Emerson College Captures Student Data via StarRez PortalX Forms
Key Highlights
CAPTURE
Important data
DASHBOARDS
For easy viewing
STAY CONNECTED
With staff and students
STREAMLINE
Internal processes

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Industry
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Product Highlights
Integrations
Founded in 1880, Emerson College’s main campus is based in Boston, Massachusetts, also maintaining campuses in Los Angeles and the Netherlands. The college is one of the founding members of the Pro Arts consortium - an association of six neighboring institutions in Boston dedicated to arts education at the college level. Originally based in Boston's Pemberton Square, the college moved neighborhoods several times, and is now located in the Theatre District along the south side of the Boston Common. Emerson owns and operates the historic Colonial, Paramount, and Cutler Majestic theatres, as well as several smaller performance venues.
A form is a process that we use to collect student data to then store in various database tables, such as the Entry Application, Booking, Entry/Application Custom Fields or Time Slot. Forms can be used to collect all kinds of student data/requirements or preferences.
The first step of using forms would be to identify what type of process you are going to use. If you wanted to track information on a specific term, you would use the form on the application table (i.e., contract cancellation request). Likewise, if the information needs to be stored against the booking, you will store the form on the booking table.
On average, 68% of our current customers use forms throughout their PortalX platform to capture resident data.
Leveraging StarRez Web and PortalX for student forms and data collection
All Emerson’s forms sit under one application process, meaning they have quite a huge process graph. They have also chosen to place all their housing selection forms under one term and all their housing data forms under another term. This has helped them to better manage things. As they have some students coming in the spring, having this set up enables Emerson to run more complete reporting.
An example of a forum would be Emerson’s Spring Intent Form. Emerson uses this form to capture data in relation to their students’ schedules. This will make their resident life team aware of students who are are staying on campus, going abroad or even taking a leave of absence. Once a student has completed their form, Emerson’s results page then provides details for their circumstances, such as move out reminders and steps that are required for them to take.
“We wanted to be mindful that if students are taking the time to indicate to us what their plans are, we also wanted to be helpful to remind them of steps that they need to take.”
Chris Muchata, Emerson College – Housing Operations Coordinator
As Emerson manages so many Custom Fields, they decided to sort these in StarRez Web by using sections and groups. Emerson have also created some Dashboards for easy viewing of the data that they are capturing via forms. The Dashboards run off a master report that captures all the data. They then copy this several times, changing the data to highlight the results for each dashboard. This process allows the team to efficiently pass around internal information for various results that are returned concerning student data around choices that they have selected within their form responses.
“We love Dashboards at Emerson. We have one Dashboard per process with specific reports for each group. This can be shared out with key stakeholders as needed for follow ups.”
Chris Muchata, Emerson College – Housing Operations Coordinator