Using Smart Autofill in Post Acceptance applications

Michele GuyorBorthwick

Is anyone else using the Smart Autofill option on any of their Post acceptance questions? I believe that this is the first year it has been available and I was happy to utilize it to expedite the post acceptance process for many of our students who are receive more than one scholarship award each year (one cycle for us). My impression after reading this Blackbaud description (pertinent excerpts copy/pasted) was that it would apply to awards within one cycle or year:

Applicants who receive multiple awards may need to complete multiple post-acceptance applications. For a given applicant, if a post-acceptance or renewal question is used on multiple opportunities, Smart Autofill assists the applicant by automatically copying the applicant's latest answer for that question to the open post-acceptance or renewal applications……Smart Autofill takes the applicant's first response and inserts the answer into the same question across all post-acceptance and renewal applications. If the applicant edits their answer, the new value is used.

If you are looking for unique answers on a question, disable smart autofill.

Examples for unique responses	Examples for shared responses
Please provide a thank you letter for the donor of this award. Please share a little about your experience with the honors program.	How do you plan to use this degree to benefit your community? Do you plan to attend our donor luncheon? Please upload a headshot to share with our donors.

Here is my issue, and wondering what others think: I could not determine why several students post acceptance had answers pre-filled when it was their only current year award. During a chat session with BB support we discovered that the answers were auto-filled from post acceptance questions answered in the 2021 2022 academic cycle. After checking for me, he determined that the system can pull answers that student may have posted to a question - if it appeared in post acceptance - as far back as 2018 (though it would pull the most recent). BB indicated they expected that the students would see the pre-filled answers, read through them and edit. Oookaaayyyy. My experience does not support high confidence in busy students noticing that the pre-filled answers aren't “current”. I think they will just leave them and move on to the next blank box. I can think of very few questions that I would put in a post acceptance application to provide interesting information for a donor from a student that would NEVER change from year to year. Majors can change, outside-of-school interests can change, and most definitely ability to attend a reception can change! As I want the information my donors receive to remain fresh and interesting I plan to remove this option next year - and I feel bad as I am sure it saved some of our students who get multiple scholarships in one year some time uploading photos and answering the same questions for different donors.

Has anyone else had any issue with this feature?

Trish Reimer

@Michele GuyorBorthwick

Michelle,

Thank you for this posting. You explained my situation exactly. I, too, thought that previous cycle answers would be cleared so edited many of my PA's to auto-fill. Then I noticed the same thing you described, followed up with a chat with BB, and learned that there wasn't much I could do to “unring” that bell since we were mid-cycle. I've now since removed all the auto-fill check boxes because I want “fresh” answers each year. The few students I have who receive multiple awards will just have to answer PA questions more than once.

Thank you.

Joel Spiess

@Michele GuyorBorthwick, we understood the system would operate in this manner and carry forward responses from the previous cycle. We still decided to activate the Smart Autofill feature, as we determined the benefits of saving students time outweighed the costs.

Russel Heskin

@Michele GuyorBorthwick, I did not know this was the case, but I agree with you. If BB can't fix this, then perhaps a solution would be to create new duplicate questions each year. Every post-acceptance question gets assigned a unique field number (e.g., “10603”). You could essentially copy and paste each question to create new versions of your post-acceptance questions each year. If you do this for one opportunity, then BB support, I believe, can duplicate that opportunities post-acceptance questions for all your opportunities.

Mallorie Fonseca

@Michele GuyorBorthwick

This is not an issue we have encountered yet, but I do see the issue and will be keeping it in mind moving forward. If you suggest to BBAM a new feature, I'm sure others would vote for it as well.

It kind of reminds me of the references issue I was running into a few years ago (the system would upload references from years ago & update even old applications if the student added a new reference to the same question in a later Opportunity, meaning a 2022 scholarship application was changing a 2019 archived Opportunity). The newer feature I linked below saved us from having to update the questions every year by simply checking a box. They can still select the same reference but only in the same award period/cycle - which would be ideal for the post-acceptance questions and honestly many applicant questions as well. If they could generate something like this for questions that are specific to that question, that would be even better! Please keep us updated if you send something. I'd vote for it!