What You Missed This Summer: Student Checklists

Derek Nichols

In August, we debuted Student Checklists for Enrollment management. Considering this major piece of the product was added over the summer months, here's everything you need to know about it as well as how to use it.The teams working on Blackbaud’s Education management products are always working to better improve our products in an effort to make your life easier. On occasion, some of these bigger updates release over the summer months, a fact that can be overlooked considering the majority of schools and other places of education are out on summer break. Naturally, this means it’s quite easy to miss something.

Before September gets ready to give way to October, I wanted to make sure that our Enrollment management schools were aware of a pretty big feature that launched earlier this summer.

What Are Student Checklists?
On August 4, out Student Checklist feature left EAP and launched for all of our EMS schools. What makes this feature important is that schools can create specific checklists to assign to students. These aren’t limited to one per student either. If needed, schools can assign multiple checklists to a student.

For current students and parents as well as ones that are incoming to the school, these checklists show a list of items that need to be completed before coming back to school.

Getting Started
Under Enrollment, Student checklists can be selected which shows a list of previously created checklists. If this is your first time using this feature, it’ll be empty. Like other list locations, you have access to everything you’d expect like filters, customizable columns, and a search bar.

Select +Add checklist to start building your own checklist. You’ll see a model window asking for things like the checklist name, school year to associate it with, and a few optional fields like Checklist status. Once added, you’ll see it populate the list.

Customize Your Checklist
Using the context menu, select Edit checklist steps to get started customizing it how you want. For each step you want to add, select +Add step. You’ll name the step and then fill in a number of other settings like the due date, a short description, if it is required, links or attachments and more.

In addition, you can set up notifications to be automatically sent out for reminders or follow ups. Make sure to check out the full documentation for a complete overview of the available fields and more options when customizing the checklist.

Assigning the Checklist
Once your checklist is done, it’s ready to be assigned out. Select the Manage checklist tab to see all available students based on the currently applied filter. Of course, you can change this to better suit your needs, or use the search to find a specific student.

Select as many or as little as you want with bulk actions. A counter appears to let you know how many students have been selected currently at the bottom along with Assign checklist and Remove checklist options. When you select Assign checklist, you can pick from any of your created checklists.

Let’s Get Processing!
Finally, under Process checklist steps, you can see what files have been uploaded by families and ensure that this is what is required. Select as many of the listed steps as you want to change the step status. Keep in mind that if you select the Hidden option, it won’t be visible to the student.

Those are the basics behind Student checklists but if you want to know more, make sure to head over to our online help to read up on this feature as well as learn what the student and parent sees when working with this feature.

That’s going to do it for this week but make sure to stop by next time as we take one last look back at everything we released in September. See you then!