Configure Your Lottery Priorities

Learn how to configure your lottery priorities

What is included in this article?

• What is a Priority?
• Types of Priorities
• How to create a Priority
  • When to save a priority to the Application v. Student Annual table
  • Using the Rules Engine
• Running a "No Priority" Lottery

What is a Priority?

Priorities are used to give students a higher chance to be placed on the offered list. Priorities, sometimes referred to as preferences, determine where a student's application sits relative to others and how "high" on the list that student is placed. Students with "higher" valued priorities are more likely to get into a school/program when the lottery is run or will sit higher on the waitlist if there is no space left on the offered list.

For example, a school gives the highest preference to students who are siblings of students attending, then to students who live in the district, and then finally everybody else. We would need to build priorities for Sibling Attending and In-District so we could know which applications to pick first in the lottery.

Types of Priorities

There are two types of priorities

• Manual Priorities: Manual priorities are applied manually by the admin to an application during the review process. This is usually done when there is more scrutiny required when awarding this priority and we don't want to let parents self-report for the priority.
  • • when creating a manual priority, the Automatically Set setting should remain empty/disabled
• Automatic Priorities: Automatic priorities are automatically marked as eligible for students who meet the corresponding criteria. These can be calculated by the system using student data. Most often, these are tied to questions on the application or info about a student (Example: In District, Sibling Attending). The rules engine will be used to create automatic priorities.

Creating Priorities

To create a priority:

1. Go to Settings > Lotteries > Lottery Priorities
2. Click on Add New Priority
3. Configure the settings outlined in the screenshot below

When to save a priority to the Application v. Student Annual table?

• If the priority should be saved to all applications that the student submits, choose to save it to the Student Annual table.
• If the priority should be assigned per application, meaning the question and answer is specific to one program on the application, choose to save it to the Application table.

Using the Rules Engine

Selecting "Automatically Set" in the lottery priority creation page will show users the rules engine. The rules engine is used to create priority eligibility rules that automatically set these priorities as eligible for students who meet the specified criteria. If the student data matches the rule, then the student is eligible for the priority.

When the application is submitted or edited, the priorities available for the program the student has applied to will be evaluated for that application. The platform will apply the priority automatically if the student meets the criteria.

There are certain pre-configured conditions that organizations can utilize in the Rules Engine for their priority assignments. These include:

• Student Address
• Grade
• Current School
• Feeder Path
• Sibling (Attending & Applying(
• Program
• Dates

These pre-configured conditions can be added to your Rules Engine by clicking the Add Condition dropdown and selecting which one(s) you are utilizing.

The Priority Rules Engine also has the option to configure custom rules based on any fields you are collecting on the Student profile or Application. You will choose the Field Name, Operator, and Expected value to set up. For example, this priority is going to be assigned to any student who has 70506 as a value for the ZIP code field:

Running a "No Priority" lottery

Why would I run a No Priority Lottery?

If you do not use priorities or placement rules to make offers to applicants, or if you have more seats than you have applicants, you may not be accustomed to running an actual lottery. In Enroll, in order to allow families to accept or decline offers, the applications will need to processed through a "lottery". These types of “lotteries” can be accommodated by running a “No Priority” lottery. 

To create the lottery design for this, you'll first need to create a priority that will automatically be given to ALL students eligible to run in the lottery. The easiest automatic priority to create would be based off of application eligibility status. The priority should be created so that all applications that are marked as eligible will receive the "No Priority" priority on their eligible applications.

If using this example, you'll want to set that priority up like this:

You would then create a lottery design that uses just that priority and attach it to the necessary program(s).