Say that you want to set up Aviso to send a personalized message to each of your advisees telling them when it is time to set up an advising appointment. Or maybe you want to set up a personalized message inviting advisees to see you when they get a low-GPA alert. Or maybe you want to set up a quick message to send on students’ birthdays.
Aviso provides a handy feature that allows you to send bulk, personalized messages to groups of students. By creating a message “template”, you can save the message and use it over and over as needed.
You can download a quick guide to messaging that includes information about templates. Learn much more about Aviso by visiting the VSC Aviso Canvas page.
Get started by going to your Messages page from the link in the top menu. From there, click “+New” in the Conversations column.
Ignore the recipients for now, but notice that right below the recipient information you have the option to select a message template. This is what you will be creating for your future self.
Go ahead and write your message as you would if you were sending it to a filtered group. To personalize the message, see the options to “Insert” in the subject heading and in the message itself. When you click on “Insert”, you can choose from many options, but the one you probably want is Student > “Nickname”. (Note that with the many options for information that you can pull and personalize from Aviso, you can create some very complicated messages!) When you insert the Nickname, leave a space as you would when you are typing a typical email, thus:
Dear {Student Nickname},
When the email sends, it will include the Nickname:
Dear Janet,
You can save this message to use it again in the future with other groups of students. To do this, BEFORE YOU SEND IT, you “Save as Template” in the top menu of the New Message box. Note that the message needs to have a subject and email text written before it will save.
You can review, edit, and delete your templates by clicking on the “Templates” option in the “Messages” menu (far left-hand column).
