New to Re-enrollment in Blackbaud and need best practices

Erin Wagner

We have always sent paper contracts to our parents.  This will be the first year we do re-enrollment electronically.  As we get ready to push out information to parents to set up their MySchoolApp in order to receive the contracts we are finding that we lack many email addresses or parents that have a shared email address.  This will of course will cause an issue getting them in to set up their own portal, view the contract and sign.  Did any one else face this challenge?  We usually have both parents sign, is that the norm or do you have one signature to ease the burden of both parents having to go in?

Corrine Duncan

Hi Erin,


We have been doing electronic re-enrollment for several years now.  For non-divorced or non-separate households, we only have one parent sign the contract.  For separate households, both parent signatures are collected.  


Our best practices are to have all parents enter a unique address for themselves and most of our parents have done this.  Email addresses for at least one parent for a non-separate household will work if you only need one parent to sign and it would be easiest if it is the parent you have an email address on.  For separate households though, it would be best to have email addresses for both parents.  


Just curious about what you meant by getting parents to setup their own portal?  Are you referring to their profile information?


Corrine

Julie Baker

We have not moved forward with parents and single sign on but we do have all emails for our parents some do share and we will have to change that for single sign on.  


As for paper contracts we stopped them many years ago and love having them online.  We used to only require one signature in the past but now with Enrollment Managament we require 2.  Year one was hard and had some resistance but we did learn about many new emails that had never been changed. Also we learned of divorces, custody changes and information changes like addresses and phone numbers. When parents would give a hard time our response was it is for security reasons and also that we hope both parents would like to have access to see how their child's grades are, what is going on in school...We also recommended to tape the password under the keyboard if they dont log in until the following year

Rose Pfeffer

Hi Erin,


I've worked at numerous schools where we did contracts through MySchoolApp and we typically would only have one signature required. We also do that for school forms as it seems almost impossible to get both parents to sign and submit. It ends up being a lot of extra follow-up work for the business office/admissions. 


We tend to have the same issue with parents sharing a 'family' email address but the population isn't that large so we reach out directly to the families to get individual email addresses.

Kim Hughes

We have required all parents to sign contracts the last 2 years, 1 parent before that (unless divorced). Having the same email isn't as big of an issue unless you are doing Blackbaud ID for parents. If you aren't doing Blackbaud ID for parents, then each parent can have their own username (you would need to assign) regardless of email. And when they request their login credentials it asks for the email and when it sees that there are 2 people with the same email, it asks for name. But BBID is a whole other ballgame.