Blackbaud Award Management vs. SurveyMonkey Apply

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

If you are looking for a software that let's you create online forms seamlessly and also minimizes your company's work flow then this is the correct way to go. It has allowed us to get accurate response and also has helped us save enough time compared to when we're still using other softwares.

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

• SurveyMonkey Apply has the best customer service I've ever experienced in a company. They are easily accessible, super helpful and friendly, and they will work until they are able to find a solution.
• The platform for building an application on SurveyMonkey Apply is simple for the user. It's set up with such a clean format that is appealing to the eye and incredibly user-friendly.
• The application system also has a lot of flexibility, making it easy to customize your applications as needed.

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

• An average administration may not have the technical capabilities to adapt and shape it for themselves. While SurveyMonkey Apply has an option for tech support for a price, it is not something always easy for the admin.
• There is no way to cross reference users by Social Security Number or other identifier. In other words, a single applicant with multiple email addresses could potentially apply and receive benefits as the users are tied to email address not email address and SSN.

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

overall it's good, but the learning curve is rough

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

We think that Submittable is the top platform available and will continue to use it for our clients. The start-to-finish platform makes our workflow smarter and more efficient, leading to better decisions and bigger impact. We are always looking for new programs and when we landed on Submittable, we were sold.

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

• Positive Impact: allowed us to move to a more virtual office, just in time for COVID's forcing all to work from home/remotely.
• Negative Impact: made it much harder to capture all data we need to merge with all applicants since organization created.

Incentivized