Set Up Email Communications

Within the Communication tab of your project, you have a number of options to create and schedule email communications to all users (students/respondents, instructors, teaching assistants and administrators) within a project. This article will cover the operational steps to create and schedule email communications.

NOTE: The video shows the older text formatting bar.

Email Options

1. Pre/Post-Survey Announcement Email: Used to alert students/respondents, instructors, teaching assistants and administrators to upcoming start dates for course evaluations, or after an evaluation has ended to make an announcement.
2. Survey Invitation and Announcement Email: Used to invite students/respondents to login and complete their course evaluations, as well as to alert instructors, teaching assistants and administrators to the availability of course evaluations to their students.
3. Non-Respondent Email: This communication is used to remind students/respondents that they have not yet completed all their surveys for the survey period.
   1. Only those students who have not successfully completed all course evaluations during the evaluation period will receive a non-respondent email.
   2. Non-respondent emails can also be sent out to instructors and teaching assistants to view their course response rate information within a Table of Courses placeholder to help them encourage students to complete course evaluations during this survey period.
4. Results Notification Email: Used to inform instructors, teaching assistants and administrators that their course evaluation results are available.
5. Canvas Message (applicable only to Canvas integrations): This communication will send a push message to the student, teaching assistant, or instructor's Inbox in Canvas with a link to the survey, and the message can be sent to only those students with an active evaluation for the course. This message type is text only. The ability to utilize the Canvas Message feature requires specific permissions assigned to the Role for the Canvas Administrator account that generated the Canvas Web Service Token for the Course Evaluations & Surveys integration. If your institution would like to use this feature in Course Evaluations & Surveys, please ensure the required permissions are enabled by learning more about this feature through Canvas Messaging.

6. Certificate of Completion Email: is automatically sent to students once a survey is successfully completed. Default setting is to use a Certificate of Completion Template that is populated with the following data:

   1. Institution name: (Communication Type)
   2. Project Name
   3. Course (Course code: Course title placeholder)
   4. Instructor name placeholder
   5. Survey submission date placeholder
   6. User full name placeholder
   7. Message

   Below is a sample of the Certificate of Completion Template with populated data:

   

7. Anytime Email: Sent to a specific user or batch of users for general purposes.

Scheduling

You have three options when scheduling emails (and a fourth within non-respondent emails):

1. One Specific Date & Time for All Emails: Schedules emails for specific day and time. Some things to keep in mind when utilizing this option:
   1. If you use the Copy Project feature to copy projects from term to term, email dates within this option WILL NOT carry over and will need to be set up in the copied project manually.
   2. If using course-level dates, this email will go out to ALL users, independent of course-level survey start/end dates. (Instead use the Number of Days Before/After Course-Level Start/End date listed below).
2. Number of Days Before/After Project Start/End Date: Schedule emails for specific number of days before/after project-level start and end dates. These settings will copy over when copying project communications.
3. Number of Days Before/After Course-Level Start/End Date: Schedule emails for specific number of days before/after course-level start and end dates.
   1. Use this option when utilizing course-level dates within a project.
   2. Emails will send based off course-level survey start/end dates setup within each course in the project. If a course does not have course-level dates then this communication will be sent to the course(s) based on the project-level dates.
   3. Send email to all courses (Open and Ended): This communication will be sent to all open and ended courses in the Project based on course-level dates.
   4. Do not send email if course-level end date(s) are before: Now (date): This communication will be sent to all courses with a course-level start date after the date displayed in parenthesis.
   5. Never send email to ended courses: This option is selected by default for new communications. This communication will not be sent to courses with a course-level date prior to when the communication is generated.

   6. Only send ONE email per day to each : <>role: </>This option is selected by default for new communications. Use this option in the case where a student or instructor is enrolled in multiple courses, or for an Administrator that has multiple courses aligned with their level(s) of access, and those multiple courses have the same start/end dates.

      NOTE: This setting applies only to the email communication where it is selected, and does not affect other email communications in the Project, and these settings will copy over when copying project communications.

4. (Non-Respondent Emails option) Send email every:
   1. Within non-respondent email options, you can schedule recurring instances of the email communication to send out to remind non-respondents to take their course evaluation. You can the date for when you wish for the recurring emails to start. For example, if your project started on Jan-1 and you wanted your first recurring email to start two days later then you would set this date as Jan-3. You can also set up the time to send the emails using the sliders (the default is midnight).
   2. To stop subsequent recurrences of this communication type, go back into the email and click on STOP RECURRING EMAIL.

   3. Ensure that date range encompasses every X days.

      1. For example, an email would NOT send if setup to send email for every 2 days, starting on 07/08/2020 and ending on 07/09/2020.

      NOTE:

      • The Title of the of the email communication on the Communications tab will display the First and Last Name of the user who stopped the recurring email.
      • You cannot re-start this communication once it has been stopped. Instead, you would schedule a new communication.

