Looking for input about the re-enrollment part of Online Admissions and Re-enrollment

Trish McCraven

We have been using Blackbaud Online Admissions and Re-enrollment for a couple of years for our applications and inquiries, but we have yet to use it for re-enrollment. I would be most grateful to anyone willing to share your insights with me.



Did you create all of the forms yourself or pay Blackbaud to help with this?


How many hours did it take you to develop the forms, test your processes, etc?


What were your biggest challenges in setting up the online re-enrollment process?


How do you handle new enrollments vs. re-enrollments?


How did you handle testing before you "went live"?

Jim Bonfiglio

Our situation is real similar to yours...new territory. To answer your questions...



Yes, we had help with the forms since we were unfamiliar with the process and forms in general. If you are familiar with creating forms (which we were not), I wouldn't pay them from start to finish...I used customer support for some of my challenges by creating cases.



Probably 5-6 hours to create the set up and process. It was a dance between what we wanted, what the system can deliver, and what we would settle.



We use a query and "contract status" in student progression to get the forms to the parents. We also created student attributes to monitor things like pay plans, etc. Our Business Office and Admissions are involved.



The biggest chalenge was to remember to keep it simple and to find the paths to monitor what we wanted. When we focused on reenrollment and removed other things, it made it less complicated. We just don't use forms much, so, the first one had too much information!



Much time will be to plan and figure out how to adapt the system to your needs.



Our phase one testing is was simple, we just had a few faculty try it for us. Our plan is to roll it out to the faculty a week before we do the parents to fix any last minute gotchas.



We are still in the middle of this...contact me and I can give you the names of two contacts that I used help us along...