Pushpages And You: An Introduction

Derek Nichols
Derek Nichols Blackbaud Employee
Ninth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud Higher Education Solutions™ Announcements
During the coronavirus pandemic, communication has been even more important than it was as many people transitioned to working from home. Blackbaud’s Education management products have a number of tools to help with this including Pushpage. Last year proved to be a challenging one as a global pandemic forced many people to work from home. The move to virtual environments made communication even more important than it already was as people continued to find ways to stay connected.

Thankfully, Blackbaud’s Education management products have a number of tools to really help including Pushpage. While we’ve covered this topic in the past, it’s the perfect time to remind everyone about Pushpage and how to use it.

So, let’s kick things off with the basics.

What Are Pushpages?
Pushpage is Blackbaud’s built-in solution for designing, composing, sending, and optimizing email newsletters. With this feature, you can use your existing database of contacts to quickly and easily reach parents, students, alumni, and other constituent groups via email.

It’s also a great way to stay in touch with your constituents and share information about your educational institution. Perhaps you want to let people know about an upcoming event or some call to action. Pushpages can make this process a breeze.

Where Can I Find them?
When you’re ready to get started with Pushpage, head to Core, Communication, and then Pushpage.

Okay Great but What Do I Do Now?
This is the hub where you can control every element of your Pushpage. Inside here you can set who should send and receive messages, create and/or update content for your newsletter templates and issues, as well as adjust email settings like opt-out, access, and more.

The page itself has plenty of tabs where you can modify and create a host of different things. Here’s a short breakdown:
  • Distribution Groups – This is the area where you can create new groups and add people to them who should receive Pushpages. When creating a new job, select the group which should be sent the specific pushpage.
  • Issues – The next step after a template and distribution group have been created is to work on an issue. Essentially, this is the recurring instance of the newsletter created from a template. The template's settings determine whether the issue can be customized each time it is created. Pro Tip! Want to know who got a copy of an issue, who published it and when? Look at the job history.
  • Jobs – While issues are the final product that end users see, jobs are the settings behind the scenes that tells the system when to send the newsletter and to which groups it needs to go to. You can set them up in advance or have them send the newsletter immediately. Pro tip! If you need to republish an issue, you'd run a new job for a new time and people but with the same issue.
  • Templates – Templates are needed before issues can be made serving as the framework to which each can be customized. They control the style, layout, and content that an issue will use. Thankfully, these are also responsive and mobile friendly.
  • Opt out Settings – This is where you’d go to customize the message users will see when they want to opt out of your newsletters. Placeholders can be added to the message to include the users first name, last name, or email if you want.
  • Email Settings – Finally, the settings section is where you’d go to further customize your Pushpage emails. Settings like enabling your Pushpage Issues to be sent as HTML emails, sending as links, and adding Alternative Text.
PushPage Resources
Naturally, we’ve only covered the basics of Education management’s Pushpages. There’s a lot more you can do with them.

Thankfully, we also have plenty of resources for you if you want to know more about them and how to use them. Want some Pushpage tips to really help make your newsletter sing? Check out our blog post here. For a thorough overview of Pushpages, setup, and the process of making one from scratch, check out our Tutorial Guide. Need help? You can access our comprehensive Pushpage documentation right here.

That’s going to do it for today, but make sure to come back next week as we’ll be taking one last look back at January 2021 and seeing everything that the BBEM teams released. See you then!

Comments

  • David Lee
    David Lee
    Fourth Anniversary Kudos 2 Participant Facilitator 1
    Very useful resource for the school communication needs.   Thanks for sharing this resource, Derek.

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