Eligibility – Avela

What is eligibility?

Eligibility refers to the capacity for an applicant to meet the basic requirements to apply or enroll in a particular school, program, or course. It is informed by eligibility criteria, which varies on the type of school, institution, or program.

Your organization will determine what eligibility criteria means to them, but in general common factors include:

Academic requirements
Age or Grade level
Residency
Language proficiency
Legal and documentation requirements
Financial grants/scholarships
Program-specific criteria - auditions, art portfolios, etc.
Additional factors - recommendations, personal essays, etc.

Based on factors like these, an applicant may or may not qualify for a seat in a given school, institution or program.

How does eligibility work?

In order to know what an applicant is eligible for, first we need to collect the answers to the eligibility criteria - factors like the ones mentioned above. Those answers become an input for Apply or Explore to know which schools or programs can be displayed to the Family as eligible.

Answers to eligibility criteria questions → Input for Apply or Explore
Schools or programs → Result or output from Apply or Explore

Eligibility in explore

Explore can help families discover schools and programs that they might’ve otherwise not been aware of. It is exploratory in nature, but it can also be set up to show only the schools the family is eligibile for. This is very useful if you’re also looking to integrate Explore with Apply, which can have the same or stricter eligibility settings.

How to setup eligibility in Explore

Eligibility in Explore can be handled in one of two ways: through Apply or through a Web Service - both of which require your organization sets this up with an Avela representative. To proceed with the setup, you’ll need to do the following:

Configure School IDs: School IDs will need to match in Explore and Apply. You will need to update your Explore config and Apply school IDs. Please note the best experience will be to have a one to one match of schools in Explore to Apply. IDs can be alphanumeric and need to be distinct. If you are using School IDs for other integrations, please note that they will need to stay consistent.
For schools that may be in your Explore instance that do not have a school to Apply to, you can leave the School IDs in Apply empty.
Configuration deployment: We will deploy your instance into a test environment so you can review the setup before deploying to your production instance.

What does it look like for families in Explore?

Depending on your organization’s set up, families in Explore can go through an experience like this one:

A welcome dialog that nudges them to check eligibility. The copy on the dialog’s paragraphs can be customized.
If or when the family opts to check eligibility, they’ll see a number of dialogs collecting the eligibility criteria answers. These questions and their settings are up to your organization.
Once a check for eligibility has been made, schools in Explore will be sorted by Eligibility - showing the ones the family qualifies for first in the list, followed by schools they’re not eligible for. Pins in the map will also be treated with more transparency for schools they’re not eligible for.
Since a family can still technically save a school they’re not eligible for, should your organization want to integrate with Apply, we warn the family the school that does not meet the criteria will be removed once they Apply.
If the family free roams, and does not check eligibility, they may yet still see several nudges to check, but can still use Explore.

Eligibility in Apply

Apply is oriented towards collecting information. Once a family is logged in, they will see any enrollment periods and forms your organization has set up - and those forms can include eligibility questions.

How to setup eligibility in Apply

The first thing you’ll need is an Enrollment period and a Form within it. Not sure what those are?

Once you have created a form, you can start configuring its content and settings. For a family to be shown results of schools, programs or institutions, their form needs to be set up in a specific way - with eligibility questions and with a ranking section.

Add a pre-ranking section. This will be the first section your families sees, and it will contain eligibility questions.
Add eligibility questions to the pre-ranking section. These questions make up your eligibility criteria, and can be set up to include or exclude schools, and enforce age or address constraints.
If you’d like to include/exclude specific schools, we recommend setting everything up to exclude rather than mix the two concepts - start excluding schools based on specific criteria. Schools to be excluded can be added through their UUIDs - the 16 digit alphanumerical value. Note: the Grade question will automatically exclude schools that don’t have the grade the family selects. It does not need to specify which schools to exclude.
If you’d like to add eligibility based on Age, you can enable Date of Birth eligibility. This option is specific to the Grades question type.
If you’d like to add eligibility based on address or geolocation, you can enable Location boundaries. This option is specific to the Address question type.
After you have created all of your eligibility questions within the Pre-ranking section, you can create the Ranking section. It should come immediately after the Pre-ranking section, and it will be dynamically generated by what the family answers on the previous section - this is the results section of the eligibility criteria!
You can now continue to add sections and questions within them, eligibility has been set up!

What does it look like for families in Apply?

Families will see the form you set up whenever they start, edit or view it.

Interacting with the form for the first time:

The first section, containing the eligibility criteria questions, can be seen by anyone who can start the form. Once has answered all of the required questions in this section, they can progress onto the next one.
The school ranking section is informed by the eligibility criteria questions in the first section. It will only show what the family is eligible for, and as such, it may show none or several schools. If they are eligible for at least one school, they can add it to their form. Depending on your organization’s policies, this can be an ordered list (where the family ranks schools in the order of preference), and they may add only within a minimum or maximum amount of schools.

Editing the form:

If the family has already gone through the first section at least once, and chooses to make changes to it, then they’ll see a warning indicating their new answers will impact their eligibility, and certain schools may be removed from their list on the following section.
The school ranking section will contain anything the family had already added and was not removed by any changes made on the previous section. Depending on your organization’s policies, the section may remain interactible - so the family can continue to add or remove schools to their liking.