Did you know that staff can easily create a profile in just a few minutes through a feature on the top bar? Sure can, sweet pea! 🌺

We're specifically talking about the ability to create prospect profiles on behalf of users, as we'll demonstrate in a moment. 🙌 If you're looking for an exhaustive overview of staff and applicant access (that is, all the ways that an account can be created and accessed), read this article, of which the present one is an accompanying piece.

Here's the quick version:

     1) On the top bar, click the Create a profile button (marked by a ➕ icon)

     2) Fill in the form according to the on-screen instructions
​     3) Press the button CREATE PEOPLE AND ADD MORE INFO

And BAAM, you're done! 💥

"But hold on a second!", I hear you cry, still stuck on the second step. "This form is huge!" And you're right. Lo and behold:

Size is not synonymous with difficulty though, not at least in this case, and most fields are fairly straight-forward! That said, if anything's left you scratching your head, read on to find help. 😃

So, first on the form is Basic info, a section devoted to recording the personal details of the prospect.

The primary fields First name, Last name and Email are compulsory and will subsequently help you find the profiles in the system and automatically link user activity to them.

As for Profile tags, choose an existing tag or type a new one. Tags are useful keywords that you can use to identify a relevant aspect about a profile, thus grouping users into "categories", to ultimately make the profiles easier to find (common examples of tags: VIP, Purchased data, Leadership, etc). There's no quantity limit.

Moving on to Consent, this pertains to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a series of laws that target companies in and out of the European Union (EU) who do business with EU residents (hereinafter referred to as "data subjects"), to assure the protection and privacy of data subjects' personal data and privacy. To that end, it empowers data subjects with a wide array of rights with regard to the processing of their personal data and the free movement of such data. 💪

In short, it's indispensable to collect the data subject's explicit consent for conservation and use of their personal data before creating a profile, because consent agreements must be scrupulously captured. For one, they affect the portal's behaviour, and secondly, non GDPR compliance is punishable by heavy fines for the sake of enforcement and accountability. Please read this article for further guidance.

This is the last section, here to remind you of two other important settings that you might find convenient to employ from the get-go.

Also add to — Click inside the field and pick one of the available classes; in turn, this will add the profile to that same class. If your school has multiple campuses, select the option that combines the class with the campus.

Source category — Choose the category that best describes how you came across the person whose profile you're creating.

And that's it! So long as at least the mandatory fields are completed, you're good to go! 😃

Think of it like this: what's the difference between a vacant rental unit and an inhabited one? With the former, the property is there, the landlord can do work on it (say, construction), but nobody lives within those walls. On the other hand, when the tenant finally moves in, they get their own keys to come and go as they wish, and they may or may not decide to change the interior furnishings. 🖼

In essence, a profile is like a house of which staff are landlords or keepers. In other words, it's just a place. Creating a profile in the manner hereinbefore directed or by doing an import is just an expedient means to let staff take the initial steps in attracting a prospect (the tenant/inhabitant in the analogy) by recording and managing individual information where it belongs.

By the same token, only when someone signs up on the application portal are they an actual user. Profiles created by staff don't trigger verification emails to confirm the account and can't be accessed and edited by prospects until the latter sign up – because yes, prospects must sign up even if a profile already exists for them, as they need private login credentials (the key inside)! 🗝 Provided the email address is the same, the system will recognise it and link the registration to the profile. Come here to know more about this particular scenario and how to avoid duplicate profiles.

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PUBLISHED: March 11, 2019
​LAST UPDATED: August 20, 2020 at 5:57 p.m.