To get started with Orah’s attendance tracking for Blackbaud and Veracross, you can sign up for a trial account on the Orah website. From there, simply connect your school’s data via API keys, and the system will walk you through the setup. Once connected, Orah pulls in attendance data automatically, and you’ll be able to explore insights and set up alerts within minutes. If needed, Orah’s team is available to assist with any setup questions.
Note:Â This transcript was automatically generated and manually reviewed, but may still contain errors.
Ronan Quirke: Hey everybody, this is Ronan from Orah. I'm a product manager here and I'm here with my colleague, Tiago
Tiago Penteado: Hey everyone. I'm Tiago, the marketing manager here at Orah. today I'm here to field some questions from you guys. Actually, two weeks ago, it was Rowan's birthday and on his birthday, he told us that he loves questions. So, um, if you want to make Ronan happy, just drop some questions down in the Q& A and, the curlier, the better, and he'll, he'll answer them at the end of the call.
Ronan Quirke: I mean, I do, I do like cupcakes as well, but, um, I think given this meeting format, I'm guessing questions is probably a better option.
Yeah, I think we've got some people coming in. yeah, today's topic, we'll be getting into, but it's all about attendance insights and using your attendance data to, yeah, drive better outcomes.
Tiago Penteado: And I'll just say as well, we're making this specifically for Blackbaud and Veracross schools as well, just as that's where we put the most of our effort in terms of integration, and focus on making that really slick.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah, absolutely, Tiago. Thank you. Yeah, so if you are New to Orah and wondering, why those folks are talking with strange voices. so I'm actually from Ireland myself, but I'm based here in New Zealand, as is Tiago. We're a global company. We've got staff, right across the world in the UK, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and lots of other places as well.
And likewise, we have customers, all around the world as well. Our, I guess our genesis was in, in the, boarding, space originally is where we started out, trying to solve pain points for boarding schools. and then it's really our journey and our product capabilities, have come from there, from that place where you're looking after students 24 7, back to where we are today, which means, so really Orah's kind of focuses around looking after the student, that duty of care piece around, ensuring that, I guess as somebody, mentioned to me a couple of years ago, it's always stuck in my mind, This idea of having and getting the student to the point where they're ready, willing and able to learn, so that they're able to do, they've got everything that they need.
we've set them up for as much success as we can by looking after them, physically and mentally. And where Orah help plays a part is giving you the tools to support that, Yeah, so that's where we're at on in terms of our journey and what we're focused on. And we really hope that some of what we're going to take you through today will be maybe an easy way to get started on that or to, I'm sure you already started on that journey, but to get you started on the next phase of that in terms of, Using sort of data and using,your existing, attendance data, to do that as well.
So the three pillars of duty of care that we focus on is attendance,being and communication around attendance and well being as well. So we really see those, go hand in hand, very much the stuff that takes place, I wouldn't say not inside the classroom, but around the classroom as well as inside the classroom, would be how I would define where we focus.
And yeah, today's topic is all about making the most of attendance insights and alerts for Blackbaud and for Veracross schools in particular. Reason being is we've essentially, developed three key pieces of functionality. The first, is attendance insights, which I'll show you. And the second is,a deep integration with Blackbaud and a deep integration with Veracross, which really brings those attendance insights, to life.
yeah, so today, just before we get into a little bit more detail so you know what to expect and also so you know when to ask questions or not. Excuse me, feel free to jump in and ask a question as things come up. Tiago, since this is quite a kind of a focus session maybe you can Just shout out with any questions as they come in, because that's probably the easiest way to run through this.
It is quite a, we're going to keep it relatively short, within the half hour so that you're really just giving a taster. two reasons. One is that this is very simple, deceptively And two,the way to, get the most out of it, to learn even more is by spending an hour yourselves connecting your own data to it.
And then you'll have a much, much better way of getting to the next level of insight as well. So we'll show you a little bit how to do that. And then hopefully you'll join us on the journey in terms of actually turning on the insights yourselves. Yeah. So connecting Orah to Veracross or Blackbaud is a super straightforward process.
There's essentially two. Two things to do. One is to turn on the, integration itself. I'll just go you a little quick demo of where that is. there's a couple of different ways of doing it, but going to the app directory, you can find your integrations. you can select Blackbaud if you're Blackbaud or Veracross.
