The School of Social Work (SSW) at Temple University is highly focused on preparing students to meet the needs of our increasingly complex society. As interest in the SSW’s comprehensive program increased, more applications started pouring in — so where was the problem?

Former Academic Coordinator Erin Brosious explained how a manual admissions pipeline process was getting in the way of being able to efficiently serve students’ needs: “Having to do everything manually, including sending physical files out to faculty for review — and then hoping that faculty would return them — was a very tedious, long and cumbersome process,” she said.

With limited administrative resources, staff members found that most of their time was taken up with managing applications, leaving little left over for any other tasks. Something had to change.

Over the course of 12 weeks, Liaison worked closely with the SSW’s admissions staff to make the transition to SocialWorkCAS™ as seamless as possible. “Liaison was very accommodating and hand-held us through most of the process,” said Brosious, who also created slideshow and video presentations to share with her faculty to introduce the CAS and walk them through the user experience.

Because each school is different, SocialWorkCAS offers a comprehensive yet flexible framework so it can truly be customized. Now that Temple has one year under its belt, Brosious said, “We’re looking to tailor the service even more to the unique needs of our program and our desires as far as admissions go.”

Brosious also praised Liaison for their attentive customer service throughout the implementation process: “Liaison is very responsive to feedback and updates, revamping their system to meet the program’s needs, and I think that’s also why this product is very helpful to schools,” she said.

In just one year after implementing SocialWorkCAS, Temple saw impressive results — including a 4% increase in out-of-state applications. The platform’s single-application portal makes it easy for prospects to apply to more than one program at the same time, so the school expects this geodiversity trend to continue

The school also saw a whopping 75% reduction in the time it took to move applications through its review process. Instead of taking 4–6 weeks, now it takes just one.

With so much time freed up from routine administrative tasks, Brosious can devote more attention to other important responsibilities, including the development of targeted messaging and communication plans that can be customized for prospects, in-progress applicants and accepted students.

“SocialWorkCAS is going to make you more available to your students, and it’s going to make the relationships you have with your students more personable,” she said. “The reality is that students want this. Students are becoming more familiar with a common application system as they’re applying to even undergraduate programs, so they’re going to want this when they go to graduate school.”