Reviewing applicants in a Product Sampling Campaign

This article assumes your Product Sampling Campaign application is running on ExpertVoice and has collected several expert applicants that you need to review within the Advocacy Platform.

Overview

Applicant review is the process of examining application answers and ExpertVoice profiles before you approve or decline experts for your Product Sampling Campaign. Within this phase, you can review, assess, and discuss the quality of each expert who applied to your program and ensure they are the correct expert to send a free sample to. 

Just to remind you, after an expert submits their application, the messaging on your campaign landing page will let the expert know their application was submitted for review, and stay tuned for an email if they're accepted into your program or not. 

To start reviewing applicants, you can visit the Applicants tab of your Product Sampling Campaign in the Campaign Manager of the Advocacy Platform. Here is a list of experts who applied to your Product Sampling Campaign.

Turning off the application

When you have enough great applicants for your Product Sampling Campaign, click the toggle button in the right-hand corner of the Applicants tab to turn your application off. 

This will automatically remove the application from your campaign landing page on ExpertVoice. You can toggle the application back on if you wish to reopen your recruitment.

The state of experts

Each applicant will start in the "Needs Review" state. The goal is to review each expert who applied to your Product Sampling Campaign and transition them to either an Approved or Declined state. This can be done manually or in bulk.

• When you approve someone, you can and should add them to a segment simultaneously

  • If you only had one segment listed, experts are automatically added to this segment. All approved experts will receive the same message and activity instructions.

  • If you create multiple segments, these expert groups will receive automated messages about the activities they need to complete -- if you made separate activity-related instructions.

• All experts will receive an automated email and message as soon as you complete these actions; it's best practice to approve or deny experts all within the same day or week to ensure approved experts are on a similar timeline
• Don't leave experts in  the "waiting" Needs Review stage; close the loop and let them know they were approved or declined

Applicant filtering

Filter the experts' application answers to surface the individuals who meet these criteria. They will be the ones that we can approve first into the campaign.

• Under Refine by, select Answer Choices and select the answers that meet your criteria
• Click Apply when done

Using filters and sorting, you can explore the applicant pool, identify your top experts, and add them to their correct segments.

Reviewing expert applicants

After turning off the application, you should start to approve or decline expert applicants. This will help keep the experts informed about their campaign state and help you stay on track with the campaign timeline. The following steps are all optional but recommended for reviewing applicants:

1. Click an expert name from the list on the Applicants step and review their application answers
2. Click the Profile tab to read the information provided in the expert's profile (Note: The information here will be different from expert to expert; some profile fields are optional yet encouraged for the expert to complete)
   • Social media profiles (e.g., ExpertVoice, Facebook, Instagram)
   • Biography
   • Passions
   • Recommendations
   • Content
   • Teams
   • Awards
   • Accomplishments
3. Click the Notes tab to write any personal internal notes about the expert's profile that you would like to look at and remember for later
   • If you make a note, everyone at your company can see these in your brand's Advocacy Platform
   • You'll have access to all notes in the future if you run other campaigns that the same expert applies for
4. Give the expert a Star Rating to individual experts or groups of experts. This 0-5 star rating system allows you to later filter groups of experts by their star rating if you'd like.

Approving or declining experts

We recommend reviewing experts one at a time first, and once you're more comfortable, you can approve and deny experts in bulk if there is a lot to review.

Once an expert is approved or declined, there is no way to undo this action.

One at a time

1. To approve an expert, select an expert and click Approve & Notify.
   • If you have more than one segment listed, click Add to Segment & Notify, select the segment you want to sort them into and click Yes on the popup notification.
2. Select an expert and then click Decline & Notify to decline an expert. Click Yes on the popup notification if you want to decline them.

In bulk

If you want to approve or decline a larger group of experts, click the checkbox at the top of the page and complete the following steps.

1. To approve a group of experts, click Approve & Notify.
   • If you have more than one segment listed, click Add to Segment & Notify. Select the segment you want to sort them into and click Yes on the popup notification.
2. To decline a group of experts, click Decline & Notify. Click Yes on the popup notification if you want to decline them.

Tracking how many experts you approve or decline

As you do this, you can see how many you approved and denied within the Applicants Approved Progress bar chart.

If you have multiple segments, you can click Show progress by segment to drill the data down by segment and see how many more approvals you need to complete to match the Target Size for each segment.

The total number of applicants you approve should match the Target Size(s) in the Segments step as closely as possible for organizational purposes. However, you can approve a different number of experts for a specific segment if desired.