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 As a SIS, Banner Pages is the full meal deal. There are multiple modules that integrate out of the box. Because Banner is all I've ever used as a SIS, I can't contrast it with another program. I can say, it gets the job done for us. I will also say that a tremendous amount of time goes into strategizing how to get new functions to work for us and there always seems to be some catch that requires even more work. In general, the university has been hesitant to build too many modifications into Banner because they take a lot of time to maintain. Inevitably, a new update (of which there are MANY for Banner) will break stuff that isn't "vanilla." This is unfortunate because we've had some great ideas for how to make Banner better for us, but also understandable. If you're looking for a highly modular system, this isn't it. Banner has lots of components, but the components work the way they work and that's that. Also, don't expect very quick responses to bugs or glitches. If the bug is major, yes, it will be addressed. But, little function issues seem to be regularly overlooked.
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 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. 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 One thing I miss from the previous version of Ellucian Banner, is the control + page down. I struggle with alt + page down. I love the Ellucian Banner favorites; however, it is a little difficult to navigate. I can honestly only think of 2 things that could be improved. I use Ellucian Banner daily. 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 We have no reason not to renew with Ellucian - we are in deep with the ecosystem, and have Ellucian providing us with information technology support. If anything, should the opportunity arise, we'd probably consider adding a different ellucian tools into the suite of applications we already have on board.
Read full review Usability You definitely have to learn it before it becomes easy to use. It's better than it was, but it's still not entirely intuitive. You can't just look at it and play around to figure out how it works
Read full review Reliability and Availability It's pretty much up all the time.
Read full review Performance Has gotten much better due to new hardware.
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 Our department generally does not contact the support center for Banner but the IT department does. That being said, in the seven years that I have been here, I have not once needed to contact the support center; we have had no glitches on Banner's side that needed to be addressed.
Read full review Implementation Rating very satisfied, along with the IT staff and ellucian support the upgrades do very well and have minimum down time.
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 PeopleSoft was more user-friendly. It also provided the ability to save and bookmark queries.
PeopleSoft will allow users to use common names to search for queries. Overall, it seemed much more current than Banner.
PeopleSoft provided enrollment data for specific sections which allowed one to spot trends of enrollment in a given class.
Read full review Scalability being able to scale with hardware was easy and not cumbersome. We were allowed to user virtual machines which made things very scalable.
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 There is positive ROI on the product overall. It had reduced or allowed us to focus our staff members on something which is very use and it does the job in the background. The application has supported in a lot of ways in saving resources and utilizing them in very productive & efficient manner Read full review ScreenShots