Blackbaud Award Management vs. TargetX, from Liaison

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

Most of the reason I'd recommend the solution is for their email capabilities. The email builder is par excellence, almost if not more competitive than capabilities provided by some actual Email Marketing solutions. Additionally, it runs on Salesforce, and thus allows for automated emails and campaigns with information integrated into them from SF records. It is truly remarkable and a very well-developed capability.

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

• Bulk Email
• Analytics
• Event Management
• 3rd party product bundling & support

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

• When sending large volumes of email the campaigns can be slow to send
• The events functions are not as robust as some of the competition
• Their telemarketing component has not been updated in a while and leaves a bit for current call centers.

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

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

Given that it's an older solution and addresses a lot more use cases, there's a lot more bulk and technical debt in the solution. This may make it overwhelming for first-time users and administrators. The email builder though is truly par excellence.

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

• Increases in enrollment!
• More efficient funnel

Incentivized