Users without authenticated account

Jill Gable

I am looking for a school or schools who would be interested in chatting about how you handle accepting scholarship applications from applicants who have not received their university authentication yet and therefore can't be technically authenticated. I can be reached by email at jill_gable@rush.edu.

Arly Douglass

Hi Jill,

We are facing this challenge and have not come up with an ideal resolution. We do not issue university credentials to new students until the very last minute (end of May for those starting in August). We do have create user upon import, so we plan to import them into Award Management as soon as they are changed to official student status in our SIS. So, at the very least, we will be able to award applicable scholarships to them and they can accept them in Award Management, but all of the other processes prior to that (completing an application and faculty reviewing the application) will continue to be done outside of award management. I'm happy to chat further and maybe we can come up with a magic solution!! We are in the beginning stages of implementation and plan to go live in the spring.

Jill Gable

Hi Arly, I would be interested in chatting - two heads thinking through the same challenge is always better than one. I was looking at the ability we have to upload list to authenticate users so maybe that would be a good workaround. My challenge is that we are primarily a graduate school and all of our academic programs use some variation of the CAS apps rather than an institutional application. Many of the applicants do not make it into our SIS system to be uploaded to AW until much later in the recruitment process. However, they are being selected for scholarships early and the need is there to have a good system in place to support the awarding of the scholarships.

Victor Swindell

We are currently importing students who are applicants into BAM, they can see what scholarships they qualify for, they can fill out the application, I think they can only get the offer once they are accepted.

Kelly Crosbie

We have the exact same situation. Did you come up with a solution since your post?

Arly Douglass

Hi Kelly,

We did not at MUSC. It's ultimately going to need to come down to our university's IT security changing the identify management system to allow for restricted access, but that won't be happening anytime soon for us. For one of our colleges, incoming students will continue to apply using their current application (SurveyMonkey type of application). After the incoming students receive university credentials, they will be imported into BBAM (we have create user upon import that creates ‘draft’ applications) so at the very least we can officially award scholarships to them within BBAM, and they can participate in post-acceptance activities. Not ideal, but we are going to have to make it work. I think Jill was considering doing local authentication where users create their own username/password and no data is imported.

Tamara Tsang

At UCLA, we actually bought a second portal from Blackbaud for our prospective application, that doesn't require university IDs or authentication, like our main application. It uses email address and user-created password. After they log in, applicants use their UC application ID (but you can use your own unique identifier).

Nancy Byrd

@Jill Gable
We have the exact same issue. Curious if you have come up with a solution or what you are doing to get around this?

Diane Pecoraro

@Jill Gable OK, this is ridiculous. How does a student log in if not with their student ID or email and password?