If not, for Blackbaud customers, you just click connect. you get sent into the sign in for Blackbaud. You sign in and authorize the connection, and that will then send you, almost straight back. It'll take a minute to sign in. Probably the longest part is signing into Blackbaud. and then you, You'll essentially you'll, it'll ask you to authorize your specific school, which probably won't be the developer cohort will be whatever your school name is, authorize that connection.
And that sends you right back to, Orah and where everything will get configured and set up from there. So what you will see then once you've got that in here, I'm just going to switch to, one of my schools here. I'm just going to show you, behind the scenes, just by the way, so you do need to be, you need to have obviously the appropriate, permissions to connect an API connection.
so I'm just going to have a quick cough for a second. Pardon me. the, you will need to have the appropriate permissions that may not be yourself. If it may be your IT person that will need to actually do the connection piece. Don't worry once you sign up for the first time or if you want to connect this, then actually the first time setup process will guide you through that and allow you to invite somebody else in, if needs be.
Here I've got my Blackbaud connection. we do need to bring in all these different, kind of pieces of data, to actually bring the, insights dashboard together. but yeah, you can see that connection is there from the app directory under integrations. And then what you see then is attendance insights, which is basically.
Once you've connected Blackbaud for the first time, and the initial sync, can take anywhere from sort of 10 minutes if you've got 200 students through to maybe 30 minutes if you've got 800, 900 students, in your school and you're bringing in,a, a couple of months of attendance history to, to start with.
And then you're going to get a, an insights dashboard like this. steps are connect your, Blackbaud or Veracross school. really just connecting the keys, leaving it for about 10 minutes. It's 15 minutes. You get an email if you're not waiting patiently here to let you know that the data is loaded for the first time and you log in, you'll get to see something like this.
There's no setup or configuration in terms of this piece that you actually need to do. You can, I'll show you what you can tweak and change if you want to, but we designed this to be ready to go as soon as you just did the connection. If you think you're missing somebody and I'm hiding a whole bunch of steps, no, it really is that simple because all we need from you is just to allow us to connect to your attendance data and bring it in.
And then we do the rest. it's been designed to be something that is, is simple and easy to use from your point of view and just get started straight away.so yeah, so that's the kind of connection part, and this will bring you to,this piece here where you've got your attendance insights.
I'll just take you, quickly through that. I'm just going to change, up here on the right hand side. I've got the, the period, reporting period. I'm just going to go to 12 weeks. I'm picking though that since it was summer break, we may not have a lot of that. Oh no, we, we did, we were working all the way through.
testing our integration. You can also see up there in the top right hand side, it'll tell you when the most recent, sync, happened,for, Blackbaud in this case. so that you can see just how up to date your attendance data is as well. So here's my attendance rate chart, which tells me my attendance rate across, this time period of the last 12 weeks.
you can also see it visualized, across here as well. And. probably if you're an attendance manager, your dean of students, something like that, most unexcused absence, a list, or as some of you have called it the frequent flyers list, is probably something that you'll be zoning in,quite straight away.
You'll see that, in this case, there's a bunch of students here have missed lots of classes. Probably the ones that we've been picking on as we've been doing our testing. Obviously, this is a test school. so anybody with an A, B, or C in their name, because they're top of the list, are the ones that we're always picking and adding as unexcused absences.
You can click in here and you can see, the attendance records. for those students. So if it is, one of your students and you want to find out exactly what's going on, then yes, you can see,the specific details there as well. You might see the zero days, alongside here as well. if The, period absences sum up to an entire academic day.
Then those days will be counting up there as well. in this instance, we've been a bit scattered gone and we've been marking students as absent, unexcused for just a couple of classes each day. So that doesn't sum up to an entire academic day. Days absence, but in a real school scenario, you probably would obviously be marking them as absent for all the periods and therefore that would sum up to that as well.
Attendance heat map is another visualization of your data. So here you can see, But, probably just a specific period that things are absent, but I can see that chemistry lab didn't have a very good attendance, last week. and you can also see it by, grade level as well. so it's just, this is quite useful for picking up any patterns, and that might indicate specific classes or cohorts are having an attendance challenge.
