If you’re looking to email the current pupils within your Ensemble database, there are a few ways to go about approaching the task depending on the quality of your database management.
Running a Report
Which One Do You Need to Use?
Organised
If you archive your pupils as soon as they’ve finished studying with your service, you can use this singular approach:
- Select Pupils from the top.
- Extract Pupils.
- Click Extract Pupils button from the top.
- Once the report has loaded, click on the yellow filter icon along the top of your screen.
- Scroll and find the column “Archive”.
- Click in the column header on the filter icon and select “Blanks”.
Note: You will now only see active, non-archived pupils in your database.
You can email these students by clicking the Email icon at the top and selecting Create Email.
Note: It’s possible that some parents will receive this email more than once e.g. if they have more than one child receiving tuition/ group membership or resource hire. Please see the Removing Duplicates section to find out how to avoid this.
Disorganised
If your records aren’t archived when a pupil leaves, you can run a report to show all current pupils. However, you will need to run this report for each tuition type.
It’s possible that some parents will receive this email more than once e.g. if two of their children are currently undertaking tuition. In this scenario, please see the following steps:
To run a report for a specific tuition type or activity, go to:
- Pupils from the top bar.
- Extract Pupils.
- Click the Pupils tab.
- Select One Record per Pupil Activity.
- Select your tuition type (The system will automatically default to the current academic year and term).
- Click Extract Pupils.
Note: Once the data has loaded you can filter the entries to show just a particular lesson. You can do this by clicking the yellow filter icon at the top. Find the column that contains the lesson name (normally ActivityPlanDsc) and click on the funnel icon in the column header. You can now select your activity from the list.
Condensing your Results
Running the report using the above method will return a row of data for each activity that the pupil was enrolled in (during the term the report was run for). Clicking the Email option now would result in pupils attending more than one lesson receiving one email per activity. You can condense your results so only one email is sent. You can arrange your data by Pupil or Parent.
You can set the data to show one row per Pupil:
- Once the data has loaded click the PupilNo column.
- Drag it to the grey area at the top of the report where it says “Drag a column header here…”
- Double click the first row that appears.
- Find the column “Parent1Email” (or find the column that contains the email addresses you need) and click on the column header.
- Drag it to the grey area at the top of the report where it says “Drag a column header here…”
Note: If you’re looking to customise your email and insert fields from the data extract, group the columns that contain that information as well.
- Click “Create Summary Dataset”.
Note: If you want to apply any filters in your data do this after creating your Summary Dataset. Filters created prior to this step will not be kept.
- On the new data click the Email icon at the top and select Create Email.
Note: Emails sent through this grouping method will NOT be recorded on the Correspondence tab. This is because you’ve had to create a new set of data.
Alternatively…
Set the Data to Show One Row per Parent
- Once the data has loaded, find the column that contains the email addresses you need and click on the column header.
Note: If you’re looking to customise your email and insert fields from the data extract, group the columns that contain that information as well.
- Click ‘Create Summary Dataset’.
Note: If you want to apply any filters in your data do this after creating your Summary Dataset. Filters created prior to this step will not be kept.
- On the new data click the Email icon at the top and select Create Email.
Note: Emails sent through this grouping method will not be recorded on the Correspondence tab. This is because you’ve had to create a new set of data.
Repeat the processes for the other types of tuition report; like centre tuition and group memberships.
Removing Duplicates
Once you have your data you can remove duplicates using one of the Group methods (as described above).
Alternatively, when writing your email use the “Mail to list” tab. Here, you’ll find a tick box for unticking any contacts you don’t want to email or don’t want to email multiple times. You can order the column content by clicking on the column header.
Customising your Emails
You can personalise your email to include data that is within the results of the Extract Pupil report. If you’ve used the Create Summary Dataset option the data you want to include will be in those results. In this example, we’ll look at including the recipient’s name.
- Create your email content and click where you would like to insert the field.
- Then, from the top of the email screen, select the Data tab and select “Include Data Field”. A dropdown list including all the columns from the original report will appear. In this example, we are emailing the pupil’s parent, so we select Parent1FirstName. This field should now appear within the email and will be populated once sent.
Note: If the column you want to insert has no data for the recipient in it, the system will not know what to use. As a result the recipient will see the Data Field you selected.