[Notifications] Ability to brand Canvas notifications

[lmorrow1]

Notifications sent via Canvas are currently not able to be branded.  This means that the emails sent to parents and students currently include the Canvas name and logo. This can cause some confusion with the community as it has no direct tie to the school or organisation and has no consistency with the site or school branding.

Having the ability to apply custom branding to email notifications at the account and sub-account level would solve this issue.  I propose that we have the following options via the theme editor to customise the following areas of notifications.

• Add the name of the organisation and the email address the notification is sent from
• Ability to add the organisations' logo
• Ability to edit the layout and colour scheme

[zowada-a]

Hi Dave,

Sure - what we've got right now is a template-in-progress. This is what the email looks like when someone enrolls in in a class through our Catalog right now :

We've made the footer blank, but have customized the header. This is our default that we're working on, but we're hoping to set this up for our subcatalogs so they can personalize them even more.

[ahayson]

 @jayde_colquhoun ‌ - We would call the platform 'Canvas' instead of 'Online Learning System' or 'LMS' to our students, they loved this as it was easy to remember and represented a quality system. But the ability to brand for institutions may help avoid students missing/ losing the emails for 'Confirmation of Registration' and 'Course Invitations'. Would love to get your thoughts on this?

[jayde_colquhoun]

We also will be calling our LMS Canvas to students, so the students know this is their LMS associated with us. I think to be able to brand the emails, or even one step further, be able to set an email address for the main account, that LMS emails are sent from (such as canvas@yourschool.edu.au), would be an obvious step in the development of Canvas. This would keep our student communication consistent and professional, and students could reply to notifications if needed and have their reply go to student services. Thanks for sharing, Am!

[lmorrow1]

Hi  @Renee_Carney ‌, looks like we have the votes for this one. What are the next steps?

[Stef_retired]

 @lmorrow1 ‌, this was one of the ideas that was given new life in February as part of the Canvas Studio‌ overhaul. Also at that time, we revamped the voting process so that 100 votes is no longer the relevant benchmark. Please refer to https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-2109-how-does-the-voting-process-work-for-feature-ideas 

[irishb]

We appreciate that we've been able to customize the "From" info and would like to be able to customize the subject line, particularly to include the name of the course a user is being invited to.

[marthazumack]

Our school actually consists of two distinct schools (K-12 and adult learners) with separate branding, so if this featuere were to be developped, it'd be important to us to be able to brand at the sub-account level.

[mdivito]

I would love it if my name and course would show up in the "from" line of a notification.  I teach online and this is my way to reach out to students. However, the college also sends a bunch of notifications through canvas and I know that students just ignore everything that's not a personal email. 

[sonya_corcoran1]

Yes! Cannot vote this up enough.

Pretty standard mail client feature is to tell you who sent the email and to style it accordingly (see above)

Also, a no-reply@instructure.com would be better or allowing us to add a footer with this instruction.

[lmorrow1]

Thanks Sonya! The more votes we have for this the better! As you mentioned, its pretty basic functionality we are requesting here, hopefully the devs at Instructure can knock it out in no time once approved.