CRM

How you describe and classify the people you deal with.

Disabilities — the list offered to an applicant who says they have a disability during an online application.

Business Type

The kinds of organisation you work with: school, college, charity. Each also carries a broader category it falls under.

A business type is set on the contact and on a prospectus, which is what makes it more than a label: because a prospectus can be aimed at a business type, you can offer one set of activities to charities and another to colleges without building a prospectus for each organisation.

For classifying schools specifically, use School Types instead.

Job Role

Roles within the organisations you work with, so a Head Teacher can be identified as such wherever they appear.

A job role is set on a teacher, and on the association between a contact and an organisation. The association is the more interesting of the two, because it is also where that person's standing is recorded — whether they have Portal access, whether they may sign SLAs, and whether they confirm the diary. The job role is how you tell at a glance who the booking secretary is and who the head is.

Relationship Types

How somebody states they are related to a pupil when requesting a connection to them.

Each type carries a position, deciding where it appears in the list, and a flag marking it as a parent, guardian or carer. That flag is the part that matters: it separates the relationships that carry parental standing from those that do not, so an aunt and a legal guardian are not treated alike.

This is not the same as an association

Relationship Types are used by connection requests. The ongoing link between two contacts is an association, which records a job role and a persona rather than a relationship type.

Gender Types

The options offered on an online application. As broad or as specific as you wish.

Each option carries the pronoun that goes with it, so correspondence can use the right one rather than guessing from the label. One option can be marked as self-identifying, which lets somebody describe themselves in their own words instead of choosing from your list.

The choice is kept on the pupil, the applicant and the booking, so it follows them through rather than being asked again.

Ethnic Group

Optional, and only shown if you have turned Ethnic Groups on in System Configuration.

Each entry carries a position for its place in the list, a central code, and can be marked as self-identifying in the same way as a gender type.

The central code is what makes this worth filling in properly: it maps your wording onto the code a statutory return expects, so you can word the question as your families would recognise it and still report in the terms an authority requires.

Notifications and Adverts

Notices and advertisements shown either in Xperios or on the Portal. Useful for publicising events or sending out a bulletin.

Each one has a title and detail, a type, an optional link, and two things that control its reach: the contact category it is aimed at, and an expiry date.

The expiry date is the one to use. An advert that stops being true is worse than no advert, and giving it a date means it retires itself rather than waiting for somebody to remember.