Making and managing offers

Setting up offers

Offers and lotteries can be set up on each form, giving you the freedom to decide how and when you’d like to extend offers - and the clarity to know exactly where acceptances are coming from.

1. Navigate to Enrollment periods
   
   
   
   
2. Create or edit a Form you’d like to work with
   
   
   
   
3. Go to the form’s Settings
   
   
   
   
4. Turn on Lottery & Offers
   Enabling this option will add new tabs to your form list view: Waitlists and Offers, as well as a few new filters to work with. See more about managing Offers.
   
   
   
   
5. Enter a timeframe for your Offers
   These dates will be displayed for families on their portal, and will enable the option to make offers within that time window for Staff within your organization.
   
   
6. Optional: Turn on Automatic messages for Offer-related events
   Enabling Lottery & Offers allows you to send automatic messages when certain events related to offers and waitlists take place. You can also modify the content on these messages if you’d like, see more about Messages.
   
   
   
   
7. Publish your changes

Extending Offers

Offers can be made by Staff with permissions during the timeframe you specify when setting up Offers. You can specify which groups of Staff should be able to extend offers by assigning them to Teams - see more about roles, teams and members.

1. Navigate to a form list
   
   
   
   
2. Pick the student’s form you want to extend an offer to, and scroll to their choices
   
   
3. Click on the overflow “More” menu to extend an offer
   
   
   

or

1. Select one, a subset, or all of students from a form list
   
   
2. On the contextual toolbar, click on the overflow menu to extend an offer
   
   
   
   
3. If your organization is making use of programs, you may also specify a program while making offers. Programs vary by organization - they can be set up to be funding sources, or language programs, and take many different shapes depending on your organization’s specific needs.
   

Managing offers

After extending offers, you’ll want to have a clear picture of who accepted, declined, and which offers got revoked along the way - this will change over time, so Avela has a dedicated space for you to work with Offers.

Using the offers tab

This tab contains every form that has an offer related substatus, such as Accepted, Declined, or Revoked.

Using filters

Filters are available from any tab, and you can use them to:

• Extend offers within capacity
• Get to the total number of Accepted, Offered, Declined, Revoked, offers
• Find very granular subsets of students, like everyone with an Offer who responded they have a sibling attending the offering school - if you asked for that information in the form.
  

Revoking offers

Offers and acceptances can be revoked at any time by staff, and depending on whether or not the Automatic messages are turned on for those events, the family may be notified about that change.

Clearing offers

Offers can be cleared fully, effectively taking back any acceptance, revoking or offer extention made by mistake or otherwise! This clears the sub-status completely, but of course will not undo any automatic communications that may have already gone out for those offer related actions.

How families see offers

Messages

Depending on whether you’ve turned on Automatic messages for offers, families may receive an SMS or an email notifying they’ve received an offer, accepted or declined one, or had an offer revoked by Staff.

Accepting and declining offers

When a family just receives an offer, it is immediately visible in their dashboard, and they can see and action on more than one at a time. They will also be able to see anything they’ve accepted, declined, or have had revoked on their homepage.

• Multiple offers. Staff can extend multiple offers to families, as well as revoke or accept in their stead, in bulk.
• Single acceptance. Families in Avela can only accept a single offer at a time. Accepting an offer does not prevent future offers from being made.

Families can use the green banner to get to their offers, or action on them directly through the overflow button on each offer.

Managing offers can be a delightful experience for families, and they can handle more than one at a time.

Anything that has been accepted, declined or revoked is visible to the family directly on their homepage.