Blackbaud Education Management Solutions is a unified student management system for K–12 private schools. Blackbaud Enrollment Management System™: Gives schools and families the ability to track admissions progress from first impressions all the way through the application process to acceptance, enrollment, and tuition payment. Blackbaud Learning Management System™: Track students' academic performance and progression…
N/A
Salesforce Education Cloud
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Salesforce for Higher Ed combines the Salesforce Lightning Experience with HEDA (Higher Ed Data Architecture), providing a cloud platform supporting student management and engagement, admissions and academics, and other higher ed administrative support functions.
N/A
Pricing
Blackbaud Education Management Solutions
Salesforce Education Cloud
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Blackbaud Education Management Solutions
Salesforce Education Cloud
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Blackbaud Education Management Solutions
Salesforce Education Cloud
Features
Blackbaud Education Management Solutions
Salesforce Education Cloud
Student and Faculty Administration
Comparison of Student and Faculty Administration features of Product A and Product B
Blackbaud Education Management Solutions
-
Ratings
Salesforce Education Cloud
8.8
5 Ratings
6% above category average
Integrations with 3rd-Party Education Technology
00 Ratings
8.14 Ratings
Online Registration Management
00 Ratings
8.75 Ratings
District Communications, such as messaging and alerting
A good, and constantly improving solution for private schools. I don't know that a lot of its functionality would be well suited to public schools, but maybe? The integration with other Blackbaud software is a huge plus for us, as we have several of their other products including their flagship Raiser's Edge. Smaller schools may not need the sophistication of Blackbaud solutions, and it is not an inexpensive option.
It is most suited for those within the education industry. For students and staff in particular, the Education Cloud allows seamless connectivity between each person and helps students stay on task. It can be very overwhelming as a student to have so many responsibilities in different areas, so Salesforce does a great job of offering many features that ease this process.
Not being able to customize displays, for example, Grading tab - we just finished 1st semester and teachers could only see the current quarter but not the 1st one which is still part of the first semester. Lack of customization in assessments.
Scheduling- even though re-running generating schedules, we're still getting a high number of unscheduled students. Lack of being able to limit the number of scheduled classes in a row for teachers.
It’s hard to run reports or create working “views” for Enrollment/Student Advisor teams that include both Leads and Contacts in the same report.
Some fields do not map from Lead to Contact object. When a student transitions from application to acceptance, some dropdown and fill-in fields completely disappear from the student’s page in Salesforce. Every version of Salesforce I’ve used has this problem.
Salesforce overall is clunky and confusing for the average user. We require thorough Salesforce training for new hires on all teams because it’s not user-friendly or obvious what to click on to achieve a specific task.
It is a solid product. We have some issues with the capabilities of the website building components and the out dated technology behind its communications software but overall Blackbaud Education Management Software services to combine numerous functions into one product.
Blackbaud EMS is very usable from my perspective. I am a power user and get lots of valuable functionality. It is, however, a complex system. Sometimes necessarily complex to accommodate flexibility for diverse customer needs. Some complexity seems unnecessary and/or hold-over functionality from earlier versions; nice to see this type being evolved away from over time. It is valuable to receive regular updates to the system along with good release notes of what changed and notices of significant changes in advance.
Decent support however the chat feature can take a great amount of time out of the workday. If for instance you are waiting for someone to respond in the chat and there is a fire drill, if you are not responding within a few minutes, you are disconnected and have to start all over again. It would be great if you could submit your problem and then whoever has the most experience, can respond. The training in the Blackbaud University is good but also time-consuming - a 3 hr training in the middle of a workday is a lot to ask. I like the 90-minute sessions. It would also be great to offer a shorter webinar to update on any changes implemented. Other than the email I subscribed to, there is no information on how these updates actually work.
People will respond on time even though Salesforce is such a large organization. This also includes various methods of getting support beyond just calling - they have dedicated reps, chat, chatter, etc that all make the experience more pleasant.
Blackbaud K-12 is very similar. I feel like I would be trading one set of issues for another so it's kind of a wash. We are very much hooked into the Blackbaud website with our Google SSO, SmartTuition, and Schooldoc integrations. It would be difficult for us to transition. That is the main reason I haven't really entertained other web firms.
I have not used similar products and I am new to this role. Salesforce has been very easy to learn and I appreciate the support and ability to access the platform when I need to. I was able to easily learn the program and become skilled in what I needed to do. It also made the transition to digital forms quite easy
Negative - The rollout is brutal. Blackbaud said it could happen in 6 months, but that is definitely not a reality. It will take well over a year, and one complete school cycle to actually integrate everything correctly.
Positive - The amount of time saved in data processing has allowed our office to become more involved in other areas of the school.
Positive - The ease of having everything in [one] place, from inquiry to application to contracts and course registration, has been a HUGE benefit to our applicants and their families.
Positive: Our entire company is more aligned because while still complying with FERPA, the right people have access to student records while also having the correct permissions.
Positive: we can integrate with our partners who also use Salesforce, while still complying with FERPA.
Negative: we've needed to hire a Salesforce Development team with multiple people to accurately customize the tool to work for us.
