Every semester sees new students enrolling at your school. To get the most out of your Merit account, you will want to add these new incoming students to Merit every semester.
The easiest way to add your students to Merit is to perform a student import. There are several benefits to importing your students each semester:
Create Merit Pages
Student imports allow you to create Merit pages for every student. Importing a spreadsheet of your enrolled students at the start of each semester ensures that all of your students have access to Merit prior to you publishing an achievement about them.
Your students will receive a welcome email introducing them to Merit, and prompting them to log into their Merit page. Learn more about welcome emails.
If you do not perform a student import, only your students who have been recognized through achievements will have Merit pages. Your unrecognized students will not have access to Merit.
Student Privacy
One of the biggest benefits of performing student imports regularly is that it gives your students the ability to access their Merit account before you ever publish an achievement on their behalf. This means that your students will be able to opt out or change their privacy settings before you share their first story.
They will have a few options available to them immediately upon logging in:
Opt Out - Your students can choose to opt out of Merit before ever making it into one of your achievements or press releases. Merit will ensure that any students who have opted out will not appear in future stories. Learn more about opting students out.
Private Pages - Your students can choose to make their Merit pages private before you start publishing stories about them. Merit will ensure that students who have chosen to have a private Merit page will not have their page indexed by search engines and their page will only be discoverable through a direct link. Learn more about Merit privacy options.
Merit's Stakeholder Email Collector
Merit allows you to passively collect email addresses for parents and other stakeholders. The Stakeholder Email Collector allows parents, family, friends, mentors and others to sign up to follow a student's successes at your institution. These stakeholders will be automatically added to students' accounts and receive notifications each time their student is recognized.
Importing your students regularly ensures that these stakeholders can be matched up to students in Merit. If you do not perform a student import, only your students who have been recognized through achievements will have Merit pages, and therefore stakeholders will be less likely to find their student.
Learn more about Merit's Stakeholder Email Collector.
Add Through Search
When you publish an achievement, you will be able to add students to the story in two ways: Upload a spreadsheet of student data, or add students manually.
The Add Students Manually feature allows you to search Merit for students who already have Merit pages. You can then locate them and add them to your story.
Performing an import of your full student body will ensure that you can add any student to your achievement quickly.
Learn how to manually add students to an achievement.
Use Merit's Data in an Achievement
Merit saves certain data sets like students' names, hometowns, zip codes, majors, and class years. Occasionally you may not have access to all of this information in your spreadsheet (either by design or by accident). When this happens, you can instead use Merit's saved data for your students.
Learn more about using Merit's saved data in achievements.
Merit AI
Merit helps you locate and identify stories about your students on your institution's RSS feeds. It lets you quickly turn these online stories about students into Merit achievements.
Importing all of your students will help ensure that Merit can identify every student mentioned in your RSS feeds. Learn more about Merit AI.