>Hi,
>
>
>
>We are a medium size school (1080), and we are doing paper re-enrollment
>and we'd like to switch to online enrollment. Are any other schools
>doing this, and if so, what company/program are you using and what are
>the strong points and the weak points that we need to be aware of? Any
>advice for starting school? Thank you - I appreciate any
>ideas/suggestions you might have.
>
We looked for a solution for years and couldn't find anything that would do
exactly what we wanted, so we bit the bullet and developed an in-house ASP
solution that ties directly into our Blackbaud SIS database. We named the
system "FalconView" and it is located at
http://webapps.peddie.org/falonview/, but there is not much to see without a
log in.
Features include:
* Ties directly into Blackbaud so that as students are enrolled items
applicable to the student are automatically added to the students item list
page. Items assignments are based on SQL filters so assignments can be
automatically assigned to all student, all new students, all new freshmen,
or even a list of students given to me (e.g. by the language dept for
placement tests). Once an item is setup, it never has to be touched or
managed unless the intended audience changes.
* Sign up is completely automated. A parent simply enters their email
address that is in our Blackbaud database and then a link is sent to create
a username and password. Account creation authentication is based on the
fact that the parent has access to the email address we have on file for
them. One side benefit is that our email addresses are better than they have
ever been because parents with invalid or outdated email addresses are
calling us rather than the other way around.
* Each item has a status "light" (new, viewed, submitted, complete) which
shows parents and the school the status of each item.
* Item management is delegated to the office/person who "owns" the item.
* Easy to use bulk follow up. For example, the health center can easily send
an email to all parents with a status of "overdue" for the health forms
item. We've also included the ability to print a phone call list for those
parents who simply are not responding to email. All info is pulled from the
Blackbaud parent record.
* With signup and student item load completely automated, the only thing we
have to do is follow up with parents. No time is spend dealing with late
enrollments, managing parent passwords, etc.
It was A LOT of work but has been received well both on the parent side and
the staff side. Unfortunately, in it's current state it is not usable by
other schools. However, we're thinking about changes to make it usable by
others school who use Blackbaud Education Edge--the application is
structured so that it could be used with other SIS's, but making this happen
would be more work than would be possible by next year. If anyone thinks
they might seriously be interested in our system and is running Blackbaud,
please email me. If there is a lot of interest we'll seriously consider
trying to do this.
--
Tom Phelan
Director of Technology
Peddie School
tphelan@peddie.org
Voice: 609.944.7625
Fax: 609.944.7913
http://www.peddie.org
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