Review the standard Slate fields available for storing person data under each section of the profile tab. This knowledge will help avoid field duplication when adding custom fields and prompts.

Extracurricular interests and sports data will be saved as grouped fields to allow for multiple entries.

Tip

We recommend collecting extracurricular interests at the Prospect/Inquiry level via a custom person-scoped field that is set to store multiple values rather than storing this information on the Interests table. Since the Interests fields are grouped data points, you are more likely to run into duplicate interests or inconsistent behavior if collecting this type of data from multiple sources – see this matching criteria article for more information about matching on Interests.

The Interests table was designed to store more complex, multi-field Interest records such as those that typically come from an application source (e.g. with Interest Type, Name, Frequency in hours and weeks per year, etc.). At the Prospect/Inquiry stage, students are usually just expressing a general interest – which may change at various stages of the prospective student funnel. For that reason, we generally recommend utilizing the Interests table at the Applicant stage, when the data is most likely not going to change and the student must be logged in to fill it out.

Unless you are intending to collect these additional details per Interest on your RFI form, a multi-value custom field will likely be the best approach at the Prospect/Inquiry level.