And that may be participation, or it could also be recording of attendance as well, because those are essentially the two things that we're trying to zone in on here is your data being collected properly,from your school information system, and do you have student engagement behavioral issues that you want to pick up on as well?
So I'm not going to go through every single,chart here, but I think you can get a sense of that. We do have the, what I call the mega table down the bottom as well. So this shows you all of your student attendance data. you can sort by, attendance, right? If I want to show, the, let's see, but most don't, an excused absences instead of attendance rate.
I can see that count and the attendance rate of those students as well. You can also filter, for example, I only want to see. in this list as students who have had more than Seven unexcused absences from class for the period, and that will show me all of those students as well. Awesome. I'm just also just going to very quickly show you that you can, filter, based on different criteria, and you can create a view, based on that criteria as well.
For example. If you thought you had a problem with biology, all the biology classes I've saved as a view here, turns out everybody loves biology, so we're all good there. Let's see if the last 12 weeks, just a few, participation issues there. and yes, you'll see that, These, some of these students did some up to a whole day absence, in this example too as well.
So that, those are the views. So okay, great. So we can visualize your data, and you can zone in on specific issues. what about a more proactive approach to this? So that's where, This little button over here, alerts, comes in handy. so you can, create alerts and,for specific attendance patterns and this, the alerts will let show you any that have been triggered, recently.
If I go to my dashboard settings,
So essentially what alerts are is it's a recipe for, for how you can trigger something. Probably the easiest way is I'm just going to pick this one here. I'm just going to edit this one. I'll show you how to create an alert yourself in a moment as well. And it's When any student is absent, unexcused, tardy, unexcused, or absent for any course, five times in total within one week, send an alert to, and your options of sending the alert to is you can send the alert to the student, let them know that, hey, we're watching, we know, let's have, and that might be your first trigger might be your low level thing.
you can also send it to contacts of students, parents, And guardians, are staff and this situation, what I'm actually doing is I'm sending, an alert to advisors. So we've set up a user role, which is a type of basically of collecting staff together. and I've got an advisor user role set up in Orah, which maps to all the student advisors.
so student advisor. will be notified if any of their students, are absent, unexcused, tardy, unexcused, are absent for any course within five times, sorry, five times in total within the last week. if more than five, not good attendance records are generated for this student, that advisor for that student will be notified,by email and push, for that.
So that's basically giving you the ability to have those intervention conversations, with your students based on whatever criteria that you have set up. You may also, have behavioral, or consequence,processes that you want to initiate off the back of this as well.
Most of your systems already have that kind of plugged in, so this is more focused on the intervention, it's soft,stepping in for letting your key staff know at the point in time, or as we say, point easy, the point where it's it's happening, but it's not a big set in problem.
versus I suppose you're more, more formal process of assigning points or behavioral and things and running your detentions and other consequences as a result. So that is one I set up, earlier. I'll just show you how we can add an alert from the get go as well. Again, if I was to pick on students, yeah, you can send it via email or SMS.
You can customize what you will send. You can also send it to, maybe you only want to send it to grades 7 to 12, because, let's face it, grades 2 to 6, probably not the ones you want to be harassing about, absences. and then you might want to, Only send that if they've been absent unexcused for any course or you could pick specific courses.
for example, maybe it's just your academics you want to do this for and, athletics, for example, is not something that you want to pick. but I'll just do any course and the frequency. in this case, if you've been, I'd say even at one time absent unexcused within the last week.then we'll send another to that student.
but also you could have that, for the context of students and you might only want to send that for. And forgive the random different labels here, but, these are coming straight from, Blackbaud. I'm hoping that you don't have lots of different relationship labels in your own system. but yeah, I would send that to whoever relationship is, and then that would trigger for that.
And then maybe in that situation, then you might give them the leeway to do it. So if it's absent on excuse three times in total within the one week for that, Our staff, as I said, so your options for staff and alerts, you've got three different ways of doing it. You can select specific staff. For example, I might want to be notified about everything in this situation.
if I'm say, for example, the attendance manager, I've got some sort of Behavioral role are, for example, if I only pick, if I'm the year head for grade 7, you could set up a filter to only alert me for grade 7 absences, and I could get that specifically. Or you could do assigned staff. So assigned staff are, it's a little bit more advanced kind of capability of Orah, but basically if you have a relationship mapped between a staff member and a student, for example,they are, the staff member has access to those specific students via,a house or a tag assignment, you, or is permission set up then they have a kind of, they have an assignment to that student and you can let them know about, anything, relating to that, or in my, as I showed in my previous example, you might, send it to staff.
