Blackbaud Award Management Reviews & Insights

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

I think having buying to marry the products is crucial for success.

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.

Blackbaud Award Management provides us with a user-friendly platform for organizing and awarding the scholarships that we oversee as a College. We have 100+ different scholarships that we award each academic year, and this software allows us to track award amounts, recipients, and letters of thank you that we share each year with our community donors.

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.

Blackbaud Award Management is best suited for institutions that have many awards to track. From awarding amounts, student recipients, stewardship, reporting, etc this software is really helpful. If you are an organization with only a few awards, this software may not make sense and you may have a better tracking mechanism but for those, such as Universities, this software is very helpful.

At my institution, we are using Blackbaud Award Management across all 16 colleges and independent departments to manage our scholarship awards process. After being audited about 2 years ago, we were informed that we were not doing a good job allocating the scholarships we had at the university. The Foundation set out to find a product that would allow us the ability to award every scholarship in our portfolio with ease. My college awards the highest dollar amount out of this system and the largest number of awards, so we were particularly interested in how it worked and made our lives easier when awarding nearly $600,000 to 220+ students.

This system has all the intentions of being fantastic. It is a great system if you have scholarships that are blindly rated or scored, or if you have multiple users with a few scholarships each. However, as a college with hundreds of scholarships that have 200-300 qualified students for each one, it is difficult to have a blind process. Plus, if the university gave our college the ability to edit some things, they would have to give those permissions to every person with a login. Needless to say, the system is not quite equipped for multiple users within one university who all have different editing privileges. However, as cumbersome as it has been to learn and manipulate for our purposes, it has allowed us to award more funds than any year prior due to the ease of having all of the student data in one place.

We use AcademicWorks to award all scholarships offered to students by the Tarrant County College Foundation. With an enrollment of 52,956, Tarrant County College is the sixth-largest college or university in Texas in 2017. AcademicWorks provides the software to effectively manage the process of applying, reviewing and offering a large number of scholarships for students in an ever-growing number of programs, to our student body.

This is an excellent system for any college/university or scholarship provider that offers a large volume of scholarships to a high number of applicants. The price point might be a little high for a smaller school/provider and may not be worthwhile if their numbers are lower.

We use AcademicWorks to manage the applications, renewal applications and payments for over 250 scholarships. We handle the review process as well for our donors to evaluate applications that are submitted. As a community foundation, we have several different departments but scholarships is the only department using AcademicWorks. This has streamlined our application process as well as it keeps track of all transcripts and payments.

We manage over 200 applications online, and could definitely take on more. If you only manage a low number - this would still be great software, but you may not need this. Also, if you have very specific applications, this might not be the best fit. However, if most of your applications are the same and just vary with some specific questions - this is perfect!

UC Hastings currently uses AcademicWorks to house our continuing students scholarship application and use it for the reviewing process. The Financial Aid department is the primary department that uses AcademicWorks. However, in the last year, Career Services has used it for the Public Interest Career Assistance Program grants they award by utilizing the application and review features.

AcademicWorks is well suited for large university campuses that have various scholarships across different departments. AcademicWorks can streamline the application, reviewing and awarding processes for these large universities. It is less appropriate for smaller colleges that have fewer scholarships and who choose award recipients manually.

AcademicWorks (AW) is being used to manage our scholarship process. It is primarily used by me here at the foundation but other departments and scholarship committee members have limited access. It has helped tremendously in streamlining our scholarship program and saves time and effort.

[It's] Well suited for scholarship programs of any size. AW works one-on-one with the customer and helps address needs and workarounds to get the information needed.

When I worked for the Arizona Community Foundation, I used AW daily. It was incredibly user-friendly and streamlined the organization's application process for over 80 scholarship opportunities. As a team, we were able to communicate through the software by using the notes features, efficiently qualify student submissions, and award scholarships to deserving applicants easily. Client service reps were responsive and knowledgeable, and the annual Client Conference was always a place to grow our proficiency with the product. I'd strongly recommend AcademicWorks to those interested in making scholarship administration a bit easier.

Colleges and community foundations are particularly appropriate users of the product. I'd say small family foundations with scholarship offerings would be least appropriate for its use.

Our university uses AcademicWorks as our central scholarship portal - from application to review to award to collection of post-acceptance items like thank you notes across our undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools/departments. We have over 900 individual scholarship opportunities on the portal and make close to 2000 awards annually. We have been on the product since 2014.

We have had a challenge with our "arts" programs and the upload of portfolio type files - may be video, animation, etc.