Option to Notify or Not Notify Guardians When Updating an Existing Lottery Placement or Lottery Status

Learn about notification options available when making manual changes to existing lottery lists

• Overview
• Adjust Placement / Change Lottery Status + Notify Guardians
• Adjust Placement / Change Lottery Status + DO NOT Notify Guardians
• Tracking Published and Notified Statuses of Applications on the Lottery Lists Page
• Tracking Published and Notified Statuses of Applications within an Application
• Tracking Published and Notified Statuses of Applications on the Lottery Dashboard

 

Overview

After a lottery has been run, if you need to manually update a student's lottery placement (i.e., from the waiting list to the offered list) or manually update the lottery placement status (pending, accepted, or declined), you now have the option of immediately notifying the guardian of the change, or not.

• Note: If a student's lottery placement is moved from the Offered List backward to the Waiting List, the Notify Guardians option will not appear to be selected/unselected as the system does not send a notification to families in this scenario.

The ability to not notify the guardian at the time of the change allows you to make updates for several students and then publish the changes all at once at a later date.

Before manually adjusting a student's placement on the lottery list, it is important to understand the impacts fully. Read this article to learn more.

Updates to an application's existing lottery placement or lottery status can be made from the following locations:

On the lottery lists page, use the Actions (3-dot) menu next to an application to select either the "Adjust Placement" or "Change Lottery Status" option.

Within an application, use the outlined lottery placement button to navigate to the lottery lists page to make updates.

On the lottery lists page, if there are available seats to be filled on your offered list, the "Bulk Offer" button will be displayed.

The user permissions needed to make updates to the lottery placement or lottery status of an application are:

• Manage Lottery Dashboard
• Edit Applications

 

Adjust Placement  / Lottery Status + Notify Guardians

When making updates to an existing lottery placement, a pop-up modal will appear for you to move the student from their current position (waiting list) to another position (either to the offered list or another position on the waiting list).

The default selection is to "Notify Guardians". When the "Notify Guardians" box remains selected, upon clicking the "Save Placement" button, the system will send the email notification template associated with the lottery list program to the guardian.

If desired, you can continue to another screen to update the lottery status for the application (pending, accepted, declined) by using the "Save Placement & Continue to Lottery Status" button. 

Upon clicking the "Save Placement Status" button, the email notification with the student's updated placement information will then be sent.

Adjust Placement / Lottery Status + Do Not Notify Guardians 

If you uncheck the "Notify Guardians" box in the Adjust Placement pop-up modal, a bulleted list of impacts will be displayed in orange as a warning:

• The guardian dashboard will NOT reflect the updated lottery placement
• The offer expiration timeline (auto-decline) will NOT start
• The lottery list will need to be republished for guardians to receive a notification with the updated lottery placement
• Click the "Save Placement & Continue to Lottery Status" button to immediately update the acceptance status for this placement
• Workflow notifications with a custom trigger for lottery placement and/or lottery status will still be sent to guardians, if configured to do so

As always, a reason is required when manually adjusting a student's lottery placement or lottery status.

"Notify Guardians" unselected for a single application lottery placement update

"Notify Guardians" unselected when using "Bulk Offer" to update lottery placements

When guardians are not notified of a lottery placement or lottery status update, the application is set to not published (lottery_rankings.published = 0 and lottery_rankings.notified = 0).

When you are ready to inform families of the lottery placement/status update, you will use the "Publish by Grade" button on the lottery lists page to send notifications to guardians. Email/texts will only be sent to guardians for applications in an unpublished state who have not yet been notified of their new lottery placement/status. 

 

 

Tracking Published and Notified Statuses of Applications on the Lottery Lists Page

The Standard View on the lottery lists page will now include the columns of "Published" and "Offer Notification" (the waiting list column name is simply "Notification") to assist you in tracking if an updated lottery placement/status of an application has been published and families notified.

On the lottery lists page, applications with lottery placement or lottery status changes that were not published and not communicated to guardians will display an orange triangle warning indicator "!" in the Offer Notification column, and the notification bell will turn orange. 

A hover tooltip will display to confirm that a notification with the latest placement information has not been sent to guardians.

Tracking Published and Notified Statuses of Applications within an Application

Within an individual application, the lottery placement and status information is located in the Lottery Status section. If a change is made to the student's lottery placement and/or status and the guardian is not notified, warning messages will be displayed in orange to indicate what information is visible to the family:

• Ranking (highlighted orange) = lottery position that is visible on the guardian dashboard. This does not reflect the latest updates made by the admin.
• Status (highlighted orange) = lottery status that is visible on the guardian dashboard. This does not reflect the latest updates made by the admin.

The Lottery Status section of the application in white displays the updated lottery placement and status as viewed by the admin. This section does reflect the latest updates made by the admin.

As always, updates to applications can be tracked at the field level by viewing the application's Change History.

Fields that capture data related to updating the lottery placement / status are noted below:

• lottery_ranking.lottery_list = offered or waiting
• lottery_ranking.accepted = pending, accepted or declined status
• lottery_ranking.adjusted_rank = position on the lottery list
• lottery_ranking.previous_accepted = lottery status that is visible to guardian that does not reflect a recent update
• lottery_ranking.previous_lottery_list = lottery list (offered or waiting) that is visible to guardian that does not reflect a recent update
• lottery_ranking.previous_rank = position on the lottery list (waiting list number) that is visible to guardian that does not reflect recent update

Note: The values stored in the fields previous_accepted, previous_lottery_list and previous_ rank are cleared out once the updated placement/ status has been published to families.

 

Tracking Published and Notified Statuses on the Lottery Dashboard

If a lottery run includes applications with lottery placement/status changes that have not been communicated to guardians, the Lottery Dashboard will reflect the lottery published state as "Partially". 

Once you take the action to republish and notify guardians of changes, the lottery dashboard page will reflect the lottery Published and Notification states as "Yes".