Blackbaud Award Management vs. Causeview

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.

Incentivized

I think Causeview is well suited for those who are looking to track revenue and donor information in the same place. It is good to have your database with all of your contacts integrated with the same system that you use to process things such as donations and event registrations, so it saves time and we don't have to maintain separate systems for our development work and our other revenue-generating strategies. We also use reports to pull up information about donors and use that information for fundraising -- for example, donor history and things like that.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Causeview's support team is mostly helpful and quick to respond.
• Causeview integrates event registrations within Salesforce.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Event registration and donation pages could be better designed - not up to par with sites such as Eventbrite
• I would like to have the option for people to register with more than one e-mail address instead of creating a duplicate record each time someone uses a different e-mail.
• Some of my coworkers find Causeview confusing to use or difficult to find information.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Causeview's support is a lone bright spot. They are often quick to respond. They are generally helpful, although brief in their answers and explanations. I would appreciate more detailed answers to technical problems, but I do appreciate their support's problem solving ability

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I did not personally select Causeview for my organization, but I have found it easy to use in comparison with other similar systems. The fact that Causeview can be added to Salesforce, and hop on our existing database, is very important to us and is one of the main reasons we continue to use the service.

Incentivized

• We had a 24% increase in applications received after the first year
• We had a 10% increase in scholarship dollars awarded
• We had an increase in scholarship funds opened, including companies we weren't able to accommodate before.

Incentivized

• Negative: expensive per-license fee with no discount for added users.
• Negative: unreliable servers that host donate pages.

Incentivized