Collect Many Signatures with One Click

Transcript

Hello everyone and thank you for joining us today, welcome to this edition of Acrobat Sign Skill Builder. Before we jump in, I’d like to remind you that this session is being recorded and will be available within 24 hours, right here where you join today, you’ll also receive an email with a link to the recording for on-demand viewing, as always please make sure to ask any questions in the Q&A pod, on the right side of the screen we’ll have Adobe experts on standby ready to answer. We’ll answer as many questions as possible, but for those that we aren’t able to get to, there are several great resources that you can visit to learn more, we’ve dropped those in the Q&A pod for you to bookmark. Have you ever had to send a document to hundreds of signers where individuals need to sign a unique copy of that document, whether it be an NDA a release form, enterprise-wide policy update or any other single signer document? Perhaps you’ve also needed to personalize each document with the name, location or any other information that is specific to each individual signer, if so stick around to learn how you and your organization can benefit by leveraging Send in Bulk an Adobe Acrobat sign feature previously known as MegaSign. This can transform a very time-consuming process by enabling you to prepare the file once while sending hundreds of personalized documents and collecting individual responses. (Upbeat ambient music) Hi there Weston Romero here, Technical Product Evangelist at Adobe, today I am going to show you how to send to many signers at once using Send in Bulk, an Adobe Acrobat sign feature. We’ll show you first how to set up your CSV file, that will act as a mechanism for importing your recipient’s email addresses and other recipient specific data that can be merged into your documents form fields. Then we’ll show you how you can take that CSV file and send to many at once using the Send in Bulk function in Adobe Acrobat sign automatically importing your recipient’s email addresses, merging their specific data to fields on a single document template and sending for signature. Finally, we’ll look at managing and tracking agreement sent with Send in Bulk enabling you to continue to keep your finger on the pulse of your documents even when sending to many at once. We’ll start by covering the steps needed to set up your CSV file, but first it’s necessary to know the names of the fields in your document, especially if you plan on merging data to those fields from the file. There’s different ways of identifying the fields names depending on how they were added to your documents, let’s take a look.

Here in Microsoft Word I have a document where I leveraged Acrobat Sign text tax which Acrobat Sign will detect as form fields when uploaded and sent, I can also merge known data to these fields as I’m sending, allowing me to automatically personalize the document for my signing participant, which I’ll be doing so with Send in Bulk with a CSV file that imports that data. It’s important that I know the names of the fields that I’ll be merging the data to, as the name of the field will be specified in the column headers of my CSV. Essentially informing which form fields on the document will be populated with the data of my CSV file at the time of sending. In this example, I have a text tag here called name, this part of the tag is the name of my field and what I’ll use to prepare my CSV file and as you can see here, I have that tag repeated throughout my document where I’ll be merging the name of the signer to personalize this document for them. Here are some other fields that I’ll use to merge data to location, color, additional fields names I’ll take note of for my CSV. Okay, what if we created our templates another way such as in the Acrobat Sign user interface, what would that look like? Well, if we come over here to the manage page and then templates and come to the form that we need to get those fields names from we’ll just simply select edit to view our document and here we have the form fields, right clicking on the fields will show us the name of each field, this field name is also name.

Here again, we can see name has been specified and then name again with these other fields, we have location and color as the name.

Alright, now that we know the names of our fields we’re ready to begin preparing our CSV file coming to the homepage, we’ll click into Send in Bulk where we can download a sample, if we select import recipients and merge fields from file this will provide us with a sample CSV file that we can download, let’s go ahead and download the sample and take a look.

This shows us the first column that includes the email addresses of signing participants, everything to the right of the email column is optional but you can see in this example the full name company title, message, phone and zip code are values that are defined in the CSV that will merge the unique information entered into their cells below to each corresponding row where we’ve identified the participant by their email address. If we were to use the sample Casey would receive his own document to sign where his unique values would have been merged to the form fields matching the names of the column headers, whereas Jan would receive her own personalized agreement to sign. Okay, now let’s build out our own, I’ll go ahead and remove the email addresses here that were provided in the sample.

Great, so far I have just the email address column header here which is required for all bulks send and transactions. With each row below the column headers representing a transaction a minimum of two rows or transactions are required to import your recipients and their data using a CSV file, let’s enter in the email addresses of our participants.

