Programs and cohorts are a critical part to creating an engaging and impactful experience for your users.
They allow your team to segment messaging for your users and determine how you want your users to engage with one another in the forum and directory. A few pieces of advice to consider when determining how to set up your programs and cohorts:
Consider how you need to segment the messaging across your cohorts and where you'll get the most benefit from sharing different information (start dates, locations, role/job family)
Consider which users you want to interact with one another and use that to build your programs/cohorts; both the forum and the directory will be segmented at the cohort level
1) Start by navigating to the "Programs" tab and clicking "Create Program" in the top right hand corner of the Program Manager
2) Enter the name of your overall program and choose whether or not you want to enable the directory and forum at the program-level (you can update these settings later in the Dashboard if necessary)
A program is defined as a group of users that should all receive the same information through the platform
3) Once the program is created, you'll be redirected to the programs page where you'll be able to add cohorts into the program
A cohort is defined as a group of users within a program
4) Enter the name of your cohort however you'd like for the sub-groups within the program to be organized (location, start date, job family, recruiter, etc.) and select the Cohort Type
Please note that cohort type does not have any bearing on the platform functionality or how the information will be displayed to your users, just for analytics and tracking on the admin side of the platform.
5) Update the settings for the cohort, enabling the directory and forum at the cohort-level and setting a company contact for this group. You are able to update these settings later under the Cohort Dashboard.
Please note that you are able to set different company contacts for each cohort within a program, but only one main contact at the program-level.
We recommend using a shared account (or proxy) for the program-level contact if you expect that you'll be getting a lot of chats through the platform. Feel free to reach out to your CSM if you have questions about contacts or need help determining who the best person from your team would be.
6) Set start and end dates for your program templates. This is evergreen content that applies to all cohorts within your program, but is able to be scheduled based on the start and end dates of each cohort.
If you would like to use the start and end date set in the program, or if you have not applied any templates at the program-level, you can skip this step.
7) Add candidates to your cohort using one of three different methods listed below
Upload candidates via CSV: upload a CSV file with 4 columns (first name, last name, email, and [optional] phone number) - see this article for more detailed instructions
Create new candidate: manually add your candidates to the cohort by adding in their first name
View import history: add your users directly from a previously-enrolled program, cohort, or journey (on V1 of the platform)
8) Repeat steps 3-8 until you have the desired number of cohorts configured
Note that any candidates added to your cohorts will not receive any type of notification until the cohort is marked as ACTIVE in the cohort dashboard, so feel free to add candidates from the cohort setup screen
You are able to add templates to both the program and cohort after the structure has been setup; we recommend this as a best practice to organize your program structure before segmenting the communications
Once your programs and cohorts are set up in Abode, you are ready to apply templates/content and then activate your candidate's experience