An Introduction to Connections Audiences

In Search, you engage with students by licensing a given number of records, but in Connections, you’ll identify groups of students divided into Audiences. 

What is an Audience?

Audiences are defined by three student factors: cohort, geography, and score band. 

Audiences determine which students you reach in Connections through communication plan messages and the Interested in You and College Matches sections of the BigFuture® School app. You have the option to refine your Audiences in a later step to filter which students can discover your school.

Step 1: Select a Graduating Class

Connections includes two graduating class cohorts: 

• Seniors and Juniors
• Sophomores and Freshmen

You’ll select one of these two cohorts when determining an Audience.
 

Step 2 : Select a Geography

We’ve defined 29 distinct domestic geographies* to choose from in Connections:

* Schools, districts, and states may choose not to provide their students with access to Connections. As a result, some geographies may be unavailable to select when building an audience and/or certain geographies may have less students participating in Connections.

Step 3: Specify a Score Band

You can choose from five score bands based on the SAT score scale (400-1600). Scores of students who’ve taken the PSAT 10 or PSAT/NMSQT will be converted to an equivalent SAT score.

Optional: Refining Your Audience

In Connections, you can refine your Audiences to engage your best-fit students. Students will have the opportunity to set their college preferences in the BigFuture School app. When their preferences and your Audience criteria align, your college will be featured as a College Match. If you would like to be more defined in which students can discover you in the Interested in You and College Matches sections of the app, you have the option to refine your saved Audiences at any time using six demographic filters. 

NOTE:  Refining your Audience only impacts the matching experience and does not change your ability to create and filter Communication Plans to all of your Audiences. 

National Student Access Group

We’ve opened additional pathways to help you meet your mission and reach students from educationally disadvantaged communities. In addition to creating custom Audiences using the three criteria above, you’ll also have the option to select a National Student Access Group made up of students from high challenge environments as derived from College Board’s Landscape™ data. The National Student Access Group:

• Includes students from environments with challenge levels of 50th percentile and higher
• Extends across all score bands and geographies
• Is divided into two cohorts: Seniors and Juniors/Sophomores and Freshmen

Each cohort uses 15 of your allotted Audiences (or 30 Audiences for both cohorts). Leveraging this benefit of Connections is a great way to expand your reach and support your mission.

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