You may have heard us throw around the term 'mapping', i.e. 'Let's map your employer categories!' or 'Let's map your majors to career communities!'. If you're unfamiliar with this process, it can be confusing, so we've broken down exactly what mapping is, and how it creates a more efficient process for you and your team.

Any topic, label, or tag that you want to include as an identifier alongside a user or piece of content uploaded into uConnect must be represented by a tag within the platform. Mapping refers to the alignment of these topics, labels, or tags that exist in other systems outside of uConnect, with the communities and categories you create within uConnect. 

For example, say you're uploading a contact list full of student information and you want to include majors, but you don't have majors set up as communities in uConnect. This means there's no place to store that major information alongside each student record as it currently exists. What we can do instead, is map those majors to the relevant career communities, i.e. the 'BA in Accounting' major, might map to the 'Accounting, Finance, and Business Administration' community you have in uConnect. Additionally, the 'BS in Civil Engineering' might map to the 'STEM' community. This way, you're able to maintain the integrity of the information you have on students (or any content for that matter) while utilizing the system you've already developed in uConnect. 

Mapping your external tags and categories is a great way to centralize topics within one system, especially as you integrate with more resources and your use of the platform expands. Since uConnect acts as the central place to access the variety of success tools you offer, mapping your categories for each integration within uConnect helps to create a consistent experience for users that makes it easier to find what they need, when they need it. They won't have to search through various similar tags within separate systems now to find what they want -- they can look in one place, using one set of tags, to find all the integrated content relevant to them, and the interest they've identified.

Any time you integrate with a new resource, whether that's a job board, alumni mentor network, student information system, or campus group directory, we'll ask you to map your incoming categories to the tags that exist in uConnect. If you've integrated a resource in the past that you're unsure of whether you mapped it, please submit a support request.