Now that I’ve identified the email addresses of each unique participant who will receive their own document to sign, I’m ready to begin adding the names of those fields we collected earlier to my column headers which will allow Acrobat Sign to know which fields to merge the data to.

In my example, I’ll be merging my CSV file data to the form fields on the document named name, location and color.

The name we enter in should match exactly the name of the fields on the document, which is also case sensitive, my first signer’s name is Robin Blake who lives in New York and his favorite color is Blue, signer Jane is located in California and her favorite color is green.

Ivanna Sign is located in Florida and her favorite color is red. Now keep in mind that in most cases when you are sending in bulk to hundreds of people in merging unique values into each document that is delivered to the recipients defined in your CSV you’re likely not manually typing this information in rather copying or exporting in bulk from a form of database. In my example however I manually typed in my recipient’s data, now that I’ve gone in and identified each participant who will receive their own document with their own unique information in it I’m now ready to save my CSV file. We just looked at how you can prepare a CSV file with the email addresses of your signers and other specific data that you can import into Adobe Acrobat sign when sending to many with a single click, I’d like to start off the session with an easy question, what is your experience level with Adobe Acrobats sign? Now that you know how to properly prepare your CSV file let’s now take a look at the process of sending in bulk and use the CSV file we just prepared and saved, this is going to allow us to import our recipient email addresses and other sign our specific data that will merge to each recipient’s agreement.

To begin the process, we’re going to log into Adobe Acrobat sign where we’ll choose the Send in Bulk option, here we are taken to a page that allows us to go through the steps to define our send in bulk transactions just as we would if we were sending an individual agreement. Here at the top, we have the ability to type in or paste the email addresses of our signing participants but if you are sending to hundreds of participants that is not something you’d likely do and is where you would want to leverage the CSV to import your recipients in bulk, regardless of if you’re merging form filled data or not.

Selecting Upload will allow us to upload the CSV file that we prepared earlier, here I have my file that I’ll select and upload which you can see has just now been uploaded successfully. If needing to countersign, we could check the box here, that would allow us to specify whether we are needing to sign first or last but in my example, we won’t be countersigned.

The next thing to do is name our agreement, so I’ll go ahead and just call this sample form and then of course we have the message that each recipient defined in the CSV will receive in the email asking them to sign. Finally, we have the ability to choose from a list of languages for our recipients and then select the document template, we’ll be sending in bulk for signature just as we do when sending a single transaction from the send page, we have the ability to upload from our desktop, choose from our document library or from a cloud storage solution such as Google Drive. For now, we’ll choose from our document library and this is where I have my sample form that we looked at earlier where I was able to get the name of my fields.

At the top here we have the ability to choose from either password or knowledge-based authentication if needing to further identify the recipients.

We also have send options such as sending a password to open the fully signed PDF or set an expiration date which in my scenario this function is hidden. Lastly, we can preview position signature or add form fields by checking this box, but because we know that we are sending a document that has form fields on it already, we don’t need to do so. The only thing that’s left to do is select send and that will take the CSV with our recipients and the recipient data and merge the data to the document that each individual recipient is sent, let’s put it to the test and make sure it worked.

First, we’ll play the part of Ivanna Sign who just received an email asking her to sign, here we see that her signature is requested on the sample form and clicking into it will allow us to review and sign the document. When opened, we can see where her name, location and favorite color was successfully merged to the document.

Notice how Ivanna can’t change the data, that’s because the data was merged to read only fields, but we could have left any of the fields optional should we have wanted to allow the signer the ability to make adjustments to the data that was merged, now she’s ready to sign the document and will click here to sign to complete the process.

Okay great, let’s play the part of another signer, this time we’ll act as signer Jane who also received an agreement asking her to sign, you’ll notice that for signer Jane that when we click into her agreement to view and sign it, we’ll see that the information merged to the document is specific to her personalizing each document to its participant while allowing you to send many at once.

We just looked at how to send in bulk with Adobe Acrobat Sign personalizing each recipient’s agreement with their own data and we did it with a single send. We also looked through the lens of the signer showing you the personalized document and then securely signing with a trusted electronic signature. It’s time for another poll, we’d like to know how you send your documents for signature when needing to send to many at once.

The last thing that we’re going to look at today is managing and tracking the agreements that we Send in Bulk with Adobe Acrobats Sign and while sending in bulk with a single send is a powerful function, continuing to manage and track these agreements in bulk is just as important, let’s take a look.

