Blackbaud Award Management (formerly AcademicWorks) vs Ellucian Banner

• All colleges and universities have differences in the way scholarships are awarded at their schools. AcademicWorks listens to the individual needs of each college/university/scholarship provider and will either add system enhancements or help users to find ways to best utilize the system to meet their needs/requirements.
• The AcademicWorks help desk is very good about support. They are timely in contact and work to resolve issues quickly and effectively.
• AcademicWorks has worked closely with our IT Department to ensure that the imports and the system will work efficiently despite changes and updates.
• Students need to only complete one application to be automatically matched to hundreds of scholarship opportunities. This is a very efficient use of the applicant's time and efforts to apply for scholarships.

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• I think it's great to use if you are tracking grades for certain classes, especially if you'd like to see how students do, comparing midterm to final grades. If you have the permissions, you can see both.
• It's also good to track students individually. You can look up a certain semester, and see how they did in that particular time frame, but you can also see their cumulative gpa, or even look up their entire course history.

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• Ability to personalize applications - we serve many companies, and we get requests all the time to use their logo, but we can't do that in AcademicWorks.
• Selective reviews - some review committees don't want to review specific parts of applications, but we can't pick and choose which questions are reviewable for specific opportunities.

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• It still runs on COBOL: the code base is getting stale.
• The company's web portal is based on stale software stack, with little visible development.
• Updates are slow and often interlocked with seemingly-unrelated modules.
• Print output formatting is nearly nonexistent, requiring use of an expensive post-processor.

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• We have seen improved consistency in review and award of scholarships.
• We have seen a great increase in the number of annual applicants.
• One stop shop for students so we feel it is very customer friendly as our students and their families are our customers.

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• Banner was already in place when I arrived at my current school, but the centrality of Banner and its constituent applications contained therein has been far more integrated into the common business practices of the various disparate offices and their charges on campus. A hodgepodge of software that incongruously fits together by force of will or lack of other options seemed to rule the day for most other schools I've worked at. It was often someone's job to migrate data manually from one area to another just to get everything to work.
• I think Banner's limitations extend from its ubiquity, utility, and centrality. At this point, moving from Banner to an entirely different Student Information System would be like tearing out all of the water pipes in your house. We're an Ellucian school, and by hook or by crook, they're going to be a part of the student, faculty, and staff experience for some time.
• from what I know about the previous system used, it was an outdated system, based on very old software. Updating to Banner over 10 years ago meant that the school was able to accomplish far more with far less. This is not unique to Banner, but it is something that Banner is responsible for in our instance.

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