Settings: General
The General tab in your Merit settings contains the following sections:
- Contact Information
- Timeline
- Contacts
- Boilerplate
- Whitelist our IP Address
- Approval Workflow
- RSS Feed
Contact Information
This information will be used internally by Merit to identify and maintain your Merit account. You can edit your institution's contact information at any time.
Timeline
It's possible for your students to be recognized by other institutions in the Merit network, such as community colleges, employers, greek organizations, high schools, and honor societies and more. When this happens you can automatically repost these stories to your own institutional Merit page by selecting the checkbox that say "Automatically share all of my students' achievements."
Contacts
Here you can set the contact information that will be used as defaults for your account. Be sure to include a name, title, phone number, and email address for each contact.
Media Relations Contact: Used on press releases emailed to the media. This can be overwritten in the publishing workflow if necessary.
Government Affairs Contact: If specified, your government affairs contact will be used in place of your media relations contact when Merit sends updates to students' elected officials.
Student Relations Contact: Included in the footer of achievement notification emails sent to students.
Boilerplate
This information is automatically added to the end of your press releases that are sent to the media.
Whitelist Our IP Address
Ensure achievement notification emails reach your students! Have your school's IT department whitelist the IP address that Merit sends emails to your students from. The IP address you should whitelist is 192.254.119.180.
This isn't a required task for set up, but highly recommended.
Why should I whitelist Merit's IP Address?
Approval Workflow
Merit users with admin permissions can activate the Approval Workflow, a feature in Merit that enables schools to designate different levels of access and permissions to Merit users.
Permissions are particularly useful when a school has a mix of student workers, office staff, and admins creating achievements in Merit. User permissions are designed to help schools control who has the ability to publish achievements and access settings in your Merit account.
Defining Merit Permissions
- Admin: This user can access and modify settings in your Merit account
- Approver: This user can approve other Merit user's achievements
- Needs Approval: Achievements submitted by this user must be approved by a designated admin user account
Activating the Approval Workflow
The Approval Workflow can be activated from your Merit Dashboard by going to Settings > General and checking the "Use the approval workflow box." You will then be presented with a list of Merit users. Take a moment to select the users that you would like to grant "Approver" permissions to.
Learn more about adjusting approval permissions
RSS Feed
You will have multiple RSS feed available inside your account. You can use these RSS feeds in any RSS reader, or embed them on your institution's website.The Achievement RSS Feed will automatically pull a list of all of your published achievements, updated constantly.
You may also see two Newsroom RSS Feeds. These feeds will include all of the press releases that you publish through Newsroom. The first feed will only contain a snippet of the press release but give readers an expandable link to the full story. The second feed will include the full text of your press releases. The content in these two feeds is identical.
