Add Responsible Signer Functionality to School Forms & Improve Form Reporting
School forms should have an option to only include responsible signers. The amount of time I spend each year pulling advanced lists of responsible signers and then removing non-responsible signers from school forms is ridiculous. Contracts only include responsible signers and contract lists allow us to pull Remaining Responsible Signers quite easily. In school forms, however, it is incredibly tedious and time consuming to figure out who has and who has not signed a form. This functionality will be particularly useful for forms that require signatures from both students and all parents (responsible signers).
Currently, the only way to determine who has not signed a school form is to individually open each started PDF file, scroll to see who has not signed, then create a separate list of those individuals for whom follow up is necessary. Since the reminder function in school forms is limited to one week after the due date and the reminder emails go to all parties on the form (not just those who have not yet signed), reminders simply aren’t the end all be all for managing forms.
While the Export button in the form submission window pulls complete data, including signed_text and signed_date information, this export only pulls data for forms with the status of SUBMITTED. Additionally, the School Forms object in Advanced Lists does not include the signed_text and signed_date fields, so there is no way to create an advanced list to pull the complete data for forms with a status of started (or not started).
Blackbaud should: (1) add responsible signer functionality to school forms (even if this is simply an “RS” indicator icon on the Recipients tab, this would be a vast improvement); (2) upgrade the Export function in school form submissions to include all status types or at least give schools the option to select the status to include on the export; and (3) add an additional school forms object in advanced lists to pull the signed_text and signed_date fields.
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Amy Hirschfeld
- May 18 2020
- Implemented
Related ideas
Hi all!
Just dropping a note to let you know that the "Responsible signers only" filter is now available on School forms! When you assign out a school form, you'll have the option to assign it to the students or parents, and if you choose parents you'll have that extra filter to indicate it should be for responsible signers only. I am going to close this idea as most of the comments were for the responsible signer filter, but if you have requests around the additional reporting features also mentioned in this idea, please create a new idea so we can track that as well.
Thank you all for taking the time to vote on this idea and hopefully this saves you lots of time moving forward!
Kind regards,
Kelsey Huijgen, Product Manager
Please implement this change! We use school forms extensively. This year I find myself having to remember to remove certain parents each time I create a school form because they are not a responsible signer for the student.
I think the best way to implement this would be when creating a form to have a question asking if this is an "educational" related form or "extra curricular" related form. If you select education related form, then only responsible signers would be added to the form. If you select extra curricular then all parents would be listed on the form because they are not related to educational decision making rights.
Please merge with Idea 1525
Agreed to the comments above--we just got hammered by a parent because we did not remove a step-parent from a simple authorization form. This was discussed with Blackbaud years ago and really needs to be implemented.
Our situation is that grandparents would like parental access to view report cards and pay bills, but we don't want them authorizing for extracurricular events or school forms. Not all parents are "responsible" and grandparents do a lot of the parenting, but legally they shouldn't be allowed to authorize.
I agree with all of the points above! Please implement this change!