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Ability to Message Students in Future Term Course

Geoffrey Goodfellow

Our 1st semester ends today, and our 2nd semester starts tomorrow. I have teachers that would like to message students in their 2nd semester classes about important things for the first day of class, but teachers are restricted to messaging students in the "current" term.

From the class roster, teachers are able to use the "Send Communication to" button to message students, parents, or all. This button only works if the today's date is within the academic term of that class. For example, our semester starts tomorrow, and when teachers navigate to their next semester classes to beging getting ready for the next term, teachers are not able to message students about an important assignment until tomorrow comes. (These are students that the teacher did not teach in 1st semester.) It is not possible/desireable to start 2nd semester in Core setup before 1st semester ends.

I contacted Blackbaud support, but they indicated that the system is working as designed, and it is not currently possible to message students in a future term which is unfortunate. Anybody here have a creative workaround?

In the meantime, I did visit the Idea bank, I've created an idea to fix this if you are inclined to vote for it.

Thanks!

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Comments

David Gillespie

Can you clarify the issue you're experiencing here? For our teachers, if they want to message students who are only in the spring term of a year-long course, they change the dropdown on the roster screen to the spring term, and the Send Communication process includes only those students (I just tested it for a student who joins in the spring). For courses that only appear in the spring term, they go into the "View Other Classes" and find their class page in there (because it won't display by default) and use Send Communication in there, or go to the calendar page to click on their class in the schedule. We not had any situation where a teacher couldn't email students in a future term.

Geoffrey Goodfellow

That's very intresting, David. Our teachers can indeed "View Other Classes" to see future term classes. They can see their new rosters, but when they click the "Send Communication to" button to send a message, the message window opens without automatically populating the recipients like normal. Just a blank recipient window.

Blackbaud support confirmed that teachers can only message students that they have a current connection to...a student in a class, a member of their advisory group, someone on their sports team, etc. If the teacher does not have a current connection to the student, they cannot message that student.

Is that wrong information? Am I missing something? I wonder how your teachers are able to message future term students before the term starts???

David Gillespie

There was an early bug where the recipient list wouldn't populate until you clicked one of the delimiter buttons, something browser-specific. Have you tried that? Really, our teachers rely on the ability to contact students in future terms via that method and have been doing so for years.

Oh wait... Are you using the internal bulk messaging, or does that button usually give you the list of recipients to use in your own email client? We do the latter; we have the internal bulk messaging turned off but bulk e-mail turned on. Maybe that's the difference?

Geoffrey Goodfellow

Ah, that may be the difference. We use the internal bulk messaging only. I think that is where the problem lies.

However, at least that makes sense why yours is working and mine is not. I knew there had to be some difference between what we were both doing. Either way, thank you very much for your sharing your experience. I value the Community!

Krista Gunzel

@Geoffrey Goodfellow I know this is an old post but if it helps anyone we create a single class called “Break” and have every teacher and every student enrolled in the class. This allows any teacher to message any student in the school division. I wish there was a cleaner option but this is what we do for now to allow unlimited messaging.