences. |
Set Up: Student Eligibility Rules domain in the Academic Advising functional area. | Enables you to create and edit student condition rules. |
Business Processes
Business Process | Consideration |
|---|---|
Engagement Plan Event
| Enables you to create, edit, and copy student engagement plans. |
Student Message Event
| Enables you to create, edit, and copy student messages. |
Student Printed Item Event
| Enables you to create, edit, and copy printed engagement items. |
Printed Engagement Item Assignment Event
| Enables you to view, send, and notify users about printed student engagement items. |
Reporting
You can use these reports to track engagement items, engagement plans, and engagement runs:
- Find Student Engagement Items
- Find Student Engagement Plans
- View Scheduled Student Engagement Runs
Integrations
You can use these web services to import and export student audiences:
- Get Student Audiences
- Put Student Audience
Connections and Touchpoints
Feature | Consideration |
|---|---|
Notification Designer | You can use notification templates to customize the layout and design of student messages. |
Workday Studio | You can use Workday Studio to create custom business layouts to use in printed student engagement items. |