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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Neon Fundraise
Score 7.0 out of 10
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Neon Fundraise (formerly Rallybound, acquired by Neon One in 2018) offers an online social fundraising platform supporting event registration and campaign management with automation.
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.
Neon Fundraise (formerly Rallybound) is well suited to third-party fundraising. We use it for our walk fundraiser, and we enjoy the level of interactivity and customization it offers our constituents. It also makes donation entry and reporting fairly easy, so it would be well suited for operations with vast numbers of donations in cash, check, and credit. It might be less suited to events with a handful of large donations from corporate benefactors.
Rallybound is able to have websites that are user-friendly to our participants. Our participants are able to navigate through their profiles with ease. With our participants able to easily navigate their pages, the staff is able to spend less time asking questions and instead coach their fundraising efforts.
Rallybound is able to customize your website to your needs, for a fee of course. Rallybound is also able to customize certain reports for you if that specific report has not already been created. This is essential for my team when pulling revenue numbers or projecting future revenue/budgets.
Rallybound's customer service is quick to respond and helps navigate issues. This is crucial when you are on-site at an event trying to solve a problem.
Rallybound allows you to check-in individuals based off of the registration on their website. Their check-in is so simple and easy to use.
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 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
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.
I was not a part of the evaluation process when Rallybound was selected. Classy was one of our top three choices, however, when we decided to eventually go with Rallybound. I do know that my team continues to look for the best platform to use, and Classy is always discussed.
