Any Applicaa Users?

[Miscbrah]

Afternoon everyone. Had the pitch and it's looking fairly positive.

 

Thought I'd ask around and see if it's something in use out there in the world, thinking of using it for admissions initially here.

 

Any lives changed by it/horror stories?

 

Thanks in advance for anything shared.

[enjay]

We've got it here. The Admissions Manager was massively opposed beforehand but has been convinced since seeing it. It takes a bit of setting up, but is definitely worth it. The name check as it imports students and parents is nice, so you don't end up duplicating a parental contact across siblings.

[Seb1780]

We're in our second year of running it for Y7 intake, there is a lot of setup work but the support team is pretty good. The data we collected prior to enrolment needed to be cleaned up as there is little in the way of forced formatting - phone numbers and medical practices in particular are prone to errors. Where it really scores well is the import to SIMS - much better cross-checking against existing contacts than other tools we have used. However, if we were not using SIMS I think we'd drop it and revert to MS Forms. It's a lot of money just for the import.

 

We also used it for 6th Form applications and enrolment - for this it is really good at gathering application data, arranging interviews and taster days, options etc. We await the key moment when the GCSE results come out and 350+ applicants need to login and add their actual grades!

[NeoNebula]

Applicaa isn't widely used yet, but that doesn't mean it can't be a useful tool for college admissions. People's lives can be changed by using such platforms as they make the application and management process easier. As with any new product, there may be both positive and negative experiences.

[Tefters]

This will be our third year come September and both I and my data admissions officer recommend it.

 

He initially got it and set it up for year 7 admissions to replace a huge MS Forms survey and it worked great. I later convinced him to look into mid year admissions as he was still doing these manually and I couldn't understand why when he had a system the automated year 7 admissions so it could surely do anyone at any time of the year.

He now has it completely setup for all year round admissions and makes his life along with others a whole lot simpler as he has automated emails come out of it regarding certain things.

 

It did take quite a lot of work and effort to learn, setup and communicate with support on our needs but now everything is automated, reminds me of when I do SCCM imaging, a pain to setup but once done it's easy street [emoji106]

 

I've personally not used it but have sat with him to help work out logic and settings. Well worth it in my opinion for the cost, especially when I looked at the all year admissions which worked out at an extra £300 per year if I remember rightly compared to single year admissions.

 

Ow and desktop application is pretty good too.

[enjay]

It did take quite a lot of work and effort to learn, setup and communicate with support on our needs but now everything is automated, reminds me of when I do SCCM imaging, a pain to setup but once done it's easy street [emoji106]

 

Agreed. There is a lot of work to get it set up (by the admissions team, not IT), and it is possibly best starting small. We did Year 12 first, then in-year transfers before a full Year 7 admission.

[Iain.Faulkner]

We use it at one of our schools in the Trust and I used it at a previous secondary school as well. Always been positive, admissions officers like it. Like has been said, I think there's quite a bit of setup required before going live with it. We currently use it for Year 7 entry and also Year 12.

[Miscbrah]

Thanks for the replies.

 

We took the plunge, dove in at the deep and and my goodness me the setup is involved. It is a HUGE HUGE undertaking!

 

I'll need to have a pretty major part in it (long story) but this is no small operation. Not by any stretch. Be duly warned of that, dear reader.

 

Having written that though, once it IS going I can see how it will make things a REAL breeze regarding applications. Processes obviously enough vary school-to-school but are all also, obviously enough, variations on a theme. This caters for that extremely well I think.

[Miscbrah]

It's also worth adding on that if you do sign up for this, you're assigned an onboarding manager/professional hand-holder who will be very patient, very knowledgeable about your MIS and admissions and will help you (in a sock puppet fashion should you require. I sure did/do.) They know it's a beast of a thing to tackle and are very prepared to assist you with it.

[enjay]

It's also worth adding on that if you do sign up for this, you're assigned an onboarding manager/professional hand-holder who will be very patient, very knowledgeable about your MIS and admissions and will help you (in a sock puppet fashion should you require. I sure did/do.) They know it's a beast of a thing to tackle and are very prepared to assist you with it.

 

Definitely. Our admissions manager literally had that person on speed-dial when we were launching!

[psydii]

We use it and are happy. We did have one significant hiccup though. We gave applicants the option to self report SEN. If they selected No SEN, this was imported into SIMS, and when the CTF came through from the previous school with SEN Data (including any historic data) SIMS failed to import of the SEN record/history because the SEN Code in SIMS was already No SEN. Thankfully our SENCO is on it, and spotted the variance in the SIMS data with what she had learned through other channels.

[Miscbrah]

We use it and are happy. We did have one significant hiccup though. We gave applicants the option to self report SEN. If they selected No SEN, this was imported into SIMS, and when the CTF came through from the previous school with SEN Data (including any historic data) SIMS failed to import of the SEN record/history because the SEN Code in SIMS was already No SEN. Thankfully our SENCO is on it, and spotted the variance in the SIMS data with what she had learned through other channels.

 

Oohh now that is very worthwhile considering. Thanks much. A huge element of it does seem to be pre-empting snags, worth being on top of that one.

[Seb1780]

We use it and are happy. We did have one significant hiccup though. We gave applicants the option to self report SEN. If they selected No SEN, this was imported into SIMS, and when the CTF came through from the previous school with SEN Data (including any historic data) SIMS failed to import of the SEN record/history because the SEN Code in SIMS was already No SEN. Thankfully our SENCO is on it, and spotted the variance in the SIMS data with what she had learned through other channels.

We've just fallen foul of this ourselves. Did you ever manage to resolve this issue?

 

Having used the Applicaa system for a couple of years we're now questioning its value for money. Sure, some parts are pretty good, but there are fundamental issues like this that mean we just cannot trust the data that is imported. And even with the good parts - importing contacts - we've found that it doesn't check against staff names so we managed to create new contacts for existing staff members that had to then be manually corrected.

 

We won't be using SIMS next year, so I'm hoping we won't be needing a third-party tool to do all this work!

[psydii]

....not that I am stalking your posts now for helpful insights... and sorry for the late reply.

 

I believe we just removed the option for applicants to share this information automatically, instead using a face-to-face process to cross check with what was received and processed in the ctf student file.

 

 

With your MIS change, are you sticking with Applicaa or using built in functionality of your new MIS?

[Seb1780]

.With your MIS change, are you sticking with Applicaa or using built in functionality of your new MIS?

 

We've dumped Applicaa - the parent apps on the new MIS are available to pre-admission students so negates the need for a third party tool.

[Ex-MGSTech]

Make sure you give it to someone who is switched on, check and double check you've mapped fields to your MIS or your import will be junk

 

Remember, Garbage in = Garbage out...

[MSGT]

On 12/19/2024 at 1:40 PM, Seb1780 said:

 

We've dumped Applicaa - the parent apps on the new MIS are available to pre-admission students so negates the need for a third party tool.

Can i ask you more about this? Which MIS do you use for a parent app (pre-admission) to be available? 

[Seb1780]

17 minutes ago, ZoeT said:

Can i ask you more about this? Which MIS do you use for a parent app (pre-admission) to be available? 

We moved to Bromcom, we can import our ATF into that and do all we need for our incoming Y7s.

[MSGT]

Just now, Seb1780 said:

We moved to Bromcom, we can import our ATF into that and do all we need for our incoming Y7s.

Interesting - i am going to ask if SIMS can do similar (we import the ATF into SIMS but then use a ms forms for parents to complete full info and its a manual update into SIMS for any missing data from those forms). We dont use the sims Parents app but we do use Talaxy.