Communication Log

All communications sent from PowerFAIDS are stored in the student communication log where the original text can be viewed. Additionally, PowerFAIDS provides options to help track student communications based on the communication type to ensure the correct population of students receives the appropriate communication.

Communication Types

PowerFAIDS tracks financial aid offer communications to help ensure that students are notified when a change to their aid package is made. The Overview section of the Communication Log displays the date the most recent financial aid offer was sent and the total number of financial aid offers sent for each academic year.

The Overview section of the Communication Log is a table with two rows, one for Financial Aid Offer and one for Outstanding Requirements

The Aid Package page also contains the Notification Requirement Completed and Notification Requirement Completed Date fields.

The General Information section of the Aid Package page scrolled towards the bottom to show the Notification Requirement Completed and Notification Requirement Completed Date fields

The Notification Requirement Completed field defaults to No which prevents the student’s tracking status from advancing forward from a status of:

  • Awarded
  • In Disbursement, New Award Created

The field can be manually set to Yes to advance the student’s tracking status when needed. It is also updated automatically by the system in the following circumstances:

  • When a financial aid offer communication is generated for the student it is updated to Yes.
  • When a change is made to the student’s aid package it is updated to No.

To identify students who need a financial aid offer communication sent, a selection set could be created identifying students with a tracking status of Awarded or In Disbursement, New Award Created with the Notification Requirement Completed field set to No. Additional criteria could be added based on institutional business processes.

Selection sets can be used to automate the process of sending financial aid offer communications in batch, rather than student by student, by quickly identifying those students who are ready to receive an offer letter but have not yet been sent one.

The following selection set example identifies students currently in an Awarded status who have not yet had their notification requirement completed for their current aid package.

Selection set with three rules specifying award year, tracking status, and whether the notification requirement is completed

For more information, see Creating a Selection Set.

PowerFAIDS also tracks outstanding requirements communications to help ensure that students are notified when an outstanding requirement is preventing financial aid from being packaged or disbursed. The Overview section of the Communication Log displays the date the most recent outstanding requirements communication was sent and the total number of outstanding requirement communications sent for each academic year.

The Overview section of the Communication Log is a table with two rows, one for Financial Aid Offer and one for Outstanding Requirements

The data from these two fields can be used to set up a selection set to control the timing and frequency when sending outstanding requirement communications in batch for the academic year specified. Additional criteria could be added based on institutional business processes.

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.

The Details section of the Communication Log displays all communications sent to a student through PowerFAIDS, including those tracked in the Overview section.

For more information about working with the Communication Log, see the following topics: