Map Your Business Processes to Real-World Constituent Journeys
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit you will be able to:
- Explain what constituent journeys are and why they are important.
- Map a constituent journey to your institution’s business processes.
This module provides information about the managed package version of Education Cloud. As of March 2023, new or migrated customers use Education Cloud integrated platform solutions instead of managed packages. For information about the integrated platform solution, go to our Education Cloud Documentation.
What Is a Constituent Journey and Why Is It Important?
A constituent journey is the complete sum of experiences a constituent goes through while interacting with your institution. Different constituents have different experiences. Defining the constituent journeys for your institution helps you create personas for each constituent group.
A persona is an archetype that represents constituents with common characteristics. A persona does not necessarily equal a single person. More often, personas compile the traits of a few different people or roles for ease of use.
You may be wondering what value this exercise can provide your institution. Later in this unit we give you specific examples of how defining constituent journeys and personas resulted in improved business processes and interactions. For now, here are two big picture results.
- Specialized resources and efforts to meet the specified needs of your unique constituent groups
- Enhanced empathy and greater ability to relate to your constituents
Define Your Personas
Start with the task of determining your institution’s personas. Each department will likely have a number of personas to represent a constituent type. (Fictional) Cloudy College has been working on defining personas across campus. Here’s what they’ve got so far.
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Personas |
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Recruitment and Admissions |
Prospective students |
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Student Experience |
Current students |
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Advancement |
Alumni |
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Institution Operations |
Faculty and Staff |
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In order to build a list of personas like Cloudy College did, you need to understand your constituents well enough to begin identifying some defining characteristics. Your persona characteristics list does not have to be exhaustive. Here’s a list of key information to focus on.
- Main jobs
- Motivators
- Common pain points
- Pain relievers or gain creators
You can use a variety of methods to gather the information you need to create accurate personas. Here are the methods Cloudy College used.
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Surveys |
Cloudy sent surveys to a variety of constituents from each group with questions that probed their motivators, common pain points, and pain relievers. |
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Constituent Interviews |
Business analysts conducted interviews with a diverse pool of constituents, asking more in-depth, open-ended questions than is possible on surveys. |
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Staff Knowledge |
Cloudy leveraged the expertise of the staff that works with constituents every day. Staff provided insight into frequently asked questions and shared the details of past constituents’ experiences. |
Well-defined constituent journeys and personas also give you additional insights for how to organize your information, and what kind of information to gather. For instance, surveys and interviews with Cloudy alumni revealed that many young alums feel that there are too many required questions on the Young Alumni Club registration form. Many eligible alums reported interest in joining the club, but the length of the form caused them to abandon the registration process. Now that the advancement department knows this about their Young Alumni persona, they will update the form to reduce the number of required questions.
Another big payoff of investing time in constituent journey and persona work is the ability to provide your constituents with the right information and resources at the right time because you understand what’s relevant and when.
For example, when the Cloudy recruitment and admissions team defined their prospective student personas they identified a persona they named Last Minute Applicant. A Last Minute Applicant is genuinely interested in attending Cloudy College but doesn’t submit all the required parts of their application until very close to the admissions deadline. Now that they have identified this prospect persona, the recruitment and admissions team can better serve these applicants at a key moment in their constituent journey with outreach like submission reminders and last minute tips and tricks for completing an application.
Map a Constituent Journey to Your Business Processes
Once you’ve completed the pre-work of defining personas you can construct touchpoints for your constituents. These touchpoints are the pivotal experiences that happen during a constituent journey.
The staff at your institution has the big picture of each constituent journey. For example, your advising and career services team know the general points of contact with an enrolled student as they pursue their degree. And the advancement team can map out the baseline interactions alumni have with the school after graduation. The next step is for each department to start mapping constituent journey touchpoints.
- When and where does the constituent make their first contact with you?
- What happens next?
- What are the communication channels?
- What are the data points being gathered?
- How are data points being gathered?
- What happens to data points once they’ve been collected?
When completing this exercise, it’s important to be as detailed as possible. If you can, go through some or all of the journey touchpoints yourself. As part of the constituent journey mapping process at Cloudy College, members of the recruitment and admissions team submitted applications through the application portal on the Cloudy website. Advising teams registered for different types of appointments with student advisors, and the advancement team practiced navigating their own donation page from start to finish.
Completing these journey touchpoints from the perspective of the constituent helps you understand first-hand what your constituent is experiencing. It’s likely to bring to light areas of some business processes that can be streamlined. It also may give you additional insight into how to explain or talk about certain processes.
The next step is to identify what is happening on the back end while each touchpoint is happening. Nina, Cloudy College’s Salesforce Admin, helped teams understand what’s happening in Salesforce when Cloudy constituents complete particular actions. One example is the back end process for the forms that are available on each department’s web page. When a constituent submits a form to get more information on a particular topic, data is gathered on that form and goes into a custom object with fields specified by each department. Then that custom object feeds an automated process to send the requested information, and finally, adds that constituent to a marketing campaign.
As you work on constituent journey mapping you may find that you need to create additional processes, objects, or fields to support a better experience. Always document your processes and automations, as well as any custom objects or fields you create, and be sure to include notes about why you created them. This will be important for future reference.
As a final step in the constituent journey mapping process, we suggest you create a visual representation (like an infographic) of your institution’s constituent journeys. Create one infographic for the external constituent journey and another for the internal back end data journey.
Exciting news, trailblazer! Once you’ve completed constituent journey mapping, you’re ready to move from planning and pre-work to building your data strategy. Meet us in the next unit to get started.