[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

[BethCrook]

This would be an incredible feature to have!  

[lmorrow1]

Hi Amelia,

I think you are spot on, while communication with our students is easy (we have their attention daily), parents are not so easy. While students are well aware that Canvas is our LMS or Learning Management System, somebody parents still don't understand and get confused or concerned when they receive unbranded emails about their child's marks or courses. Some parents have even thought the emails were malware and became quite panicked.

We have gone to the extent of switching all notifications off for all parents. As a large school with around 14,000 parents, this script had to run for a week with a maximum of 2,000 calls per hour as there are many notification types that need to be turned off jneach API call. The ability to brand the notifications gives us the ability to switch on notifications and it ensures that parents and students know that the communication is legitimate, it also would look a lot better from a branding perspective.

Regards,

Leigh

[lmorrow1]

Hi Beth,

I completely agree, hopefully this will become an in progress idea at some stage. stefaniesanders‌ what sort of timeframes should be expected for new ideas to become adopted? How do we get this idea some more attention from dev team?

regards,

Leigh

[Stef_retired]

 @lmorrow1 , this document should help illuminate the process: What is the feature development process for Canvas?‌

[trinaadams]

When subaccounts post "Announcements" in courses, the email received by participants appears to be from the name of the root account. Our users do not identify with the root account name or organization which leads users to delete the email. We also have the announcements visible on the home page. However, some participants miss the posted announcements.

I would like to see this feature suggestion also include branding of communications and announcements available on the subaccount level instead of pushing the root account branding. 

[rimaj_solh]

Notification branding is a big must for me. I have signed in for notifications but I am enrolled in some courses that I am a student and some courses which I teach. Therefore it is a very convenient feature.

thanks for the opportunity to vote and the opportunity to reflect.

[stuart_ryan]

I wholeheartedly support this, great idea  @lmorrow1 . 

I too would love to see the ability to brand the emails, so much of what we do at our institutions is about our unique brand, however that may be presented. For me the branding would come down to not just the logo, however, as others have mentioned, the notification text.

I have worked with many systems in the past that use a template (which includes parameters) to enable institutions to customise the text. 

If editing the full text was not an option (standardisation is good at times), at least the ability to add a small block of institution-relevant text at the bottom of the email would be outstanding.

[pcraig]

I agree that if implemented, having differentiation across subaccounts is a must. 

[trinaadams]

Unfortunately, this is an example of what our subaccount participants are experiencing. The below course ended Sept 1 and the participant came across the notifications in his junk mail on Sept 19. We share a techno help sheet (see image) on our registration site directing users to add specific email domains to their white list. However, due to different techno knowledge by various users, the struggle continues. I would appreciate any suggestions.

"I just seen this email it was not in my inbox it was in the junk emails, all of the notifications you sent me went there. I had completed all the discussion questions except for #1 as it would not let me into it. I am not sure what happen I thought that i completed the course."

[garrett_william]

I agree that branding would be very helpful. This combined with setting up your own Discovery URL can help minimize confusion. Here is an example of the one I created for our virtual program using Google Sites:

https://sites.google.com/a/ucps.k12.nc.us/ucv-student-launch/

https://sites.google.com/a/ucps.k12.nc.us/ucv-student-launch/