Many schools are planning for students returning to campus in the fall, and are thinking about how best to track students’ vaccination status, whether or not it is required for campus re-entry .

We’ve been thinking about all the different options that schools have for this, and wanted to provide some best practices for collecting and recording this data.

Consult with your legal team

Before starting to collect this kind of data, make sure that you consult with your legal team to ensure that you are going to be FERPA compliant.

If you don’t need it, don’t collect it

One of the most important things to consider when collecting your students’ vaccine statuses (or any other piece of information!) is how you will use the information.. Are you going to allow only vaccinated students to attend certain sessions at your orientation? If so, it may be worth collecting. However, if you don’t have a defined purpose for the information for admissions e, you may be better off just moving on and leave the information gathering to your medical staff when they collect their other vaccination records. Collecting unnecessary information in TargetX will bog down your contact records with data that isn’t actually useful and make it harder to find what you’re looking for in the future.

Identify who needs access

Before you start gathering any vaccination data, identify who needs access to it. For this kind of sensitive health information, you should strive to limit the number of  people who have access to the field. Once you’ve identified who truly does need to be able to see it, consider creating a custom permission set to limit access to the field to only those necessary users.

Create custom fields

If you do want to collect this data, we recommend one or two custom fields:

  • A boolean on the contact record called “Covid 19 Vaccine Received,” where the box is checked if the student has indicated they’ve received a vaccine, and;
  • (Optional) A date field called “Covid 19 Vaccine Last Dose Administered” to track the specific date when the vaccine was received.

From these fields, users with the appropriate permissions will be able to use them like any other field in TargetX to report, segment communications, and assign groups as well as all the other TargetX features!

If you have any questions about tracking vaccination status in your CRM, please contact your Client Success Manager.