An accreditation notice is a reusable email template that you can send to a school’s contacts yourself or through a billing run. This article explains how to create, limit, retire, and delete a notice, and how the Programs note works when you record which programs the notice is for.
Prerequisites
- You need access to Accreditation Setup.
- To limit a notice to specific contact roles, at least one contact role must already exist.
What This Controls
- The name, email content, and audience for a reusable school notice.
- Whether the notice goes to every contact at a school or only to contacts with selected roles.
- A note that records which programs the notice is meant for.
- Whether the notice appears in Console pickers for new sends.
Where to Find It
Go to Setup › Accreditations › Notices to view active and inactive accreditation notices in your account. From there, create a notice or select an existing notice to edit it.
Create or Edit a Notice
- Go to Setup › Accreditations › Notices.
- Create a new notice, or open an existing one to edit it.
- Enter a name and write the email.
- Choose the audience: every contact at the school, or only contacts with roles you choose.
- Optionally, note which programs the notice applies to.
- Save the notice.
| Setting | Options | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Name | Any text | None; required | Identifies the notice in Console lists |
| Email template | Subject and body, with merge fields | None; required | Provides the message sent to the school's contacts |
| Audience | Every school contact, or chosen contact roles | Every school contact | Decides who at the school receives the notice |
| Programs | One or more of your programs | None | Records which programs the notice is meant for; see the warning below |
| Active | On, off | On | Controls whether the notice appears in Console pickers for new sends |
You must enter a name, email content, and an audience before you can save a notice. If you enter your own identifier, use only letters, digits, underscores, hyphens, and vertical bars, and make sure no other notice already uses it. If you do not enter one, Rhythm generates one.
Limit a Notice to Certain Contact Roles
When you send a notice to specific roles instead of every contact, choose at least one role before you save. Keep these details in mind:
Warning
- If none of a school’s contacts have the roles you chose, or those contacts have no email address, the notice reaches nobody at that school. Rhythm does not warn you when this happens.
- If you later switch the audience back to every school contact, the role list stays stored but is not used. If you switch back to specific roles, the same list is still there.
Insert School, Accreditation, and Program Details
When you write the notice email, the editor offers merge fields for school, accreditation, program, and membership details. Use these fields to address the recipient by name and reference their specific record. If a merge field does not match anything in the notice’s context, such as a field for a different kind of record, it appears empty instead of causing an error.
Warning
accreditation.unsubmitted_reports is a collection of reports, not a single value, so it does not merge as plain text on its own. To list the individual reports it holds, wrap it in an #each block in the template and reference each report's own properties, such as its name, inside that block.
A custom field on a notice does not automatically pull in details from a related contact role, such as a head contact's name and email. If you want that information in the notice, someone must type those values into the custom field and keep them updated by hand. The custom field stores only what staff enter; it does not read live details from the contact role record.
Program Restriction Is a Note, Not a Filter
Warning
Recording programs on a notice is for your reference only. Rhythm does not check this note when the notice is sent, whether you send it yourself or through a billing run. A notice “restricted” to one program can still reach a school in a different program. If a notice should reach only certain schools, use the audience and contact-role settings above, or control which schools you target when you send it. Do not rely on the Programs note.
Retire a Notice
Switch a notice’s Active setting off to remove it from the pickers staff use for new sends, without deleting the notice or its history. Retiring a notice does not affect places where it is already saved. A billing template or billing run that already names the notice keeps using it.
Delete a Notice
You can delete a notice only when nothing else in Accreditation refers to it. A school history, billing template, billing run, or billing-run action cannot still name the notice. If any of these still name it, Rhythm refuses the delete and shows how many records depend on it, without naming those records. Remove or change those references first, or leave the notice in place and retire it instead.
Warning
Deleting a notice is permanent in the notices list. Your account’s audit history keeps the notice’s last saved version, but there is no other way to recover a deleted notice’s exact wording.
Permissions
You need access to Accreditation Setup to create, edit, retire, or delete accreditation notices.
Validation and Errors
| Situation | What happens |
|---|---|
| Name, email, or audience is missing | The save is refused and names every missing field |
| Audience is set to specific roles with none chosen | The save is refused |
| Identifier contains a character outside letters, digits, underscores, hyphens, and vertical bars | The save is refused |
| Identifier is already in use | The save is refused |
| A school's history, billing template, billing run, or billing-run action still names the notice | The delete is refused and shows a count of the records that depend on it |