Baseline provides campus staff with the technology to administer web-based surveys to assess their programs and services. As part of this service, Baseline provides a mailing capability which allows staff to send emails from the Baseline system to survey respondents. In most cases these respondents are students, staff, or faculty on campus. In order for these surveys to reach respondent inboxes, we ask that campus IT departments allowlist the Baseline IP address for campus email addresses. Allowlisting registers the Baseline IP address as an accepted sender with your campus email accounts as another means for increasing deliverability of the messages.
To obtain IP address and domain information, please contact Support.
Questions regarding this process can be directed to your campus Consultant. If your campus IT staff would like to set up a conference call with Baseline IT staff, that can be arranged as well.
If your campus uses Gmail for your student email accounts, please see “Allowlisting for Campus Gmail Accounts” for instructions.
Click here if your campus does not allowlist any IP addresses.
Additionally, we have experienced other technical difficulties in dealing with various campuses and their mailing systems. Outlined below are a few of the issues we have encountered and may be worth bringing to the attention of your campus IT staff.
- In some situations, mass mailings may go to thousands of addresses on campus. When this happens, some systems tend to see this as spamming and will shut down the receiving server before all emails can get through. Other systems may send our emails to junk mail boxes. We ask that any barriers set up for spam mail are released in order for the emails to go through.
- We have found that non-campus email addresses (such as survey invitations to alumni or parents) will occasionally be blocked or filtered for spamming purposes, particularly when many emails are sent at once. This includes Yahoo, Gmail, and .net addresses. We continually work with these providers to stay in compliance with spam and denylist rules to ensure delivery of your survey invitations. You can assist with this process by avoiding common spam filter red flags such as excessive use of exclamation points, all CAPS, misleading subject lines, and not including a physical mailing address in your signature area.
Since every campus server is unique, we recommend that you test the mailing system before you send out your first mailing. If you are unable to conduct a test, build in extra time for your first project for potential troubleshooting.