Designing a System to Grow Engagement and Guide Investment

In one of my roles at an educational non-profit organization, my supervisor and I created a system to tier candidates to help the organization determine how much to invest in a candidate based on his/her achievements.

Overview

My team managed a pool of around 500 candidates who applied for scholarships and educational programs organized or sponsored by the organization. Our job was to determine how much and how to invest in candidates so that they placed in a tenure-track job at the end of their PhD studies.

The Why

Our CRM, Salesforce, contained information on the entire pool on candidates, but the data was inconsistent. We hadn’t heard from some candidates in years, while we had very recent updates from others. We also didn’t have a system to help determine level of investment for candidates.

Solution

We designed a system to tier candidates into “investment levels.” To tier candidates, we used a combination of objective data points such as program ranking and number of publications, and miscellaneous information such as research interests.

This system depended on accurate and up-to-date data, so we put an emphasis on relationship management. We devised strategies to gather better information from candidates so we can better identify where we can add value and better match them to educational and funding opportunities.

Outcomes

We used this new system to select candidates for the organization’s flagship educational programs and to determine value of grants and scholarships.

We analyzed the data that we collected to help determine our strategy for supporting our pool of candidates.