Customizable Email Templates

Jennifer Welch

Does anyone use Blackbaud SIS to send customized (merge fields), bulk emails to students and parents or do most use a third party like MailChimp or Constant Contact? I have seen the discussions on using PushPages and Official Notes. I appreciate any help in understand the system's capabilities. Thank you!

Jeff Gaudet

@Jennifer Welch We use a mixture of both the BB pushpages and Constant Contact. Primarily we have started to use CC for our weekly newsletter to our parents. It gives us a bit more data and has a little more flexibility with the style of the page. However, we use pushpages for basically everything else to communicate to your community

Jennifer Welch

@Jeff Gaudet thank you Jeff!

John Ronan

@Jennifer Welch

I wish I could say we use only pushpages for almost everything. I like the fact that there is a central place from which to send messages and have a record of it. [I like to know what has gone out to our community and only have access to BEM ?]

Alas, our communications folk use Constant Contact for newsletters, etc.

Jennifer Welch

@john ronan thank you! My former school's communications people did the same although they use MailChimp and I was trying to guage whether anything has changed in the meantime with BBEM Communications ?.

Amanda Polson

@Jennifer Welch We are using pushpages for our emails to family. Before we moved to Blackbaud (this is our first school year using it) we used MailChimp. I really like the ability to have a smart list that updates with current parents, and I appreciate not paying for yet another service.

That said, the pushpages are still pretty basic in terms of design/functionality. If you're used to mailchimp or constant contact it will likely be somewhat frustrating to use and its a little awkward in terms of layout (it says its responsive, but the layouts still appear funky on devices in my experience).

We are still sorting out the various ways of communicating with parents as well, and so far have used pushpages for weekly bulletins and general emails (events, annual fund appeals). Our admissions office uses Official Notes for candidate and enrollment communications. A few of our teachers have started using Messages for sending group info for classes, the rest currently use google groups but we will be moving it all into messages next year. The part I'm still trying to figure out is the best way to get time-sensitive notices and announcements out to the whole school (early dismissal, no school, etc).

Jennifer Welch

@Amanda Polson thank you so much!

Marisa Phirangee-Gentles

@john ronan Question - We use BB for pushpages but looking at different templates…just wondering if CC is able to pull the lists and distribution groups from BB

Suzan Moffett

@Amanda Polson we use Ruvna Announcements for time-sensitive communications, text and email (there is a voice option too but we don't use that). It syncs with BB to keep the data fresh. We also use their emergency event module (I forget the name) for fire drills and lockdown check-ins – it syncs with BB class rosters. They also have a couple of other modules that look great but we don't use. I've been very happy with the software and support.