Sending mass communications using Informer

Abdussamad Gregory

Oct 22, 2024

Informer is a fantastic tool for mass organizational communication. By the end of this article you will be able to download an informer report, and use the data from that report for the purposes of mass communications.

First, we begin by opening the Informer tile in Baronone:

Upon logging in, you should see two Queries. They are defined as follows:

PUBLIC- Credit Courses and Faculty by Reporting Term: Running this Query will return a report of all those currently employed at RCBC who teach at least one class in any given semester.
PUBLIC - Current Employees with Position Class and Status: Running this Query will return a report of all those currently employed at RCBC.

We will cover usage of both of these Queries in this guide. Lets start with PUBLIC- Credit Courses and Faculty by Reporting Term.

1. Start by selecting PUBLIC- Credit Courses and Faculty by Reporting Term:

After selecting the Query, you will get this screen. Here you are to define which semester it is that you want to pull current employee data from. We will use the current fall 2024 semester, so type 2024FAR into the field and press ENTER.
If there is a pre existing value from a previous report, click the X as highlighted in the screenshot to clear it.

The possible semester options are as follows:

SPR: Spring Semester
S1R: Summer 1
S2R: Summer 2
FAR: Fall Semester

Just as in the example you would need to type {YEAR}[Semester code].

2. Click Run. Wait a few seconds for the Query to run. After that completes, you should get a screen similar to this one:

From here, you can export as you see fit! In Part 3 of this article we will cover exporting to Excel and using that spreadsheet to get your required user information.

Now we will cover running and filtering the PUBLIC - Current Employees with Position Class and Status Query.

1. Click on PUBLIC - Current Employees with Position Class and Status:

2. This will automatically run the Query without needing to provide specifications. You may need to wait a few seconds for it to complete.

3. After that you are presented with a screen similar to this one. Click on the down arrow pictured here. This will allow us to filter the list by employees of specific classifications.

4. Click "Filter".

5. You will then be presented with a few options Here are some of them listed as an example:

FT - Full-Time Staff/Faculty
PT - Part-time Staff/Faculty
STU - Student workers
AF - Adjunct Faculty

6. For this example, we will select Full Time and Part Time, and then collapse the window. When needed, you may select as many or as few filters as you like.

That covers the PUBLIC- Credit Courses and Faculty by Reporting Term Query!

Lastly, we will cover exporting reports and copying information from them in excel for the purpose of email communication.

1. In either of the reports, click on the download button in the top right corner:

2. Click on Excel.

3. You May rename the file to whatever you like, and then click "Export".

4. You will then see it come up in the top right corner of the screen as a download. You may either open it from up there or navigate to your downloads folder and open it like you would any downloaded file.

5. Here we have our report open in Excel. Click Enable Editing.

6. As we want to get all of the email addresses for our selected group, we will select column c at the very top, and copy.

We now have all of our email addresses copied. Moving over to our RCBC employee email:

7. Compose an email as you would any other. Then in the "To" box, paste the addresses you copied from Excel.

And that's it! Gmail will automatically remove duplicates. If there are student email addresses in the field (like from student workers) you may get a banner like the one you see at the bottom of the most recent screenshot.

From here you can send your communication as necessary!