They have a specific role set up in, in Orah as well. For example, I might have two or three staff members who have the attendance manager role in Orah, and so they will get. this alert because they're an attendance manager, or I might send it to the advisor role, which links,the student advisors, to the students via that advisory relationship only.
So you can use your, your sort of, your different, Blackbaud or Veracross data to create that linkage using user roles, which is slightly more advanced. so if I was starting off. Probably what I would do, I'd be selecting specific staff, initially, at least anyway, because then you can set up, maybe,an alert for grade seven, the attendance manager, you can select specifically.
So you could get started quite quickly by just selecting specific staff in ORAH and get started that way. But once you've. been using it for a couple of weeks and you want to systemize it a little bit more, that's when I will probably start using user roles and using my sort of advisor role to get, start rolling out alerts to everybody at that point.
and before you start rolling out alerts, you're probably asking yourself, are,How these alerts are working, are they triggering on the right criteria, because obviously it does rely on your attendance data, so you need to have confidence that's coming into ORAH correctly, that the categories are as you'd expect, and the triggers are working as well.
Again, that's probably why I would set up some just specific to me initially and just get a few emails myself. And then I can have a look at my alert history and I can see what alerts have actually been triggered, already and making sure that, they, they make sense. for example, this absent on excuse three times in a row was sent to the parents.
of the student, based on this criteria here. So I said, I can go in and go, okay, great. Okay. So this alert triggered at this point in time. why did it trigger? And I can have a look and say, okay, that's because these three classes had an absent code. and that absent code was what was configured for the alert.
And so if that, Wasn't what I was expecting, then I could go back into my alert and tweak the code. So potentially this is triggering for absences, but actually what I wanted to trigger for is, that is all code to absence unexcused. I've actually updated this since. but I think it was initially set to just absent, whereas actually I only wanted to trigger for absent unexcused.
So that is an example of where looking through my attendance alerts, testing them at myself first, just sending them to myself and then going through my attendance alerts and just having confidence in the data. That's at the point then that I'm confident that I can actually set up. all staff and start sending it out to everybody.
and so then they would be able to have access to the attendance insights to see the overall picture. and then they'll be getting the email and notifications as well around the, alerts. So that's basically the three steps that we've got for, attendance insights. So connecting Orah Visualize the data as I've showed and then creating the automated alerts, automated alerts, using your SIS data.
now a question that we do get, quite often around alerts is, sending to, contacts or parents and when to do that and how does that work? I'll very quickly just give you just a little bit of an insight into,to how that might work, for Orah. So within, if you are an administrator, which if you've signed up initially, you're the first user, you're definitely going to be an administrator.
the integration sync brings in all the contacts that you have in Blackbaud or Veracross as well. And you will see these, Come in here as well. As I mentioned, you can filter on things like the relationship field. we can also have another field in here, which is approved and approved basically is a flag to say that these are contexts that we want to, either allow, register, absences are in this case, we want to use that as the field that we're going to use to, to notify,parents about, for example, I'm just going to find a useful one.
There's normally one we'll hear with grandparents or something like that. In this example, I bet you, I'm not going to find anybody real quick. but that's okay. the, the best way to do that, if you're using the integration is. Going into your Blackbaud settings and contacts.
And yes, you can filter what relationship type that you actually want to use. In this case, we've turned off grandparents. I might want to have guardians switched on though, so just bringing in parents and guardian relationship types into everything. So that means that I'm pretty confident, that if I do set up any attendance alerts, that I can do that just for, those specific types.
if I go in here, then all contacts. Yeah, you can. So the relationship type that we're bringing, we're only bringing in, right now we're bringing in parent and guardian relationship types. there isn't a relationship field as well. That, comes in from your SIS, which has all of these different options as well.
but you may not need to need to use that if you're only filtering on specific relationship types in your settings. I also did mention that, that approved contact. so yes, you can use the approved contact field as well, to only send those, notifications to approved contacts if you only want to find, pick specific contacts, of a student, then that is a way to do that too.