Email Students, Teaching Assistants, Instructors, and Administrators Across Projects

Add Projects

1. Include enrollments from other projects: Setup and manage your email communications for multiple projects within a single project. If you deploy multiple, simultaneous projects and those projects include some or all of the same enrollments, you can add a project(s) to the email communication to automatically pull together the course enrollments in the selected projects.

   The advantage to using this feature is that a user would only receive one email if two projects had the same start and end date rather than multiple emails from separate projects. For example, if a student is in three separate projects starting on the same date and time, the student would only receive one invitation email (set up in a single project using this feature to include the other projects) rather than three invitations emails (one from each project).

Note: The Project-Level dates scheduling option is disabled with the Add Projects feature as projects could have different dates.

Creating / Formatting Emails

Formatting Toolbar: Formatting options include cut, paste, copy, undo, redo, bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, alignment, bullet list (with variations), numbered list (with variations), add hyperlink, break hyperlink, font size, text color, background color, insert table, insert image, and Placeholders. Note: the new bar will resize itself depending on the size of your screen so you may need to click the three dots to see all your options

Special Rules when Adding Images: the Insert Image option allows you to link to an image on a webpage rather than uploading an image. The image is referenced from the website and not stored on CES servers so the image must be on a publicly-available webpage for it to appear as expected in communications. When you find the image you would like to add, you can typically right click on the image and click "Copy image address" to get the link you will need to paste into the Insert Image setup.

Fonts: you can copy text from another program (like Microsoft Word) that has the font you wish to use and then paste the text from Word into the body of your message. The font will be pasted along with the text. Please note: the font will appear as expected only if the device receiving the message has the same font installed. Given this, the email may look as expected when viewed on a PC (if using typical MS fonts) but might not when viewed on a Mac or on a tablet or phone, for example.

Course Evaluations & Surveys Placeholders

NOTE: Placeholders may not work correctly if you cut and paste a Placeholder. If you are cutting and pasting text (either from another program like Microsoft Word or from one communication to another within the system) it is recommended that you delete and redo any Placeholders in the new message to ensure they will be replaced as expected when sending the emails.

1. Survey Start Date & Survey End Date: Utilize the Survey Start Date & Survey End Date placeholders within the email to insert the project start and end dates.

   NOTE: If utilizing course-level start/end dates AND the third email scheduling option (based off number of days before/after course-level dates), these placeholders will insert the course-level survey start/end dates for specific courses that user is enrolled in.

2. Passwordless Login URL: Insert this placeholder into email communications to provide recipients with a user-specific login link. When clicked, this link will transfer the student into their Course Evaluations & Surveys account to view their Dashboard. Link text can be customized.

   NOTE: This link can be utilized in student, instructor or administrator emails and the user will have access based on their role.

3. Table of Surveys & Table of Surveys – No Login Link: Insert this placeholder for students to view all courses they are enrolled in within a project, including survey start/end dates (specific to course-level dates as well), status of survey, and if you choose, a link to go directly to the survey for that course.

   NOTE: If a student in enrolled in a course that has project-level dates and a course that has course-level dates with in the same project then use this placeholder so the individual start and end dates will be correct for each course.

   

4. Table of Courses: Insert this placeholder for instructors to view all courses they are enrolled in within the project, including survey start/end dates (specific to course-level dates as well), report access start date and the current response rate for their course(s).
   

   Note: Cross-listed child courses will not appear in the Table of Courses placeholder. Only the parent cross-listed course will be displayed.

5. User First Name, User Last Name & User Full Name: Personalize email communications, by inserting these placeholders, which will insert the user's first, last or full name into the email communication.
6. Project Name: Insert project name into email with this placeholder.
7. Send Test Email: Test emails will display formatting except for placeholders, which are user-specific.

Communication Email Status

1. Once your emails have been created and saved, they will show as Scheduled within the Communication tab. At this point, you can edit or delete these email communications.
2. After email communications have been sent, you will not be able to make changes, or edits, to these communications. Email statuses will be updated on the project Summary tab, as well as within the Communication tab. Once sent, recurring emails are displayed within the non-respondent email section.
   
3. If you receive the below error, this means there were bad email addresses within your user information. You can click on the Download Failed Emails link to view the bad email addresses.
   

Suspended Emails

If a project is Suspended, unsent communications will go into a pending status. Once the project is unsuspended, a CES Admin will need to decide whether or not these communications should be sent.

Sample Emails

We have put together a collection of pre-written messaging templates. You can download this resource directly from the link at the bottom of this article.

The attached file contains ready-to-use templates for various scenarios, including survey announcements and non-respondent follow-up reminders.

Please note that these templates are entirely optional and are meant to serve as a helpful starting point or inspiration. We highly encourage you to customize them to better fit your institution's unique voice and style. You are completely free to edit, tweak, or rewrite any of the provided samples. Alternatively, you can choose to skip the templates entirely and write your own communications from scratch.

If you do decide to use our samples, please remember to review them carefully and fill in any placeholder text before hitting send.