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.
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Bonterra Case Management
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Case Management by Bonterra is a cloud-based solution for nonprofits of all sizes. It's designed to bring data to the forefront in order to bolster a nonprofit organization’s impact. Bonterra Case Management helps organizations to save time and resources because the tool makes managing data more efficient, so that users increase the time spent delivering the mission. Bonterra Case Management offers configurable forms and fields so organizations can customize their experience to their…
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Pricing
Blackbaud Award Management
Bonterra Case Management
Editions & Modules
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No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Blackbaud Award Management
Bonterra Case Management
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Required
Additional Details
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Pricing for Bonterra Case Management is driven by individual usage and needs of the nonprofit.
Organizations aren't one-size fits all, so neither is Bonterra's pricing.
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.
Well suited to tracking aid needed and provided to people; to developing a plan for helping - a roadmap. We use it to also identify which volunteers can help on various projects, to try to leverage volunteer experiences and linking to specific client needs.
Apricot by Social Solutions does a great job of making database administration simple and effective. It is easy for someone in the non-profit sector without much prior experience in similar programs to work on the back end of Apricot by Social Solutions building forms and doing reporting.
Apricot by Social Solutions is a generally user-friendly program that our staff of many different ages and abilities are able to utilize effectively.
The buildability of the program is a major plus for our organization, allowing us to cater Apricot by Social Solutions with exactly what we need for our programming and services.
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.
Almost every year I get a new customer care support person, and it can be hard to reorient each new person to my unique business case and use of Apricot by Social Solutions
In the past, I have had issues with communication from different departments in Apricot by Social Solutions about what I was getting as part of my contract. In my experience, when I had my initial meeting to kick off upgrading our Apricot by Social Solutions instance, the majority of the information the project consultant had was incorrect. I had to send an email to someone else to rectify the situation.
If Apricot by Social Solutions was compatible with phones that would be really helpful.
I wish the font size and formatting were more customizable when building out forms in Apricot by Social Solutions (e.g., more similar to how customizable Surveymonkey is with different surveys).
While the price is a bit high, the software provides everything we need to effectively award and track scholarships and awards within our institution. The ease of use allows for everyday users and occasional users to both be able to access the information they need without wasting time or resources
I went to the Summit a few weeks ago to learn about the future expansion and vision of Social Solutions. I already been with Apricot for 5 years and researched other products I still come back to Apricot and where it can grow with us.
Without any formal IT education, I was able to utilize their articles and videos to teach myself how to configure and customize the software to our organization (although I do recommend their Apricot Admin training to polish your skills). The majority of users are able to adapt immediately with minimal training.Staff that have challenges with technology in general do adapt to using the system once you can create buy in and engagement (although it does take time and training)
I lean on our centralized Foundation for support related to Blackbaud Award Management. However, any time I've had a question they couldn't answer, they were able to get the support quickly and efficiently. I give an 8, versus a 9 or 10, because our centralized office has had some requests in for changes to the system that have not been made. Some parts of the system are not working for our purposes, and we've asked for some changes that should be doable. However, the time it takes to get universal changes made is quite long
This is a difficult question to answer because when I hear the word "support" I think of this in multiple levels. The customer service on the front end, with my account manager is pretty good. There was a time for about a year and a half where I didn't even want to get to know this persons name because they wouldn't be there there long enough for me to get to know them. For the past 8-9 months we've had the same account manager, and this is helpful as a way to grow our trust in Apricot social solutions as well as the account manager understanding the needs of our organization. The technical support is also fine. The issues we most have problems with is how the technical support is calculated and the lack of roll-over of technical support time. If our account has 1 hour of technical support per month, but we don't need any technical support for 4 months, it would be great to have the ability to use those 4 hours (as time allows per the IT calendar) when we need them, even if it falls within one month. We've also had instances of working with IT persons who didn't seem to care at all about our issues, and seemed eager to put our call behind them and get onto the next without much thought as to why we were calling them in the first place. We've also had instances where the IT person didn't seem to really be listening to what it is we needed, and was heck bent on what they THOUGHT we needed rather than listening to what we actually did need. While we also have had experiences of working with IT persons who were absolutely great at working through issues. They were patient and understanding and would explain why a solution (c)would or (c)would not work. We even worked through those options in real time if they were unsure whether a data solution would work or not. That was great because we felt heard.
There need to be specialists who know how to best work with an organization developing a new program, not just transferring existing forms to a digital format.
Blackbaud Award Management easily integrates with their other softwares but award management is more specific to scholarship and award needs and tracking. RE NXT is moreso for the fundraising and tracking side of things whereas Award Management is for the scholarship side of things. Making sure you're purchasing the right sofware for your needs is important.
The ability to customize Apricot and the simple interface is incredibly appealing. Salesforce CMS may be more well known, and cheaper for nonprofits, but it's also seen as the "Cadillac" version and is overwhelming for many small to mid sized organizations. The build out can be expensive as well, although there is a more general knowledge about the product and integration options.
Our data reporting capability. We're able to do the most robust reporting we've ever done.
Was able to handle our rapid expansion (doubling program in 1 fiscal year).
We did have a loss of data near the beginning of our use of the system and never got a clear answer why it happened. Data was never recovered.
The cost to add additional users is really high, and there aren't many options to bundle or review user licenses to ensure we're getting the best deal.
