How are YOU using Official Notes?

Mary Zieten

We've had some resistance in the past to using Official Notes, but we're now trying to get them up and running, and trying to sell it to the higher ups. So, what neat ways are you using Official Notes? Are there administrative tasks they can make easier? Please fill us in!

Sandra Ross

@Mary Zieten Hi Mary, we use quite a few Official Notes in our Admission Office for communicating with candidates and parents. Some of uses are: notifying regarding financial aid qualifying, how to submit financial aid forms, reminders for forms, Scholarship workflow (i.e. if they complete interest form, official note is sent with details of how to apply), letting families know what outstanding items they have left to submit. Very useful tool!

Brian LeBlanc

@Mary Zieten We use Official Notes for just about everything in admissions, as well as in academics for things like attendance notices and documentation of parent contact and conferences. Ours are “prettied up” using HTML, and they make for very sharp looking emails. The one complaint I have about official notes is that it is very difficult to see when someone responds to one; they don't always display and we typically have to rely on the parent emailing the admissions office to prompt a reply. But for one-way communication of information, they're fantastic.

Karla McNamee

@Mary Zieten We use ON for everything during the admission process (invite to interview, application status, I-20 paperwork, enrolllment contracts…) I agree that a huge issue is when some one responds and trying to find the message.

Brian LeBlanc

@Karla McNamee @Mary Zieten The best way we've found to get around the issue with replies not being seen is that we append a footer to the bottom of every single official note email that we send. The notification that actually triggers the email looks like this:

[author comment]

Please note: this message was sent via an unmonitored onRecord inbox. If you receive an email copy of a reply you sent in onRecord, please forward the email to admissions@thalesacademy.org to ensure your message will be received. Thank you!

What we're doing here is kind of using EMS's own quirks against itself. Since we have it set up that any official note, whether an original sent from us or a parent reply, triggers an email to the parent with the content of the note (the “author comment” placeholder is whatever is included in the official note, whether plain text or HTML), that means that the parent gets an emailed copy of anything they send to us through an official note reply. All they have to do is forward that message to us, and we can reply through email. It doesn't catch them all, but if I were to guess, it catches 80-85% of them.

Sherrie Warren

@Mary Zieten I am the Academic Principal and I use Official Notes in ALL part of my job.

(1) I use it to keep track of community service hours with notifications going out.

(2) General Registrar's office documentations about a student/user with no notifications being sent out

(3) Summary of academic planning meetings with students and parents

(4) Our principals use it for teachers to document first offenses of behavior that comes from the teacher.

David Gillespie

@Mary Zieten Two handy uses we added a few years ago:

(1) Quick group invitation to an event. For example, we invite the parents of awardees to awards night. We have a template with some HTML+images to pretty things up a bit for “official letters” so you go into the official note, type all the names of the recipients in the single message, write the note using the [Student First Name] placeholder, and off it goes to those people, faster than a mail merge.

(2) Message to the students and/or parents of multiple classes/groups. You might only spot by accident that you can also type any active group name in the recipient list and the note will go to the students in that group. We have used that to send an “official notice” to a class – like a special trip or a due date or such - specifically when we wanted it recorded in the system, rather than just emailed out.