Summer doldrums did not slow the momentum of the Scarlet Journey initiative, one of the major elements of the Cornerstone project.
In fact, August proved to be an especially busy time for the Scarlet Journey team. The first day of the month marked the launch of the university’s second year on the Common App. Early returns looked promising: As of August 21, more than 350 students had submitted college applications to Rutgers through the app.
“That compares favorably to last year, when the university ultimately received a record number of applications,” says JoAnn Molnar, project manager for Scarlet Journey.
The Scarlet Journey team also completed the annual launch of the Salesforce system, a constituent relationship management tool designed to facilitate interactions with current and prospective members of the university community. This yearly maintenance work is critical to maintaining the integrity of university data.
“If, for example, one of Rutgers’ schools decides to stop offering a program in a particular semester,” Molnar explains, “we would have to identify that and remove any mention of it from Salesforce.”
The Scarlet Journey team also made enhancements to the Common App, including the addition of an automated mechanism to help the university comply with the Education Opportunity Fund (EOF) program, a state initiative to provide financial assistance and support services to New Jersey students from educationally and economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
“The State audits the information of every student in the program, so we have to make sure we have all the correct documentation in place,” says Molnar.
The project team also added “additional field validations” to student applications to automatically improve accuracy on completed college applications. If, for instance, the high school end date and graduation date for a particular student do not match, an error message will pop up when someone tries to submit that application, prompting the submitter to review the dates and make the correction.
Moving forward on call center integration
The Scarlet Journey team also continued with the integration into Salesforce of Five9, the university’s new service provider for the One Stop student services centers. In August, Rutgers data administrators began developing process flows and addressing questions from Five9 about how phone system prompts will be managed—using two languages, English and Spanish, for example.
According to Molnar, development was slated for completion in the first half of September, followed by several weeks of testing.
If you have any questions about the Scarlet Journey initiative, send them to scarletjourney@finance.rutgers.edu.