Using Groups in Cialfo

How To create and edit a Group and How To assign students and tasks to that Group.

Client Solutions Center avatar
Written by Client Solutions Center
Updated over a week ago

Groups are exactly as the name suggests - collections of students who may have similar needs. Students in the same group can have their college application settings, tasks, learning content, and communications all standardized and set up in just a few clicks.

Counselors can assign multiple groups to a single student -- so for instance Johnny could receive content that relates to him as a Student Athlete, Scholarship Seeker, and someone interested in European colleges.

What makes groups useful?

There are a number of reasons groups are useful in Cialfo. The top 3 are working with Tasks & Assessments, Broadcast, and, Student Dashboard views specific to Groups.

Smarter Bulk Tasks via Tasks and Assessments

Task lists created inside Resources can be assigned/delivered to students en masse by linking the task list to one or more groups. Edits you make to those tasks also get bulk-delivered to students on those linked groups.

To access Tasks & Assessments, simply click on the More button located at the bottom of the page. This action will open a new sidebar, where you can then select Task & Assessments.

Smarter Bulk Messaging via Broadcast

Groups can also be used to filter students for communication purposes, so you're not having to constantly rebuild email lists from scratch.

Smarter Student Dashboards via Views

Groups can also be used as a filter in your Counselor Dashboard. Create as many Views as you like, with as many filters as you can imagine, so you can quickly catch up on different groups of students when you need to.

Streamline Surveys

Please refer to Creating Surveys article to find out more!


How to Create a Group

First, head to the Groups page by clicking on your profile at the top right of the page and clicking on the 'Create Group' button.

The only required field that needs to be filled up is the Group Name and you can decide whether all students in your group will automatically start out with similar settings for Degree Type.

Select a Degree Type to make our database of schools visible to your students. You can choose from a range of degree types:

  • K-12 (for boarding school applications)

  • Undergraduate (for university, associate's degree, and BS/MD applications)

  • MBA (for business school applications)

  • MD (for medical school applications)

  • Postgraduate (for all postgrad applications beyond MBA and MD)

Indicate a number of included Schools if you would like to place a hard limit on the number of applications your students can create / submit. While this is not relevant to all contexts, some schools do enforce a limit.

Once you are happy with the group details, scroll down to click on 'Create Group' that is at the bottom right corner of the page.


How can I view, edit or deactivate existing Groups?

As a counselor admin, you can view a group that has already been created by clicking on Groups and clicking into that group.

Here, you will be able to see the Group Details page and you can edit details and even deactivate the group.

When you edit a group, Cialfo saves these changes under a new revision. Once you're done editing, click on 'Save Details' button to save the changes. Do note it may take up to 30 minutes for the changes to be fully reflected in the students accounts depending on how big the group is.

Note: Updating students to the latest revision of a group can cause data loss (this will happen in those circumstances where you remove a degree type in the new revision), so your students will keep their existing revision until you update them. Inactive students cannot be updated to the latest revision. 


How to add students to a group?

(1) Bulk Assign Group

The first way is to bulk assign a group with Bulk Actions on the Students List page. Select the students you want to add to a group with the checkbox next to their names, click on Bulk Actions followed by Assign Group and a sidebar will open.

Select the group(s) you would like to assign to the selected students and click on Assign Selected.

(2) Assign or remove groups from a specific student

On the Students List page, click on Profile under the student's name whose group you would like to update/edit/change, scroll down to the Application Details section and click on 'Update Application Details' and a sidebar will open.

Scroll down to the Groups sub-section and you may edit the groups for that student here. Once you're ready, click on 'Save Changes'.

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