Updated communication features including relationships
Completed
Hello -
We're currently trying to send out an email to students AND parents and it seems incredibly difficult.
Axcelerate is missing some seriously basic relationship options to allow us to get in touch with not just students, but parents and schools as well.
We've had to resort to dropping a parent email into the 'Alternate email' field to get parents involved. We can then pull in a key school contact from organisations if needed. Great.
HOWEVER - when using alternate emails and organisations - when you can and can't use them seems to have no logic - just luck if it's available with the way you want to send the email.
For example - today we want to send a whole college email to students and parents. We will have to use our 'Alternate email field' to make this happen.
We'll then need to create a report to gather all current students into one list. Then move over to workflows, select the report, select the email template and send off. HOWEVER - neither alternate email or organisations seem to be available in workflows.
We're left now with the only option to go through classes to send this template to the whole college, sending 16 times for each class.
BUT even using this method, we can easily add the 'alternate email' but could not possibly tick 'key organisation contact' to send to each contact linked organisation if we want to include a school contact also. That would be too easy. Instead it seems as though we have to select each student INDIVIDUALLY to send a template to student, alternate email, and correct school contact.
We are a small college, but sending an email individually to 166 students juts so we can include 1 Student, 1 Parent and 1 Organisation key contact is just a bit of a joke.
Please let me know if we are missing something, but if not, we need a way to link relationships to a student and send bulk emails with the system then using the information already to provided to make sure the email makes it to each relationship selected.
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Official comment
Hi All
Thank you for your feedback.
This change will go live on Wednesday evening in our next release.
You can read our full release notes here.Comment actions -
Hi Andrew and aXcelerate,
Adding a vote to this idea too - we would love to see increased power/features in relation to copying other people or contacts into correspondence.
To add to Andrew's example - another use case could be recovering bad debt. It would be helpful to be able to send an 'outstanding invoice/s' to the organisation finance/accounts contacts as well as the sales contacts or other general contacts.
We also frequently receive requests from corporate clients wanting managers or L&D departments to be copied into booking confirmation correspondence (which is admittedly available in the email template interfaces) but not necessarily available in other interfaces such as workflows.
Good one Andrew :)
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Hi agree with all of these comments. We are a large RTO with 5-600 school aged students who require emails to be sent, and find this very challenging as stated above by Andrew.
We are yet utilizing the invoicing function, however I could understand that what Stuart has stated would be a scenario we would encounter as well.
Having features, templates and email functions more friendly when needing to email multiple parties is really needed with all the different funding modules.
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