Batch Send Emails

The Send Emails page in Batch Processing gives you the ability to send emails to multiple students at the same time, rather than sending them individually from each student record. This enables you to communicate with students quickly and more efficiently and allows you to set up processes for regular communication to specific populations.

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Some advantages to sending emails in batch include:

  • Efficiency of sending communications to multiple students at once: In just a few steps, you can send communications to entire groups of students, saving you the time and effort of sending each email individually.
  • Tailored messages for each student or population: When used alongside the robust features of communication templates, sending communications in batch doesn’t have to mean sending the exact same information to all students. Each communication in the batch will be individually populated with any student-specific data or population-specific messaging you’ve set up within the template.
  • Access to a detailed results report: Once the batch process has completed, you can view a detailed results report showing you the outcome of the process, student-by-student, including any reasons why an email was not sent.

Communications to remind students of outstanding requirements needed in order to package or disburse financial aid are a great example of how you can use selection sets to automate the process of sending those communications in batch, rather than student by student.

The following selection set example identifies students who last received an outstanding requirements reminder more than 7 days ago and have not received more than 5 reminders already.

Selection set with four rules specifying award year, tracking status, date of last outstanding requirement communication, and total outstanding requirement communication set

You’ll notice this is also a great use of relative dates in selection sets, as we can set the date to be relative to today (the day the process is run) and continue to use this same selection set all year, rather than needing to update the date each time.

Value list expanded to show options available when the relative date Type has been selected

For more information, see Creating a Selection Set.

Sending Emails in Batch

To send emails in batch, complete the following steps:

  1. Select Batch Processing in the top navigation bar to open the Batch Processing menu along the left side of the page.
  2. Expand the Communications options in the left navigation menu and select Send Emails.
  1. Choose the group of students to whom you want to send emails from the Selection Set list.
  2. Choose the academic year the emails apply to. This field determines which academic year to retrieve data points from for any student data blocks or field alias values included in the communication template.
  3. Select the communication type from the Type list.
  4. Select the communication template from the Template list.
  5. Select the sender email address from the From list. Your individual email address will be available to select only if your user account has been configured to allow outgoing email.
  6. Select the recipient email address(es) from the To list. This is a multi-select field; depending on what data is available for the student, the following options will be displayed:
    • Student Email Address 1, from the Student Profile
    • Student Email Address 2, from the Student Profile
    • ISIR Student Email Address, from the ISIR Student Data
    • ISIR Parent Email Address, from the ISIR Parent Data
  7. Enter the subject line for the email. The subject may already be prepopulated if a default subject was specified when the communication template was created. This default text can be edited.
  8. Optionally select an attachment. You can upload files directly or select any that have been previously uploaded to the file manager. For more information, see Uploading a File.

    9. Tip: Optionally, select Preview Students to view the population prior to sending the emails. This will show you a list of students in the selection set.

Select Send to send emails to the selected population of students.

Note: The batch send emails process in PowerFAIDS is asynchronous, meaning that you can navigate away from this page to other student records, modules, or pages, or even close PowerFAIDS completely without disrupting the batch send emails process. Once completed, a message will appear in the top right of the page letting you know the batch send emails process was completed successfully or that there was a problem, and it was unable to be completed. Either way, a results report is generated with more information.

  1. Select Results Reports at the top right of the Send Emails page.

    Send Emails page shown with the Results Reports button highlighted at the top right of the screen

  2. Select View Report from the rightmost column of the Send Emails Results Reports table for the instance of the process you want to view.

    Results reports table is shown with the rightmost column containing the View Report links highlighted

    A window appears with detailed information on whether the email was sent to each student and if not, the reason(s) why.

    Tip: There are many customization options available within tables in PowerFAIDS so you can use and organize the data to your liking. This includes rearranging the columns, searching the table, filtering the data, and exporting the table. For more information, see Working with Tables.