Managing the organizations on your campus is one of the primary administrative functions and tools Engage offers. But when you are first configuring your site, or if you're new to your role as an administrator, how do you know where to begin? This article breaks down the entire life cycle of organization management. Throughout the article, you'll see many links to other resources to further break down the utilization of each of our organization management tools.
NOTE: This article is intended to specifically cover the life cycle of first setting up organizations in your community or in a new administrative branch. For managing your orgs beyond your initial setup, view our article on managing the re-registration process.
- STEP ONE: Creating Organization Types
- STEP TWO: Creating Position Templates
- STEP THREE: Assigning Positions
- STEP FOUR: Populating your Community with Organizations
- STEP FIVE: Creating Registration Processes
- STEP SIX: Assigning Registration Processes
- STEP SEVEN: Review Organization Registration Submissions
- STEP EIGHT: Ensure Roster Information is Up-To-Date
- STEP NINE: Ongoing Organization Management
STEP ONE: Configure your Organization Types
Before you can begin creating organization pages on your site, you should first confirm the organization types you will use to sort and define your organizations. Organization types allow you to manage the tools an organization has access to, its available position templates, roster requirements, and assigned registrations. Organization types are fundamental for how your organizations will operate, so do not hesitate to reach out to your Consultant to discuss how you might optimally configure these for your community.
STEP TWO: Create Position Templates
Position templates standardize positions within organizations, allowing you to define certain positions as required or optional within an organization. Utilizing position templates allows you to more effectively message your students and report on their involvement. Once you have determined your organization types, create position templates common to your campus. For example, this might include: president, vice president, treasurer, secretary, advisor, coach, staff, coordinator, director.
STEP THREE: Assign Position Templates
After you have created your position templates, you can return to your created organization types and assign them only to the types of organizations who should have them. For example, a Fraternity & Sorority Life ("FSL") organization won’t have a “Captain” like a club sport might have, so that position template probably does not need to be available for the FSL type. By assigning position templates to an organization type, you are not only making those position templates available to organizations in the type, but you can also configure which positions will be required during the organization's re-registration.
Be sure to repeat steps 1-3 for each administrative branch in your community before progressing!
STEP FOUR: Populating your Community with Organizations
Now that you have set up the basic configuration for how organizations will operate in each administrative branch, you will need to determine how to onboard your existing organizations into Engage. There are three primary methods to consider. Read our detailed walkthrough for populating organizations into a community and make note of any considerations for updating or populating roster information.
STEP FIVE (New Organizations): Create Registration Process for New Organizations
If you have selected to have all of your organizations register in the site, your next step is to create that registration process. Even if you have chosen to populate your organizations via an import or manually as an administrator, this is still a good time to set up your registration process for new organizations who might want to register moving forward. Most campuses use a new organization process on an ongoing basis to accept applications for new student organizations. Note this registration process must remain checked as "Active" for as long as you want users to be able to utilize it to register. Read our article on how to build a registration process.
STEP FIVE (Existing Organizations): Create an Organization Re-Registration Process to Update Rosters
If you chose to manually populate your organizations, through an import or one-by-one, we recommend setting up an Organization Re-Registration process for students to complete right after their pages are created. This option allows students the opportunity to immediately get into the community, take ownership of their organizations, and complete their organization pages. It also allows the transition of ownership of the organization, because the user who completes the re-registration process will be automatically assigned the Primary Contact role.
Start by building a re-registration process. A few considerations here:
- The re-registration does not need to be an open registration. We recommend giving users a specific time-frame within which to complete this process.
- Don't forget to include the Roster step! This is crucial if you want users to update their organization Rosters in the process.
- If you have not yet assigned Primary Contacts, make sure you do not limit the re-registration process to be completed by certain position template holders. The students who will be completing the registration will not yet be listed as members. If you assigned Primary Contacts when you created the organizations, you can restrict the registration to only those users to ensure the primary officer from each organization completes this process.
STEP SIX (New Organizations): Assign Registration Process to the New Organizations Org Type
Once you have built an active and open registration process, assign the registration process to your New Organizations organization type.
Note: If you do not want to have a new organization registration process on your site, you can create new organizations at any time as a branch admin. If you do not want students to be able to register new orgs within a particular branch, do not assign any registration to the New Organizations Type.
STEP SIX (Existing Organizations): Assign Re-Registration Process to Appropriate Org Type(s)
Be sure to assign your re-registrations to the correct organization types, excluding the “New Organizations” organizations type. Assigning the registration to the appropriate type ensures the correct position and roster requirements are requested.
STEP SEVEN: Review Organization Registration Submissions
If you chose to have your students register their orgs to populate them into the site using a New Organization Registration, you will need to review your new organization registration submissions and approve them. Once this process is complete, don’t forget to change the organization type so that they have access to the correct features and resources in the community. We recommend you do not leave approved organizations in the "New Organizations" type! You may want to ensure there is not a re-registration process assigned to the type your are moving these new organizations into, or they will be prompted to register again!
If you chose to manually populate orgs and then have them re-register to update information, you will need to approve the re-registration submissions. These organizations should already be assigned to their appropriate type upon approval.
STEP EIGHT: Ensure Roster Information is Up-To-Date for New Organizations
If you chose to populate your organizations by having students manually register them from scratch, you can include requesting Roster information in that process to ensure rosters are accurate from the start. If you populated organizations manually (through an import or one-by-one), you might set up a re-registration process (step five above) to request accurate roster information. You can also upload roster and position data in bulk into Engage using an involvement import, or encourage your student leaders or staff to manually update rosters through the Roster tool of the organization.
STEP NINE: Ongoing Organization Management
Now that all of your organizations are populated into your community, in their appropriate administrative branches and with up-to-date roster information, you now have to think about year-to-year maintenance of your organizations.
We've created a separate walkthrough for managing re-registrations so you can ensure you are taking care of all appropriate steps in this process.