Using EesySoft Messaging to Deploy Payment Deadline Notices In Blackboard

With the start of the Spring Semester, we were asked to provide a notice in Blackboard reminding students of the payment deadline. Since EesySoft currently doesn’t offer a way to batch-upload users for a campaign, we got creative. Here’s how we deployed a payment deadline notice to nearly 2,000 students.

The Work Around

While the current setup of Campaigns offers the ability to add students one-by-one, it doesn’t provide an easy way to import multiple users at the same time. While exploring the EesySoft Dashboard for an alternative, we noticed that Popup Messages could be deployed via course roles. With this feature, we then created a new custom course role just to be used for our EesySoft Campaign.

How We Did It

1. Create a new custom course role titled EesySoft.
2. Create a new course titled EesySoft Messaging.
3. Make the new course unavailable.
4. Batch enroll the users with the new EesySoft course role.
5. Login to the EesySoft Dashboard and create a new Popup Message.
6. Set your context, proactive status, start date, and end date.
7. Set the target to be assigned to CourseRole_EesySoft.

NOTE: Using this method you will only be able to deploy one large targeted campaign. If you needed to run multiple large-scale campaigns, you could create multiple EesySoft course roles. I will also mention that our faculty don’t have the access to enroll users into their courses, so we don’t have to worry about faculty and staff using the EesySoft role.