Award response is now completely online!

Derek Nichols

Want a way to streamline and track parent responses to the award process? Well, we have good news for you as Award response is now completely ready to make your life easier online!Over the summer, our Financial aid team released Award response. Award response streamlines the award process by allowing parents to accept, appeal, or decline an award right from their parent portal. Award response has minimal setup and makes it easier for your school to keep track of parent responses right from your Blackbaud Financial Aid site.

Any school user can quickly and easily turn on Award response for a school. They simply need to select Yes for Award response in their school’s General School Settings. By default, Award response will be turned off. Once it has been turned on, your school just needs to send out your Award letters like normal and parents will have the option to submit a response through the parent portal.

The process is super easy for parents too! They simply log into the parent portal and from their Communications tab, they will select an Award letter to view. After they have finished viewing the Award letter, they can submit an award response. If Appeal or Decline is selected, they have the option of adding a comment to explain their decision.

Once parent responses have been submitted, school users have an Award letter report available to them if they would like to view Award responses in bulk. This report exports as an excel file which includes column for the Award letter response and any comment the family may have added. Additionally, they can view and edit award responses for families from the Family detail page. If you want to know more about Award Response, check out our online help!