Decision notifications

Hi Laura!

You have a number of options when it comes to communicating your decisions. Have you taken any of the Admissions Process classes through Blackbaud University? They're a fantastic resource and a great way to familiarize yourself with all of the options and tools at your disposal in Enrollment Management.

One thing I've seen many schools do is use the Mail Merge Letters as their official, branded notice of acceptance. You can create those letters (along with mailing labels) from Enrollment Management's Communication menu. You can build out your acceptance letter using logos and seals from your Core style settings as well as placeholder fields to personalize the letter. Once generated, the placeholders will populate with the appropriate candidate information.

You can generate these letters and they will be attached to the candidate record. You can then include them as a downloadable piece of the Decision page within Enrollment Management, or send them via snail mail with the generated mailing labels.

You absolutely could use a push page for this purpose, and it would be really up to you organization's preference at that point.

Good luck with your admissions season!

For the past few years, we have been using Pushpages to send out decision notifications. We have separate issues set up for each of the various decision types that are given and they are set to go out to the families within the particular decision groups.

There are definitely some pitfalls to using Pushpages in this manner. Since there isn't a specific student name placeholder and only user name, we have to do an export/import of parent emails and use that to add email contacts or overwrite any personal student emails so that we know the decisions are being received and that they are also personalized with the student name and not the parent.

Additionally, if you have siblings who both received the same decision and letter, only one of them is going to be sent. This obviously creates confusion for parents and students because they didn't receive notification about the other sibling.

I'm looking into the possibility of using Official Notes in place of Pushpages but it seems like there might be some of the same issues.

Thank you @Bryan Lorenzo, I was checking out those placeholders but I'm not sure that they would work in this specific case. From my understanding, those fields are pulled from Admissions Options → Custom Candidate Fields and therefore would need to be pre-populated for each candidate record if we were to create a custom text field called ‘student name’ or something like that. Is this the way that those custom fields are utilized within Official Notes or are they pulled from somewhere else?

Hi @Troy Burki as of today, January 6, 2022, you can now import custom candidate fields.

"We've added a new import type for Candidate Custom Fields. These are pulled directly from what is defined under Enrollment management, Admissions, Admissions Setup, and Admissions Options."