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Parent Log In Issues with Email Already Being Used at Another School

Jennifer Welch

We offer a summer session where parents of candidates log in with their personal email to sign the contract, etc. We have not been issuing invitations when their BBID is set up, just an email with instructions to login to our instance and follow the prompts. This works for about 90% of our parents. Several parents have encountered problems logging into our system when they are already using the same email at another school even when they delete cookies, open an incognito window, try another device, etc. The only way it seemed to work for them was when I issued an invitation to connect to our system out of Core.

I am having a hard time pinning BB Support down on whether issuing an invitation is required when using the same email with another system. Does anyone have any experience with this?

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Comments

Lisa Tulchin

@Jennifer Welch I don't know why this url is so hard to find. If you log into that URL, you will see links to all your Blackbaud schools.

https://app.blackbaud.com/

We have a lot of Blackbaud schools on our island, two are across the street from each other. Most families will apply to all four at the same time, each entry year until they get into the school of their choice. So a lot of our families have blackbaud accounts at different schools. Many families have siblings going to different schools. I almost had a nervous breakdown from all the calls before that url was shared with me.

Personally I use a completely different Google profile for my other kid's school just to keep things separate. Like I will log into a new chrome session with my personal profile to look at my son's grades.

Just this past week though, I've been getting an increase in calls from parents having problems logging in from their iOS and Mac devices if their operating system hasn't been updated. They can log in from their PCs fine, having problems just from Safari on old Mac OS, like Catalina or iOS 15. No calls from Android users.

Coco Parham

@Jennifer Welch As more schools started using Blackbaud in our area, Blackbaud told me to have the parents use the same email address, then first sign in at signin.blackbaud.com to their current school and then sign in to our school so the accounts link. It works but it is hard to identify the families who have this situation until later when they are having trouble. I wish the inquiry had a message (from Blackbaud) embedded that has an instructions about this. we can put it on our website but it would the parent see it? or just request info, who knows.

Jennifer Welch

@Lisa Tulchin thank you so much for your insight! I agree that Blackbaud does a very poor job of handling multiple logins at different schools. It shouldn't be this hard!

Jennifer Welch

@Coco Parham In all my digging around in Knowledgebase, opening a case, and trying different options, I have never seen anything like what you and @Lisa Tulchin have shared. Thank you!

Jessi Walters

@Lisa Tulchin if you want to surface app.blackbaud.com to your community, you could customize the Login settings text under Core>Settings>Custom labels & text>Custom text/messages.

3591fd3db584fec6f5e244b6d8d113a0-huge-im

@Jennifer Welch, an invitation is not required to connect a user/BBID to Core or Tuition Management; however, the URL in the Core/admissions invitation email provides extra URL parameters that help drive the user to the final destination correctly. To give better tips for the 10% of summer candidates who have trouble, I'll need more details. Can you message me your Case numbers?

For everyone's benefit, here are some general troubleshooting tips I shared at BBCON in September:

General troubleshooting:
- Verify they started at myschoolapp.com or mycampus-app.com (If they continue from the Welcome back screen, they may accidentally reactivate an old session.)
- Ask what they typed in the box there – it must match the BBID username on the Access tab. (Verify they actually typed it in from your login page and didn't just click continue. The trick is to get them to pay attention to this detail.)
- What do they see next after the portal login page? (does the email on that BBID page still match the BBID username?)
- Forgot their password – offer help based on authentication method (visible on the Access tab)
- Check for cross-site tracking setting (Safari) – leaving it on contributes to perpetual redirects and page loads.
- Walk them through grabbing a .har file – sounds scary but it’s really simple after you've done it the first time (knowledgebase article)
Fast lane through Support:
- What happens when they use incognito window or totally different browser?
- How does the experience compare on different
  - Networks?
  - Locations?
  - Devices?
- Are they on VPN?
- Can they log into app.blackbaud.com? What email address shows in their profile there? (many users experiencing problems find their browser's cache hijacked the login process and enabled a different BBID session)
- What error messages (if any) are shown?
- If multiple users are affected, what are the shared characteristics?

Lisa Tulchin

@Jessi Walters Thank you so much Jessie! That's very helpful. I have a question about Cross Site tracking. We want the browser to allow cross site tracking?

In iPhone and iPad, iOS 18

So in Chrome:

Allow Cross-Website tracking = turn it on?

In Safari:

Prevent Cross-Site Tracking = turn it off?

In Firefox:

Enhanced Tracking Protection = keep it Standard?

Jennifer Welch

@Jessi Walters thank you for all the detail. It is great information to have. I have been slowly piecing together how this all works. Unfortunately, I am not dealing directly with the parents, only helping the support desk folks. Generally, we tell our parents to open an incognito window or new browser and type in our BB URL. That seems to work and most figure it out from there.

Jennifer Welch

@Jessi Walters I just checked our custom labels & text Login information. We provide parents with the link below if they are logging in for the first time or have forgotten their password. I assume this is still ok?

Lisa Tulchin

@Jennifer Welch
You are absolutely correct. It shouldn't be this hard. We all log into other websites daily with more privacy like banks and healthcare and it's not as hard.

Jessi Walters

@Lisa Tulchin those are the settings I use in those browsers.

@Jennifer Welch signin.bb will redirect to app.blackbaud.com/signin. The new URL would be better in case the old one is ever fully deprecated, but your text works for now.