Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Well suited for sending mass emails or emails to certain groups, sending automated emails, collecting donations, and peer-to-peer communication. They have a good support team. I'm still figuring out how to best manage supporters, it's not as intuitive as I would like. I used to just manage all donor information on Google Sheets, and I still prefer Google Sheets.
Read full review Pros Keeps awarding data in one central hub Allows users to easily review awarding history and application history Easily customizable for the average user Read full review User-Friendly. As a user, it is an intuitive product. When you are working, it is easy to navigate. Fundraising Pages: Salsa Engage allows you to easily and quickly make fundraising pages that can be pushed out to your community of donors. CRM: Easy to manage the constituents. When someone signs up for our fundraising pages, the software captures the demographics and either matches up to the existing donor or creates a new constituent. Salsa CRM listens to their customers and works well with the user base. Most ideas are listened to and can see that requests are pushed out in updates. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review When we started with Salsa, not every option was available online, some were desktop specific. As it has been some time since I worked with Salsa these have probably been resolved. The ability to communicate between Salsa CRM and other Salsa software options. Sometimes the crossover was not as efficient as was needed. Tagging and setting up rules for particular donors was somewhat confusing - meaning, therefore, that the amount of training needed to implement the software was somewhat intensive. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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
Read full review It suits all of our needs.
Read full review Usability You do not have to be a tech-savvy person to be able to use the CRM. Reporting is easy to do.
Read full review Support Rating 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
Read full review Their tech support is very good and I am very pleased with it. They speak in non-techie lingo for my non-techie staff just as easily as they speak techie to me (a techie). I appreciate their quick turn around in time to answer our questions and the follow up to make sure their answer(s) helped.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review I have reviewed
Salsa Engage and perhaps after our transition has taken place it might be a viable option versus using Constant Contact for internal and external correspondence.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Has helped increase our donor retention as we are able to track all communications with donors ensuring that they remain connected. The improved emailing (with fewer bounce rate) has helped increase our website and donation page visibility. We've sold more tickets to our fundraising events with an improved event management system. Read full review ScreenShots