Official Notes for incoming and re-enrolled students

Derek Porter
Derek Porter
Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud Enrollment Management System™

In our first BB year, our admissions team has been using Official Notes to communicate with families/students, and it’s worked fairly well through most of the process. Now that we’ve got the bulk of our contracts in, the office usually sends communications to all families with submitted contracts - new and returning, about various things between now and next year.

Is there a way that we can send Official Notes through EMS to returning students as well? It’s easy to do just the incoming group.. we’re hoping for an easy way to get everyone.

Seems like since we can assign checklists to current students in EMS, we‘d be able to get at them with other tools.. but maybe not.

Thanks for any insight!

Comments

  • Jess Moxsky
    Jess Moxsky
    Kudos 5 Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant

    @Derek Porter Unfortunately you can only send Official Notes to users with the Candidate role in Enrollment Management. It does seem odd since we can create Student Checklists for current and incoming students though! You could use the Academics official notes for your current students, but they don't have the same placeholders or template functionality that the Admissions official notes do :/

  • Derek Porter
    Derek Porter
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    Thank you for confirming that @Jess Moxsky I kind of figured as much, but thought I’d throw it out there to see if I was missing something.

    Between that and the limited placeholders with pushpages, it’s a little frustrating having to look to 3rd party options for these communications.

  • Brian LeBlanc
    Brian LeBlanc
    Kudos 5 Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant

    @Derek Porter This has been a sore spot in EMS for years. There are a handful of ideas in the idea bank regarding this issue, which I agree needs to be addressed (and I would think is a very easy fix):

  • Derek Porter
    Derek Porter
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    Thanks for sharing this @Brian LeBlanc. Yes, it does seem like an easy, and logical, thing to implement. Definitely a frustration and a head scratcher.. I'll do my part in voting.

    For now, we decided to send out our enrollment/re-enrollment emails via Pushpage. But since we will have a trickle of enrollments throughout the summer, updating a Distribution Group to target those new families as they come in is going to be very clunky. Official Notes would be so much easier.. sigh.

  • Amanda Polson
    Amanda Polson
    Third Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    @Derek Porter the actual building of emails and general functionality of pushpages is frustrating and outdated, but I believe you can use smart groups so they are automatically updated with newly enrolled families/students.

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