Let’s start by going to the manage page and select Bulk Sends, here we can see the sample form Bulk Send that we initiated together, we can see the collective status is out for signature, which indicates that not all participants have signed some quick actions will allow us to open get form data or apply a no.

Clicking into the Bulk Send will allow us to see some high level details to the right as well as provide us with some additional actions such as open in bulk, send reminders, download the PDFs, form filled data or individual files, we can also hide the transactions from our view, share it, view the activity report or add notes. Down below we can see a high level status report that shows us that we initiated three total transactions from the Bulk Send, two of which still in progress with only one being completed, clicking into all will show us all of the transactions that were initiated from the Bulk Send providing the ability to manage these agreements at the individual transaction level. For instance, here I can click into the agreement, that shows me the information specific to Iavana Signs transaction, I can see the recipient and activity details.

For signer Jane, we can see that it was viewed by her but not yet sign, whereas for Rob it was sent out for signature but not yet viewed, but what if we wanted to send a reminder to both signer Jane and Rob since they haven’t signed yet, would I need to send one reminder at a time? No I wouldn’t, I would simply return to the Bulk Send section of the managed page, click into it and then select Remind which will allow me to remind everyone who still needs to sign and just like that we sent a bulk reminder to those who have yet to sign.

Another thing that we are able to do is view the activity report for our bulk sends providing us with a shareable report that shows us who initiated the process, the total number of recipients unsigned and signed transactions with those details further broken down below providing the visibility necessary to keep our finger on the pulse of our agreements even when sent to many.

We just looked at how to manage and track your agreements Send in Bulk with Adobe Acrobat Sign giving you the ability to track their progress as well as manage outstanding transactions by sending reminders to those who still need to sign it’s full-time and we’d love to know who is in our audience today, how do you typically use Adobe Acrobat Sign? Today we showed you how you can begin sending agreements in bulk, personalizing each recipient’s agreement with their own data while collecting individual responses all with a single send. We covered how to prepare the CSV file with need a recipient details, how to then upload and use the CSV file to send and personalize many agreements at once and then finally how to manage and track your agreements Send in Bulk.

I’m now going to take a moment to answer a few frequently asked questions about Send and Bulk with Adobe Acrobat Sign, one question that often comes up is, does Send in Bulk count as a single transaction since you’re just sending once? The answer is no. Each row with an email address specified in the CSV will count as its own transaction and the example I demonstrated today, I consumed three transactions by sending an agreement to Ivanna Sign signer Jane and Rob Blake. A follow on question to that is, well how many transactions can be sent at once with Send in Bulk? By default, you can send 300 transactions at once with Send in Bulk, but that count can be raised on the backend with proper approval, another question that’s frequently asked is how many signers can be included in each transaction when sending in bulk. With Send in Bulk, you can only include one signer per transaction unless the sender is countersign, if you have multiple participant workflows that you’re needing to send in bulk we’d recommend using GigaSign, which leverages the Acrobat Sign API to support the same functionality as Send in Bulk with additional support for multiple signers, recipient groups, recipient roles, agreement names, carbon copy and more, be sure to ask your account representative about GigaSign if you’d like to learn more, I have one last poll for you, I’d love to know if you’ve learned something new from today’s session.

As a reminder, this session has been recorded and will be available within 24 hours, right here where you joined today you’ll also receive an email with a link to the recording for on-demand viewing. Before I let you go today, let me point out a few resources you can bookmark to help you find answers to any questions we weren’t able to get to today. We’ve dropped those links in the Q&A pod, the first is the Adobe Help center where you’ll find user guides, tutorials and can use the search function to find what you are looking for, next is the Adobe Experience League, here you can access a vast library of learning content and courses, get personalized recommendations and connect with bellow learners. The Acrobat Sign and Support Community is another resource where you can view past discussions, join current ones or start your own, these monthly Skill Builder webinars are a great place to learn new skills or brush up on existing. You can register for future events and watch past webinars on demand and finally, the Acrobat Sign Resource Hub is a one-stop shop for everything Acrobat Sign, it includes tips and tricks, tutorials, customer stories the latest integrations and more. We’re always updating and adding to it so be sure to check back frequently, thanks for joining, I’m Weston Romero and this has been another session of Adobe Acrobat Sign Skill Builder. (upbeat ambient music)