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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Copper
Score 6.5 out of 10
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Copper is a customer relationship management (CRM) built as an integration into Google Apps.
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.
Copper has helped me extensively keep track of not only my own but my company's workflow. With so many projects and quotes to track, it has become essential to keep me on task and not miss any of our goals. It has been a perfect fit with our specific workflow, but I don't think it has the customizability just yet to be a perfect fit for every company out there.
I think the Opportunities Pipeline is probably the best feature of the CRM. The versatility of it allows for pipelines to be made for not only sales but myriad of other ways.
Copper's commitment to customer satisfaction is pretty spectacular. Many CRMs aren't as dedicated to this and provide their customers with simple how to articles that fall short of being an actual help.
Copper's ability to sync with Google is an undersold perk. If a company relies on the Google workspace, Copper is an amazing tool to work alongside with Google.
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.
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 would rate Copper overall usability as a 10. It is easy to use. I am not extremely computer friendly so I needed to find something that would fit what I can do. Copper definitely fit the bill. I would highly recommend it to anyone of any level of computer knowledge.
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
It has been so far so good, they have been quick to respond to queries, and do follow up as well. But then again this is a work in progress and I guess they would not have a solution to every problem every posed to them right away. Hence I will refrain from making any judgments.
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.
For my company, we chose Copper over Salesforce and HubSpot for a few reasons. First and foremost, G-Suite integration. This was one of the most attractive features we liked about Copper. The integration allows for seamless lead import, automated activity tracking and much more. Second, Copper is designed with the end user in mind. It has to be one of the simplest CRMs I have ever used. Additionally, Copper has fantastic customer success managers who make sure you are getting the most out of the platform. Lastly, Copper has very competitive pricing and offers many features of the big name CRMs at a much more economical price point
I used ProsperWorks at a startup with around 100 people that was undergoing a serious sales crisis. ProsperWorks, I would say, was the number one tool to turn around the sales team as it allowed one book of truth and one place where every one could finally be on the same page.
It's hard to judge ROI on the joy of using a well designed product. After using SFDC or Hubspot or any other CRM, ProsperWorks will feel like a Ferrari. Everything is fast, everything is smooth, and it's lightweight in a good way.
The ROI was excellent based on a productivity stand point. Being able to pull up daily activity reports went a LONG way to ensuring the sales team was hitting their marks, and getting done what they need to get done.
