Offer letters are the gateway or roadblock to countless dreams and ambitions, representing a watershed moment for aspiring students. As a result, we understand that schools face tremendous pressure to perform at the highest level, due in part to their own admission targets and business goals, and in part to their intrinsic duty to their applicants.
Full Fabric can help you manage your offers process to ensure that it runs smoothly and flawlessly, and we've prepared a collection of articles to show you how. The present article serves as a general overview of the basics of offer management in Full Fabric, with the succeeding articles diving deeper into each of the ideas herein introduced. Happy reading! 😊
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What is an offer?
If you're visiting our Help Centre, you probably work in Higher Education; and if you work in Higher Education, you're certainly familiar with the concept of offers. 💪Nevertheless, for the purpose of this article, let's do a brief recap: an offer is essentially a response letter to someone's application, inviting the candidate in question to move forward with the admissions process by either accepting the school's offer and enrolling, in the case of an unconditional offer, or, if it's a conditional offer, by fulfilling a number of remaining requirements, such as achieving a minimum IELTS or TOEFL score, so that the conditional offer can then become unconditional. If applicable, offer letters may also include information regarding scholarships or other forms of financial aid granted by the institution.
As a full suite of solutions for the higher education sector, Full Fabric naturally includes an offers module that specializes in the various potential scenarios of an offer. To shed some light on it, our offers module can be summed up as an automation mechanism that gives you complete control and flexibility over when and how to make someone an offer, not unlike an automated workflow – something we'll explore in the subsequent topics.
How are offers related to letters?
In Full Fabric, the concept of offers is inextricably connected with the concept of letters – in fact, they go hand in hand. Offer letters aren't called that for nothing, after all. 😉
Simply put, our letters module enables staff to produce any kind of document by creating .docx files containing merge fields based on field references from Full Fabric. These files are then uploaded to Full Fabric to be used as templates, whereby the respective merge fields are automatically populated with data from the database once a letter is generated for a profile. Because of this, our letters module is what you use to create offer letter templates. 📃
Meanwhile, as we've already established, our offers module is fundamentally a tool for building automated workflows largely directed towards the same outcome: delivering an offer letter to an applicant. 📨
Consequently, and to conclude, you need the letters module to design offer letter templates, and you need the offers module to generate and send the letters to their rightful recipients. 🔄
What are the basic steps to building an offer in Full Fabric?
Concisely, the process of developing an offer consists of three to four steps:
Creating a letter template to be associated with the offer
Creating an offer template and classifying it as conditional or unconditional
If the offer is conditional, building a form within the offer template to have the applicants submit proof that the conditions have been met
Automating the offer template, primarily (but not exclusively) to define the triggers and other factors under which an applicant should be made an offer – to put it another way, the points at which the offer template is to go into action
The next several articles will guide you through each and every one of these steps and their many particularities.
Why use offer templates?
As can perhaps be inferred from the preceding list, the need to specifically create offer templates versus other types of automated workflows stems from the nearly infinite variety of acceptance scenarios that a school could come up with, warranting a dedicated solution. If a school had but one simple scenario, such as only making unconditional offers using the same letter template, then the need to use offer templates would be practically null, as you could just create a class or lifecycle workflow in which, upon a profile being moved from a certain lifecycle state to another (for example, applicant::submitted to applicant::admitted), the corresponding letter would be automatically generated and sent.
However, when individual characteristics and circumstances are added to the mix, resulting in conditional offers with scholarships, unconditional offers with scholarships, conditional offers with early bird discounts, unconditional offers with early bird discounts, conditional offers with different stipulations, and so on and so forth, you will not only need separate letter templates, but also a way to easily determine which scenario is appropriate for each candidate in order to set the correct chain of events in motion.
As we'll soon see, this is precisely what offer templates were conceived to do. 😎
PUBLISHED: November 10, 2022
LAST UPDATED: June 18, 2025 at 9:00 a.m.