Initial Site Settings

Before using Blackbaud Financial Aid Management, a few things need to be set up.

  1. Under Settings, choose General School Settings.

  2. Complete the following sections:

    • Application fee: Enter the fees and costs associated with the application process.

    • General: Configure application and tuition parameters for your school, including:

      You must contact Support to update some of these settings.

      • Application Available for Parents: Determines if parents can select the school the financial aid application.

      • Account Manager

      • Award Date: indicates when you will begin making financial aid awards.

      • Mandate Tuition

      • Email Reminder for Families: When enabled, weekly email reminders are sent to parents with applications in the Open, Submitted, and On Hold statuses.

      • Family Code Required for Parents: Enable to require parents to choose a Family Code in the application.

      • Student Code Required for Parents: Enable to require parents to choose a Student Code in the application.

      • Automated Communication For Schools

      • Completed Implementation

      • Show Award Responses: Allows parents receiving an award letter to accept or decline.

      • Include Appeal Option: If Show Award Responses is enabled, this option allows parents receiving an award letter to appeal the school's decision, in addition to the options to accept or decline.

      • Include Special Circumstances Option on Application for Parent to Opt-Out of Sale of Information

      • Include Special Circumstances Option on Application for Parent to Opt Out of Sale of Information

        Note: For more information on privacy features and resources, including providing your school's privacy policy, profiling, opt-out requests, and data deletion and retention, see Blackbaud'sPrivacy Resource Center.

    • Enterprise: Select if the school Allows Only Enterprise Budgets. If Yes, Advanced School Users, School Users, and Read Only users do not have access to Home, Reports, or Settings. Additionally, they cannot access Manage Awards > Letters, Budgets > Budget Mapping, or Families > Manage Families > Recent Status Updates.

    • School Details: Enterprises can group their schools by Region, School Type, and School Category. For more information, see Clusters.

  3. Select Save.

Family and Student Codes can be used as custom tags for sorting and reporting purposes.

Family Codes are intended to be used at the family level. For example, "Parish Member" and "Parish Non-Member". Keep in mind that parents select a Family code in the Submit section of their application so these should be codes that parents can recognize and understand.

Student Codes are used at the individual student level. For example, one student in a family may have a "Returning" code while their sibling applying for aid for the first time may have a "New" code. Parents select the Student Code when selecting the grade and school in their application.

  1. From Settings, choose Codes.

  2. Under Family or Student:

    1. Select +Add to add a new code. A new entry displays in the list.

    2. Enter the Code Name and Code.

    3. Select Save.

  1. From Settings, choose Codes.

  2. Under Family or Student locate the code you want removed, and select Delete.

    Warning: Once a code has been deleted, it cannot be restored. It would need to be added back in manually.

Internal Codes are assigned by school users on the Family Detail page of submitted applications.

Schools can have up to five Internal codes.

  1. From Settings, choose Codes.

  2. Under Internal:

    1. Locate an empty entry field.

    2. Enter the Code Name and Code.

    3. Select Save.

  1. From Settings, choose Codes.

  2. Under Internal locate the code you want to remove, and select Clear.