Personalize your organization with glossaries

Different organizations use different words for the same things. One district's "school" is another organization's "campus." And a place's "student" is another's "scholar." Avela supports this through glossaries — a setting that lets your organization replace Avela's default terminology with language that matches how your team and families already talk.

Glossaries are managed by Avela on your behalf. Reach out to your Avela success representative if you'd like to set up or change yours.

What you can customize

A glossary replaces specific labels wherever they appear in Avela Apply. Each label has a singular and a plural form so it reads naturally in context.

The labels available for customization fall into three groups:

Entities

• School — the organizations families apply to (e.g., "campus," "program")
• Student — the child being enrolled (e.g., "applicant," "scholar," "learner")

Form statuses and sub-statuses

Verification statuses

Actions

• Match — the matching/lottery outcome
• RunMatch — the action of running a match or lottery
• StartForm — the call to action button on the parent portal to create a new form response

You don't have to customize every label - you can mix and continue to use Avela's default term on the ones that don't need personalizing.

Where custom labels appear

Once saved, custom labels appear everywhere that term shows up in the product — in both the family experience (application forms, status pages, confirmation messages generated from the status name) and the staff experience (dashboards, filters, application detail views, reports).

Changes take effect after Avela saves them, and as soon as the user refreshes the screen. If Avela saved the changes and a family member already had a screen opened - the changes may not be reflected until that family member refreshes the screen, for example.

What glossaries don't change

A glossary only changes the displayed label. It does not change:

• Underlying statuses. The system still recognizes a status as "Offered" behind the scenes — only the word shown to users changes. Preexisting scheduled reports, exports, and integrations continue to use the standard status names.
• Message templates. Emails and SMS messages you've written will use exactly the text you wrote. If you want message templates to reflect new terminology, update them directly.
• Workflow behavior. Renaming "Waitlisted" to something else doesn't change how waitlists work — only what that status is called on screen.

How to request changes

Since glossaries affect language your families and staff will see throughout Avela Apply, they're managed by Avela to keep the experience consistent. To request a glossary setup or update:

1. Contact your Avela success representative or Avela support.
2. Send the list of labels you want to change and the new singular and plural forms for each.
3. Avela will apply the changes, and you'll see them reflected in your environment right away.

If you're not sure which labels to change, your success representative can walk you through what each label controls and recommend common substitutions other districts have used.