This guide for Internship Training Directors provides you with documentation, videos, and other assistance to get started with Outcomes. While we continue to build on the content available here, feel free to contact our Support team with any additional questions.
Outcomes is a cloud-based admissions management platform that provides you with tools to streamline your admissions processes. Through these tools, you can:
For product and technical assistance, contact us by email at outcomessupport@liaisonedu.com or by phone at 617-221-7838. Note the following:
Please note that our offices generally observe the following holidays, which may impact our customer service hours.
Each year, there is a new cycle for applicants to submit for positions at your institution. Within each cycle, there is a Phase II opportunity. Phase II is a chance for unmatched applicants to submit for positions not filled from Phase I of the Match process. In Outcomes, applicants are grouped together based on their cycle and Phase. Note that the Phases mentioned here are different from Phases used in Outcomes to categorize your applications.
To update deadlines:
In Outcomes, each institution has its own Default Dashboard, allowing teams to see the information that is most relevant to them. You also can adjust your Dashboard to customize it to your preferences. Changes made to the Default Dashboard apply to all users on your side who have not customized their own Dashboard. To update the Default Dashboard when a new cycle begins:
If you prefer to update your own Dashboard, rather than applying changes to the shared Default Dashboard, follow these steps:
By default, there is a Desired Program of Interest chart on your Dashboard indicating what applicants have selected on the application when asked to identify the program they are interested in. Each cycle's application has a new version of this question, so for this chart to contain current data, you'll need to point it to the most recent version. To update the chart:
Once Phase II begins, you can review Phase II applications. To access this group of applications:
Once you have identified your Phase II applicants, you can:
The Dashboard in Outcomes displays charts to provide you with relevant information about your application pool. Each report on the Dashboard can be filtered to display Phase II applicant information. To do this:
In Outcomes, the standard way of assigning applications is by creating Evaluation Forms and linking them to Phases. This process allows applications to be automatically assigned to reviewers with a designated review form whenever you change their Phase.
In this video, you'll learn how to use Evaluation Forms. The following topics are all covered:
Assigning applications via Evaluation Forms as described in this video comes with several benefits, including the ability for assignees to enter their responses in the Evaluation tab, the ability to create PDF files with evaluation results, and the ability for assignees to be notified of their assignments (as seen at the 20:15 mark of the video above). For a simpler process, though, you may wish to assign applications via Tags or Tasks. Read below for more information on these other options.
To assign applications in Outcomes without using Evaluation Forms and Phases, you may decide to work with Tags or Tasks.
Watch this video to learn how you can incorporate Tags or Tasks with your application review process. You'll learn:
Tags are labels that you can place on applications to categorize them for any purpose. One way of working with Tags is to create Tags that indicate which reviewer should work with an application. Once the reviewer has completed their review, they can use the comments tab or add other Tags to indicate the results of their review.
To assign reviews using Tags:
To save time, Tags can also be created and assigned in batch from the Applications View. To do this:
After Tags have been created, you can group them for reviewers, interviewers, or others to see which applications they should work with.
Once you've started applying Tags to applications, you can create Filters or Segments to see which applications are assigned to each reviewer. To create a Filter or Segment based on Tags:
As noted above, another way of indicating which applications need some action taken on them is by creating Tasks. Watch the video for guidance, or continue reading for written instructions.
You can use tasks to assign reviewers to applications individually. To do this:
Outcomes allows you to configure email templates to send to your applicants. You can send emails individually from the More Options menu in an application, or in batch from the Applications Grid.
While configuring email templates, you should also configure your Reply-to Address. This refers to the email address that will be used when your email recipients reply to your message. For example, if you have a shared inbox that all applicant emails should go to, you can set that email address as the reply-to address. If this option is not configured, you may not receive replies to your messages. To establish your Reply-to Address:
This name and email address will populate when a recipient attempts to reply to one of your messages.
Outcomes allows you to design Exports so you can extract the application data you need into a spreadsheet, PDF, JSON, or zip file.
You may wish to create an applicant data download containing all application data, or you may wish to build an export template by selecting specific fields to include. This section focuses on exporting all application data, while the following section helps with exporting review and assignment data specifically.
The easiest way of extracting all applicant data into a single file is to use the Default JSON Export option. This option sends all the included applicants' data into a JSON file without any additional configuration. JSON is a format commonly used to transmit data from web applications but, unlike a Speadsheet Export, it isn't easily readable in Excel. Instead, JSON files are typically imported into another system. For a more readable file containing all application data without additional configuration, you may choose to export the Default PDF file.
To create a Default JSON Export file:
If you prefer to export all application data into an Excel file, you can do this by configuring a Spreadsheet Export Template with all fields included. To do this:
If you're using Evaluation Forms to record the results of your reviews or interviews, you can export the results into a PDF. When generating Application PDFs, the Evaluation Form results appear in a section called Evaluations.
The quickest way of exporting review results is to export the Default PDF. There's no configuration required to generate this file, which includes a cover page, attachments, documents, and other applicant data.
Since this PDF document includes the entire application, this method allows you to quickly create an export file without needing to select which sections you want to include. To export a Default PDF:
You can also generate the Default PDF for an individual application by navigating to the desired application record, and selecting Export from the More Options (three dots) menu.
If you don't want to export the entire application as described above, another way of exporting review results is to create a customized export file. Using this method, you can select the specific elements you wish to include in your PDF file. For example, you can configure a PDF export that only includes the Summary Page and Evaluation Form results. To configure an export file including review results:
It may be useful for you to filter applicants by their APA, CPA, and PCSAS Accreditation Statuses. To do this, you'll need to create Custom Properties for each of these accreditations and then display the Custom Properties as desired.
To filter your applicants for their accreditation status, you'll first need to add three Custom Properties to capture this information. Once you're finished, you'll have fields on each application that indicate the accreditation status for APA, CPA, and PCSAS, respectively. To add the Custom Properties:
JavaScript is a programming language commonly used to add interactive elements to a webpage. In Outcomes, JavaScript expressions allow you to dynamically incorporate other data points from the software in a Custom Property. In this case, you'll need to add the following JavaScript Expressions for each Accreditation Custom Property. Copy the appropriate text below, and paste it into the Expression window when completing Step 6 above.
{ // Enter key of accreditation value to return. let statusKey='apa'; if ((forms.dct_designated_subfield_info) && (forms.dct_designated_subfield_info.accreditation_status.rows) ) { let formRef = forms.dct_designated_subfield_info.accreditation_status.rows; return (formRef[statusKey].accreditation) ? formRef[statusKey].accreditation : null; } else { return null; } }
{ // Enter key of accreditation value to return. let statusKey='cpa'; if ((forms.dct_designated_subfield_info) && (forms.dct_designated_subfield_info.accreditation_status.rows) ) { let formRef = forms.dct_designated_subfield_info.accreditation_status.rows; return (formRef[statusKey].accreditation) ? formRef[statusKey].accreditation : null; } else { return null; } }
{ // Enter key of accreditation value to return. let statusKey='pcsas'; if ((forms.dct_designated_subfield_info) && (forms.dct_designated_subfield_info.accreditation_status.rows) ) { let formRef = forms.dct_designated_subfield_info.accreditation_status.rows; return (formRef[statusKey].accreditation) ? formRef[statusKey].accreditation : null; } else { return null; } }
After completing the steps above, the accreditation information now appears as a Custom Property on each application. This allows you to run filters based on accreditation.
To find the accreditation status for an individual applicant:
To filter for accreditation statuses: