User Name Formatting Has Changed!

Inside of the May 21 release, the Core team made a big change to how usernames are displayed within Blackbaud’s Education management system which places more emphasis on the user’s preferred name, rather than the standard First Name field.

Why the change? Well, the previous format seemingly implied that a user’s preferred first name was less important than their legal first name. Historically, the quotation marks around a preferred name were added when this field was used to denote nicknames, rather than preferred first names.

So, in response, we’ve updated the default format for user names to both streamline the information and prioritize the user’s preferred first name.

As an example, a name would previously display like this:

• Dr. John “Jay" Jacob Schmidt III '24

You’d have the prefix followed by first name, preferred first name, middle name, last name, suffix, and then graduation year.

Now, usernames will look like this:

• Dr. Jay Schmidt III '24

As you can see, we continue leading with a prefix, but then jump immediately to the preferred first name if one exists. If there isn’t one set, it will then default to the First Name value.

Other things to note:

• Customized formats for user names remain unchanged. If your school prefers the original format, set up a custom format to replicate the original.

• The headers in Core, Enrollment Management, and Academics aren't affected by the new format and will continue to use the older formatting way for now.

• Preferred last name will appear on Contact cards eventually, so head to Core, Security, Profile access to configure access settings for the field.

We hope these changes, help make your experience even better! As always, thanks for taking a look at the latest journal entry this week. Make sure to catch up on any others you may have missed and stay tuned as we have plenty more to talk about in the coming weeks. Speak later!