Bulk Assignment (Subscriptions)

Overview

The Bulk Assignment interface in Relationships Administration allows advisor, coach, and staff (follower) assignments to be assigned in mass from a list of subscriptions copied or entered into SS&E. This is most helpful for the following scenarios:

• Initial system setup of advisors and coaches.
• Re-assigning students from one advisor or coach to another advisor or coach, either temporarily or permanently.

Once the desired subscription assignments are entered and saved, the system will check the subscription requests and update all valid assignments on the Student Profile.

• In the case of "Primary Advisor" and "Primary Coach" assignment types, this action will re-assign each student to the new person as defined in the list.
• In the case of "Staff" this will add the staff member as a follower of the student defined in the list.

Note: When "Primary Advisor" is selected in Bulk Assignments, any Advisor Coach Mappings settings are bypassed, e.g the system assigns the Primary Advisor without changing the Primary Coach.

What is Required

The Bulk Assignment interface requires a list of assignments in the following format:

","

For example:
0079735,0079729
0084457,0079735
0084458,0079732

• If there are few bulk assignments, the subscriptions list can be entered directly in Relationships Administration using the enter key to seperate each row.
• If there are many bulk assignments, we recommend creating a spreadsheet to help generate the subscriptions list, further explained in the following example listed below.
• Bulk Assignments will only assign users with an "Advisor" role as a student's Primary Advisor.
• Bulk Assignments will only assign users with a "Coach" role as a student's Primary Coach.

For example:

If you wanted to assign Vicky Advisor (ID 000049651, Role "Advisor") to be the primary advisor for 120 students:

1. First, you would gather the student ID's for those 120 students.
2. Then you would want to generate a list of subscriptions in the above format.
   • There are many ways to generate the bulk-assignment interface input, however one of the easiest ways is to use a spreadsheet.

Following are instructions for gerenating a list of bulk assignment subscriptions using a spreadsheet:

1) Copy the list of student ID's to the first column of the spreadsheet:

2) Next, in the second column, add the following formula, replacing the subscriber Id (Note that the formula must start with an equal sign and the number displayed in this example is the user ID for Vicky Advisor). Copy the formula by dragging it down from the right bottom corner to all student rows.

="000049651," & A1

3) Once applied, you'll end up with results that look something like column B:

4) Select the results and copy/paste the data from column B into the input area on the Bulk Assignment page in SS&E, found here.

• If you have multiple coaches, advisors or followers that need to be assigned to students:
  1. Add the coach, advisor or staff follower's IDs in Column A.
  2. Then add the corresponding student IDs in Column B. 
  3. Then, in Column C copy and paste the following formula to allow for the coach, advisor or follower ID  and the student ID to b combined in one column with a comma separating them (the number of 0s represents the length of your ID #s so adjust appropriately). Copy the formula in Column C all the way down the list of IDs. 

=TEXT(A1,"0000000")&","&TEXT(B1,"0000000")

Once the formula is applied in Column C, the end result will look like this:

Once the IDs are combined in Column C and separated with the comma, copy all the combined IDs from Column C into the input area on the Bulk Assignment page in SS&E, found here.

How to Run Bulk Assignments

1.  Select the Assignment Type from either Primary Advisor, Primary Coach or Staff (Follower). 
2. Enter or copy in a list of subscriptions in the required format.
   • Subscriptions must be entered as subscribed, studentId separated by using the enter key/a new line.
3. Select "Save" to assign the subscriptions.
   • This "Save" action CANNOT be undone once submitted.
   • If there are mistakes, you must run bulk assignments again with the correct information in order to "fix" it.
4. After selecting "Save", a bar displays on the top of the page displaying the number of subscription requests.  
   • In general, Bulk Assignments display immediately on the Student Profile.
     • The bulk assignment action runs in the background after you click "Save" while the page refreshes immediately. For this reason, you may need to wait a few minutes to view the bulk assignments throughout the application.
   • Bulk Assignment display on the Relationships report as assigned by "Reasons = UI".
   • Subscription requests will not save/get assigned if the staff subscriber is not assigned the appropriate Advisor/Coach role.
     • Even though these subscriptions are included in the count displayed in "Found n subscription requests":
       • Bulk Assignments will not assign a user with a Coach role as a student's Primary Advisor.
       • Bulk Assignments will not assign a user with an Advisor role as a student's Primary Coach.

Leading Zeros

If your personal identifiers include leading zeros, often times they will be lost due to automatic formatting of numbers applied by spreadsheet programs like Excel. If your identifiers are always the same length and you'd like to add leading zeros to ensure the identifiers always include the leading zeros to meet the length, you can use the "TEXT" function in the following manner to ensure leading zeros are added.

 ="000049651," & TEXT(A1, "0000000")

For the second argument of the TEXT function, type as many zeros as the length of your identifiers. For example, if the identifier appears like "12345" in the spreadsheet, the result of TEXT("12345", "0000000") will be "0012345".