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School-level feature — managed within your school portal at yourschool.deandesk.com. Use the school Admin Dashboard, not the institution dashboard.
Make the registration, application or purchase journey match your school’s actual audience. Where to go: Admissions → Enrollment & Admissions. This is the Onboarding Policy Manager.

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Video walkthrough

Download the video
This walkthrough is a human-recorded tutorial in the Northstar Academy demo school, with English captions. Use the CC control to turn captions on or off. Changes shown in the recording apply to the demo school.

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Follow along

1

Open Enrollment & Admissions

Choose Enrollment and admissions in School setup, then Open Enrollment & Admissions. Start on the Enrollment tab.
2

Confirm how people join

Review Enroll through purchase, Apply for admission, or Both. Use Save enrollment method only when you intend to change that behavior. Existing products keep their own enrollment method. For services or events using custom settings, keep those settings unless you intend to change the joining journey; educational purchase enrollment can grant Student access.
3

Review the application journey

If you accept applications, open Applicant Journey. Review who can enroll, parent/child settings, required information and the application steps. In Fill out forms, check the adult forms; in Add children, review child requirements. Create missing forms in Admissions → Form Manager, then return and attach them here.
4

Check review rules and rounds

Within Applicant Journey, inspect Admin review and any acceptance requirements. Use Admissions Team for review permissions. If you run cycle-based applications, use Rounds & Tracks to check the intended round, dates and tracks. Ensure the correct round is open before inviting applications.
5

Save and rehearse

Use Save Changes for the applicable settings. Follow the journey with a designated test account, including a parent and child when relevant. Return to the checklist and check I reviewed enrollment and admissions only after the forms and approval behavior match your plan.
A public event or service purchase is not automatically an admissions application. Confirm which journey applies before enabling application requirements.

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Video transcript

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0:00 — Introduction and enrollment methods

Hi everyone and welcome to the second step of getting your school ready to accept new people. So this step is going to be the Enrollment & Admission step and this is going to be where you decide how people join and what they need to complete in order to be a part of your school or your organization. So this requires you to open the Enrollment & Admission step which is by pressing this button here in the Onboarding Guide and you can also access it from the Admissions section over here from the Enrollment & Admissions button from the left side. So once you open Enrollment & Admissions, you’re going to answer one simple question which is going to be how do students join your school? So there are essentially three different options on how students are going to join. Option number one is going to be Applications. What that means is that students need to create an account and complete the application and follow a set admissions process. So anytime that you want people to create an account first and you want them to go through multiple steps in order to enroll in your program or in your organization or school, this is the you’re going to select. You can also do a simpler enrollment process by simply enabling Enrolling through Purchase which means that students choose a program and they pay for that program. This is great for any type of organization that allows access to materials or allows entry for open access such as events and programming and open classes. One great thing is that even if you select the option for Enroll through Purchase, you can still ask your students and ask your applicants to fill out additional information such as a form before they submit and they submit their payment for the program that they’re enrolling in. But let’s go with Apply for Admissions first and see what

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2:06 — Applicant Journey and sign-up settings

that looks like. So we save that enrollment method and once we save that enrollment method, now the part of this is to define our applicant journey and this applicant journey is going to define what exactly do we want on that application process for when students are signing up. So some of these are going to be managed and they’re going to be grayed out which is fine but and what that’s going to do is that that’s going to help us to define certain things like are students allowed to self-register, what’s the role that’s given, and this is managed by the previous question that we answered over here which is why it’s grayed out. What you can also do is that you can decide you want it to be a single page application when students are logging in and signing up and so on and so forth. You can also ask, so this is a longer step but you can define

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3:00 — Profile information and children

very specific things related to how does enrollment happen. Do you require them to have a profile picture? What profile field steps do you want to ask them when they’re applying? Do you want to ask them their date of birth? Do you want to ask them their address? And then there’s certain information that is going to be required as long as you need students to complete their entire profile. So you can also turn this off which means that as long as you create an account then they don’t really need any additional information. So you can also add additional profile fields as well over here too. That will allow you to collect additional information related to the user at the time when they’re signing up. You can also configure this to be for children as well. So certain programs are designated only towards children. Other programs are designated towards children and parents as well. So you can cover both of these scenarios by either requiring at least one child or requiring the parent or allowing the parent to enroll or you can turn this off entirely meaning that only parents or adults will be able to enroll in the school. The next thing is going to be what

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4:19 — Required and optional forms

forms do you want to fill out. So forms are going to be longer forms that are used for specific reasons such as enrollment and financial aid and you can add those in by going to the form manager and once you have created a form you can come back and attach a form to the application. This is really helpful for long application processes where there’s multiple steps such as enrollment forms, releases, agreements that have to be signed, and you can also add optional forms. So this is great for organizations such as K-12 institutions and other schools as well.

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5:01 — Payment methods, fees and programs

Then you can require that payment options are turned on. If you require that payment options are turned on then they will be asked to place a credit card or a bank account on file without necessarily being charged for anything. You can also add an application fee as well. You don’t need to turn on the payment method in order to charge an application fee. An application fee means that any time that an application is submitted this fee will be charged. There’s also a credit card surcharge that you can also add as well. So this is great for when you want to charge a premium if applicants are paying by card instead of by paying by bank transfer. The next thing is to add a program. So some organizations may ask that you choose a program when you are applying and what that means is that they have to select a paid program, meaning a product, and have to buy one or more of those products in order to be a part of the organization. You can also add policies here,

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6:10 — Policies and application preview

so for example terms and conditions can be added from the state. Then you can add additional terms and conditions which will be the final thing that they review before they complete their application and then there’s a submit application step. There’s also some additional things that you can add such as a donation prompt and you can explore this and try this out. Whenever you want to understand what the current application process looks like you can select this preview application process button from here and this will give you an overview of what an applicant will see when they are going through the application. So as you can see we selected profile information is turned on so they have to complete all this basic information and their address information and some additional information like their emergency contact and so on as well. Then the next step is application fees and the final step will be program selection.

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7:12 — Review applications after submission

So after that we have the after submission step. The after submission step is going to determine how exactly are applicants going to be reviewed. If you leave this turned off that means that as soon as an application is submitted with all of the previous steps they are auto accepted or you can also turn this on and that will allow you to develop an application workflow and it will not automatically give applicants access once they have submitted their application but instead they will be held for under review until you accept their application. Once their application is accepted then they will be required to pay and then they will finally be given approval for their organization. There’s a lot more and this is one of the most versatile and useful steps in DeanDesk so this is a very short tutorial on how the application process works and in other guides you can learn more about how the application journey works, how the admissions process works, and how to really tailor this for your organization’s needs. But let’s go back to that original step. Let’s say that instead of applying for admissions you’re to simply choose

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8:28 — Enroll through purchase and finish the step

enroll through purchase. If you choose enroll through purchase then this will allow students so let’s press save enrollment method and this will allow students to enroll into and get access into DeanDesk by purchasing a product or a program that is going to give them access to the organization. So from here if I choose enroll through purchase and I set up my enrollment products then I can create products from over here and this will allow me to create enrollment products. So once that has been done and once I have added in my products then I can go back here and I can complete this step. That will bring us to the third step which is courses and learning material.

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More help

Back to the school setup guide.