Step 3: Write your online story
Go back to the previous step: Adding students
This guide will take you through Step 3 of the Merit achievement workflow. Here you will learn how to write the version of your story that will appear online for each student. Each student will see this story when they click through from their email notification, and this version of the story will appear on each student's Merit page. You will have 2 options when writing these stories:
- Personalized - This will create a unique story for each person on your list. Their achievement will be written just about them. It works similar to a mail merge and uses placeholders for personalized data (like first names, last names, hometowns, etc.).
- Generic - This will create one story that will appear on each of your students' Merit pages, with no customization at all. Any students mentioned by name in the achievement will appear in each students' story.
Note: We recommend doing personalized achievements whenever possible because students are much more likely to share their story when it's written just about them.
Check the box next to the option you'd like to use:
Below you'll find instructions for creating both of these story types:
Personalized online story
Choose the Yes option to create personalized stories for your students. In this version of your story you'll be asked to add placeholders for custom data to add to your achievement. Use the dropdown box to select a field of your choice, and click the Insert placeholder button to insert that data into your story:
The inserted placeholder will look like the rectangular box (pictured above) throughout this process, but when the story is published, the student's personalized text will replace it.
You will want to insert these placeholders in both the title and body of your story, creating a customized story that is unique to each person on your list.
Generic online story
Alternatively, you can check the No box to skip personalized stories entirely. This will share one generic story with all of your students. You will not have the ability to add placeholders to this version of your story.
After checking No, you can optionally choose to autofill your online story with your story title and summary from step 1 above by clicking the "use title and summary from above..." checkbox.