so yeah, so that's just a quick sort of insight into how you can customize, for letting, contacts know. but again, as a, as I mentioned, I think where I would be starting, for, for alerts would be,initially maybe just your sort of like key staff letting, getting the alerts, making sure that you're happy with how the alerts are triggering your recipe is working correctly.
and secondly, I will be rolling it out to the, I suppose the staff members who can be part of the, corrective or intervention side of things in terms of supporting students to,address any attendance participation issues that you're seeing, then maybe rolling it out to all staff if you want to at that point in time, then you could be a good option to also send it out to specific student groups.
and then I would build up to also using that to notify parents. Now, the one exception is that if you wanted to use Orah to trigger your kind of,your process for, notifying parents that, a student hasn't reported in that day. you could use an alert to, to set that up as well, to initiate that sort of, that process where if, a student is unaccounted at the start of the day for your first roll of the day or whatever your process is, you could also set up an alert to, trigger for that too.
All right. yeah, so that's the three key areas. In terms of, next steps and what I would be advising if you don't already have, if you can't see this in your ORA account or if you don't already have an ORA account, The next steps would be pretty simple, would be to get in contact with ourselves or drop me an email and we'd be happy to, get you set up with a trial account where you can actually initiate this and connect your data.
Honestly, the hardest part in all of this is normally getting your API keys or getting whoever needs, has API access to connect Orah to your Blackbaud or Veracross data. Once you're over that kind of hump, then All that data I showed you comes in very quickly and then you can maybe have a quick session with us just going through that and getting your alerts set up.
you're pretty simple and we're pretty confident that, if you can connect your,your API keys, then you should be able to get all that into, into Orah very quickly.
Tiago Penteado: Awesome. Great. That's awesome. Thank you. Thank you, Ronan. Let's put up the call for anyone who's got a question for Ronan to put that in the chat now, but I'll just ask for something that comes up frequently is, for those obviously wanting to know from the privacy and compliance side, obviously existing Orah schools are pretty well sorted, but where can people go to kind of learn a bit more about how our privacy and compliance work?
Ronan Quirke: Yeah, so we, we work with some of the top schools around the world, so there are no questions that you'll be asking that we haven't already fielded in terms of data privacy. we have a page on our website which talks about, where our data is held, how it's held, and that as well. As always, as you would expect,the school's data is the school's data.
It's not our data. and, when you sign with Orah, that's always made clear in our terms and conditions. You have control over what is sent across and what is stored. we only ever, Pull in what is necessary for the task at hand. in this case, you do need quite a little, quite a bit of data.
So you obviously need the student records and you need the contacts and the staff members, as well as the class timetables and the attendance data itself. But, yeah, we don't pull in anything that we don't need, like medical or demographic data or anything like that as well. but yeah, But yes, orah.
com forward slash security is where you can go to see, the specifics of what we do. we're obviously, we also host in the region that's most appropriate for you, for if you're a US customer, your data is hosted in the US. Whereas if you're, you're based in Australia, it's hosted there too.
So we, we have that all squared away as well.
Tiago Penteado: Yes. And, just quickly as well, how frequently does the integration sync between either Blackbaud or Veracross and Orah?
Ronan Quirke: Yeah, so it syncs, every hour at the moment. So there's the initial sync, which kind of takes a little bit of time. I mentioned at the start of the call, which, that's just pulling in, month's worth of data.
That takes a little while. but then once it's up and running, then it syncs, hourly. So I wouldn't say it's real time. I don't think,Real time in this situation is ever, a good thing based on our conversations with schools as well, because, real time means somebody could be halfway through completing a role,or something like that.
and so we feel like every hour or so is appropriate for this use case. It's not meant to let you know that somebody hasn't completed a role, for example. within the last 10 minutes and that, but, yeah, we could probably bring it down a little bit, faster, but, that we don't want to overload the, the, the Blackbaud API or the Veracross API either.
Tiago Penteado: Awesome. there's no other questions in the chat, With that, think we're done. Thank you, Ronan.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah, as I said, yeah, just drop us a line if you do want to know more, or if you, are using Orah already, but you don't see Attendance Insights, just let us know and we'll be happy to help.
Tiago Penteado: Thanks, everyone.
Ronan Quirke: Thanks, everybody.
