Filling groups from your student system

Students pick their own groups during onboarding: first-in-family, commuter, working, and whatever else you have set up. Most universities already hold some of that in their student system, and asking a student to enter it again is both friction and a worse dataset, because plenty of them will skip it.

So your roster feed can fill groups for you. It is off by default, and you turn it on one group at a time.

Turning it on for a group

Open Audiences, find the group, and switch on Fill from roster. From then on, any student your feed sends with that group key is put in it.

Nothing else changes. The group still appears in onboarding, students can still join it themselves, and targeting works exactly as before.

Sending the groups

Add a groups field to each student in your feed, or a groups column to a pasted CSV. Either an array or a plain list works:

{ "email": "liam@uni.edu.au", "groups": ["first_in_family", "commuter"] }

email,groups
liam@uni.edu.au,"first_in_family, commuter"

Use the group's key, not its label. Keys are shown next to each group in Audiences. A key you send that does not exist is skipped.

Sensitive groups need a confirmation first

Some groups reveal sensitive informationA category the Australian Privacy Act 1988 protects more strictly. It includes health information, racial or ethnic origin, and sexual orientation.: a group about being LGBTQIA+, Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, or neurodivergent, for example. A student choosing one of those for themselves is them telling us. Your roster sending it is a different act, and the Privacy Act treats it differently.

So marking a group sensitive puts a gate on it. Before the feed can fill it, somebody has to confirm that your institution holds the consent to share it with First Six. We record who confirmed and when, and the switch is refused until they do. Audiences then shows that confirmation, with the name and the date, under the group it belongs to.

You mark a group sensitive with the tick box under its name in Audiences, and you can only change it while that group's feed is off. Stopping the feed is the first step, not an extra one: unmarking a group while it was still being filled would slide it out from behind its own gate without anybody deciding to.

A student can always leave, and it sticks

Any student can take themselves out of any group on their People page.

When they do, no later roster update puts them back. We record the removal and honour it permanently. This is the part that makes the whole feature safe to use: a student who does not want to be in a group they did not choose has a remedy that works, without contacting anyone.

The reverse is also true. If a student picks a group themselves, the feed never overwrites that: their profile shows the group came from them, not from you.

Common questions

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