Blackbaud Award Management

Score7 out of 10

18 Reviews and Ratings

What is Blackbaud Award Management?

Blackbaud Award Management is a solution that aims to transform institutions' student awards programs and revolutionize donor stewardship practices. Built for higher education institutions of all types and sizes, this cloud-based solution is designed to serve as a catalyst to improve student access to awards and scholarship funds, create impactful stewardship practices, and enhance cross-functional visibility throughout the scholarship process.

Categories & Use Cases

#1 most frequent

Educational Services

82.8%

135 installations of 163

#2 most frequent

Public Administration

8.0%

13 installations of 163

#3 most frequent

Other Services (except Public Administration)

2.5%

4 installations of 163

Verified User

Director (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I heavily use it to manage our scholarship. However, our financial team will not link it with RE or FE to truly make it a better integration. I have yet to understand and truly figure out a 4 year renewal scholarship effectively despite numerous attempts

Pros

organzing information

Cons

renewals are impossible to understand
bulk communication updates for the offer emails

Return on Investment

keeping all the info centralizes is great
lack of training has hurt continutity

Usability

Ashley Milton View profile

Alumni Development Manager, College of Education at Florida State University (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

This platform integrates our current university image, so students are not confused when they open the page. It was completely customizable so it had the same look and feel as our own university websites, which helps when switching to a new platform.
This system automatically matches students to scholarship opportunities based on their existing data in the university system! This saved us a TON of time from having to individually look at student records and manually match them to scholarships across our colleges and units.

Cons

We have had a few cases where we awarded a student a scholarship out of a single fund, and then later decided to increase that scholarship. Unfortunately, once a student has been assigned to a fund, we can't re-assign them or increase their amount - so we've had to clone opportunities in order to increase funds. This has been a headache when it comes to post-acceptance, because it prompts the student to complete the post-acceptance again as if it were a new award.
With cloning opportunities, we are unable to rename the opportunity so it stands out. For instance, if I want to clone an opportunity so I can award the same student an additional amount, I have to "guess" on the drop down menu because the name of the opportunity is exactly the same as the original. It would be great if the dropdown menu gave some additional context into whether it was a cloned opportunity, which aid year it correlates to, etc.

Return on Investment

At the College level, it has helped us ensure that we award every dollar we have available for scholarships. In the past, we had a hard time finding qualified students for some of our difficult scholarships - but this system allowed us the ability to identify those students easily.
I was not part of the team who purchased this software, so I can't say what the direct return on investment is, however, I know that the university needed a centralized system such as this because some colleges were not awarding their funds at all. For that reason, I can imagine that the return on investment has to be high!

Alternatives Considered

Qualtrics

Other Software Used

Qualtrics, Canvas, MS SharePoint, OneDrive, DocuSign, Microsoft Teams, GoToMeeting

Verified User

Administrative Assistant (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We currently Blackbaud Award Management as the management portal for scholarship applications and funds. It allows us to have one central hub that store student applications and data, as well as award amounts and awarding history for scholarships. It's very easy to look up all the past recipients of a particular scholarship, or to view a specific student and see all their past applications and scholarships within the portal.

Pros

Keeps awarding data in one central hub
Allows users to easily review awarding history and application history
Easily customizable for the average user

Cons

The interface that students see is not the most user-friendly
Exporting data sometimes results in weird symbols showing up throughout text in place of quotation marks or commas
Support can be hit or miss

Most Important Features

Auto-match feature for scholarship matching
Ability to run reports
Ease of organization structure

Return on Investment

Donor Stewardship - Ability to store and pull thank you letters to share with donors
Easy access to historical record of past awards allows us to determine when we may need to "ask" for more funding to increase impact
Allows for quick answering of questions from donors regarding history or recipients

Other Software Used

Raiser's Edge, Jotform

Verified User

Director (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Blackbaud Award Management has been a huge asset in helping us keep track of scholarships and awards. Without it, and having numerous scholarships in multiple colleges, it would be a challenge in keeping track of things ranging from award amounts, students, distributions, amounts available to award, etc. This software helps us keep everything organized in one place.

Pros

Scholarship award organization
Donor reports
Award tracking

Cons

Increased emphasis on donor stewardship through the software
Connecting reports in RE NXT
More filters on forms

Most Important Features

Award Tracking
Organization of Awards
Donor Reports

Return on Investment

Allows us to see where we can increase scholarship awards.
Allows us to see what has gone un-awarded which can trigger a needed conversation.
Allows us to provide easy reports to donors and development members.

Alternatives Considered

Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT

Rhonda Seyfried View profile

Scholarship Manager at Tarrant County College (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

All colleges and universities have differences in the way scholarships are awarded at their schools. AcademicWorks listens to the individual needs of each college/university/scholarship provider and will either add system enhancements or help users to find ways to best utilize the system to meet their needs/requirements.
The AcademicWorks help desk is very good about support. They are timely in contact and work to resolve issues quickly and effectively.
AcademicWorks has worked closely with our IT Department to ensure that the imports and the system will work efficiently despite changes and updates.
Students need to only complete one application to be automatically matched to hundreds of scholarship opportunities. This is a very efficient use of the applicant's time and efforts to apply for scholarships.

Cons

Our school is unique in that we require a minimum of two references to be completed per applicant and they must be the right references. One must be a teacher/instructor if the applicant has been a student in the last 5 years and the others must be professional level references. To date there is no way for the system to identify and qualify students based on their references, so this process falls to us.

Return on Investment

There are many factors that go into an ROI and it is hard to determine the impact that the AcademicWorks System alone has had. However, I can say that the scholarship committee reviewers that used to help evaluate students using our previous system much prefer the ease of doing the reviews in the AcademicWorks System. This is good because at times some of the committee reviewers have transitioned to become scholarship donors.

Alternatives Considered

NexGen

Reviewr

AwardSpring

Blackbaud Award Management

What is Blackbaud Award Management?

Categories & Use Cases

Most Frequent Users

Educational Services

Public Administration

Other Services (except Public Administration)