6/3 Weekly Update: Get to know Winston-Salem; understanding our communications

Bottom Line, Up Front

• Upcoming key dates or action items for families and/or students
• Get to know Winston-Salem
• Recommendations from local families
• Understanding the kinds of communications that go to families

Dear parents and families of incoming students,

June is here, and there will be more and more things your students will be asked to do from now until August. Here’s your weekly update on things families should know or do (see all past emails here). 

Upcoming key dates or action items for families and/or students

Here’s what you should know this week.

• [for students] Academic Advising phone calls begin this week: Students can talk to representatives from the Office of Academic Advising as they plan their coursework. Encourage your students to take advantage and call during their assigned week.
  
• [for families] Ensure your student has a plan to have a laptop, as they are required. As of June 1, new academic year WakeWare laptops became available for purchase online (or in the Bookstore). If your student plans to bring their own laptop, be sure to check to see what the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) requirements are.
  • Some students qualify for a technology grant, which covers the full price of a standard WakeWare model. Students should check their Wake Forest financial aid portal and WFU.edu email for more information.
    
• [for families] Sign up for our Virtual New Student Reception on June 17. (We are also planning in-person New Student Receptions in locations with a sizable amount of incoming students. The list is not yet finalized, so keep checking our website to see if additional dates or locations are added. We regret that we cannot offer them in all areas where our Deacs live.)
  
• [for families] Talk to your student about having them make you an authorized payer (third party access) in Workday. This allows you to receive notifications of tuition bills and other payments due (strongly recommended that all students authorize a third-party payer; student instructions here – they may need to be logged in with their WFU address).
  
  • IMPORTANT NOTE: I am told that we have had some students add Authorized Payers/Third Party Access but they have not done the 2nd part of the process, which is granting access to specific functions, such as Make a Payment, receive Proactive Past Due Notifications, View Account Activity and View Account statements.
    
  • To manage permissions via Workday, students will need to:
    • Type in the search “Manage Permissions for my Third Party”
    • Choose the permissions.
    • Click Ok.
    • Type a purpose of waiver for the permissions and confirm FERPA permissions.

Get to know Winston-Salem

• I am admittedly biased because I have lived here for 30+ years, but Winston-Salem is a great small city. Generally speaking, it is friendly, it is inexpensive relative to a lot of the places our students come from, and it is also a pretty safe city relative to a lot of bigger cities. So how can you get to know Winston-Salem, your student’s home for the next four years?
• If you have not already checked out the Beyond Campus page of the New Students website, spend some time digging in at your leisure.
• There are also some great local resources that you can subscribe to. W-S Today is a relatively new e-newsletter but it is one I follow and I always find something in it that is worthwhile. You can subscribe here if you wish. Even if you don’t subscribe to the e-newsletter proper, their website has lots of info on local activities, dining, day trips, and more.

Recommendations from WFU families

• Every other year or so, we ask our current parents and families to share their best recommendations for local restaurants, hotels, and other places of interest. You can see those here.
• Winston-Salem has a surprisingly good food scene for a small city, so I hope you will try out a good many of our dining options in town and see which ones appeal to you. I have eaten at a great many of the places our current WFU families recommended, and in my opinion they are spot on with most of the recommendations 🙂

Understanding the kinds of communications that go to families

• We have had some questions from new families asking to ‘get on the email list,’, so I wanted to explain the kinds of communications we send and how to troubleshoot those.
• There are three main types of emails we send families:
  • Official emails to all families (or a large subset), which are sent from a Wake Forest server. These are emails such as these Weekly Updates every Tuesday, the Wake Parents & Families monthly e-newsletter (which goes out mid-month each month), information about Family Weekend, and/or any big news we need all families to hear.
    
    You do not have to sign up to get these emails; they automatically go to all parents for whom we have a valid email (this is why we ask you to Verify Your Family Record in Wake Network!)
    
    These emails are sent from a WFU server and typically have a reply-to address of parents@wfu.edu, returns@wfu.edu, alumni@wfu.edu; occasionally we send on behalf of another office, like Family Weekend, and the reply address will be to that specific office.
    
  • Emails to segmented groups of families, also sent from a Wake Forest server. These are typically used for smaller, targeted audiences. Some examples are: emails to families with a new student in the Atlanta area to invite to a New Student Reception, or families of arts majors in New York for an event there. In other words, these are typically to invite to a regional event or to share news with a specific group. You do not have to sign up to get these emails, and the messages are also sent from a WFU server.
    
  • The Daily Deac, our opt-in parent and family blog that goes out each weekday around 5 p.m. from a non-WF server. The Daily Deac is a publication you must opt in to. It does not go out automatically to all families. You can subscribe here (and if you don’t like it, you can unsubscribe using the link in the footer of any Daily Deac email). We send the Daily Deac through a blog push service outside of our Wake Forest system (it’s called Mailchimp).
    
• Troubleshooting our communications. Here are some common issues and how to solve them:
  • “I’m not getting Wake emails!” Sometimes families tell me their spouse/partner is getting emails, but they are not. In these cases, the issue is often that the emails we are sending out are being filtered out by your Internet Service Provider as potential spam, or are automatically routing to your junk/spam/quarantine folder. (Unfortunately, once we hit ‘send’ on an email, we can’t control how your ISP interprets it.)
    
    If you have not searched your spam folder for wfu.edu emails, you might want to check there first, and then either mark the email as from a ‘safe sender’ or hit “move to inbox” to try and avoid future emails going to spam. If we are not in spam/junk/quarantine, try these fixes:
    • Add parents@wfu.edu, alumni@wfu.edu, and returns@wfu.edu as contacts in your email system. We use various email addresses, and having us as a contact might help.
    • Talk to your Internet Service Provider to see if they can tweak your settings to allow email from WFU to reach you (vs getting caught in a spam filter).
    • If you had given us a work email in Wake Network, but you have a home email on a different ISP (or vice versa), you can switch to the other email in Wake Network and see if that solves the issue.
      
• “Other parents I know got an email but I didn’t!” Sometimes we send emails to segmented groups of families as described above. It may be that there is an event that is restricted to a specific geographic area, or a specific major or class year, etc. In those cases, it is often for an event where there is a maximum capacity and so the guest list is tailored.
  
• “I get the Daily Deac, but not other emails from Wake.” Because the Daily Deac is sent out from blog-push service, and not our normal Wake server, sometimes families’ ISPs will accept the Daily Deac but reject the regular WFU emails. All you can do is talk to your ISP (or your IT department if you are using a work email) and see if they can tweak your settings to allow our emails to come through. You can also add parents@wfu.edu, alumni@wfu.edu, and returns@wfu.edu as contacts in your email system, as having us as a contact might help.
  
• “I used to get the Daily Deac, but it stopped coming.” What most likely has happened is the Daily Deac is getting routed to spam or junk, so check there first. If it is not there, it is possible that you may have accidentally clicked on the Unsubscribe button, which got you off the list. In that case, you need to email us at parents@wfu.edu so we can have Mailchimp (our blog push service) send an invitation to you to resubscribe.
  
• “If I hit ‘reply’ to a Daily Deac, where does that email go?” Straight to my inbox, so I can answer you 🙂

NOTE: next week’s topic is about safety, so we will cover safety notifications (and how to receive them) then.

Parting thoughts

We will continue sending weekly messages to our new families throughout the summer, so stay tuned for more information! If you missed last week’s message, please see our archive.

With best wishes,

Betsy Chapman, Ph.D. (‘92, MA ‘94)
Executive Director of Family Communications