AdmitHub vs. Blackbaud Award Management

AdmitHub is nearly ideal for student success and retention with traditionally aged and younger students. They enjoy engaging with the platform and the AI. However, many of our older students do not enjoy engaging with the platform and the AI. In fact, some find it frustrating and confusing. If a bot that was somehow friendlier to older students was implemented, that would be ideal.

Incentivized

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

• The AI conversations were surprisingly engaging.
• However, the AI conversations did take a while to learn to respond to some inquiries.
• Enriched and detailed analytics as well as customizable surveys.

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

• The majority of our students are low-income, and at times, they are unreachable as a result of losing internet or cellular service. If mailed flyers and handouts could be generated, that would be great!
• I wish we could do more of our own personalized messaging.
• I wish there were a few more mobile application specific features.

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

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

Both Ravenna and Salesforce Education Cloud both feature robust online enrollment management and lead-tracking solutions. However, AdmitHub is superior with regard to communications, as well as AI and replacing manual tasks with automated processes. AdmitHub has a superior ability to send surveys, which has been extremely helpful in making
data-driven decisions, especially during the global pandemic. The
system proved very easy to use to train end-users.

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

• We have had an 11% uptick in year over year retention.
• We completed an all-student survey in less than a third of the time of any previous year.
• We are trending towards reaching pre-pandemic enrollment levels a semester sooner than expected.

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