Blackbaud Award Management vs. WizeHive Zengine

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

I highly recommend this software, as it has allowed us to be much more transparent with the delivery of benefits and their applications, also the hours of work in this regard are less, allowing staff to devote to other tasks. A very useful and necessary software.

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

• It has made the application, which is almost identical to the application questions previously displayed by our old service, seem less daunting and more user friendly to grant applicants.
• The grant review team has exclaimed that the side-by-side review option is the best feature ever invented and has saved them loads of paper.
• Internally, I appreciate the ease of use of the back end system. Being able to easily assign grants to reviews both in and outside the organization, easily create queries for the stats I need, and the ability to move application through the steps of the system seamlessly make this my top choice since I'm the only staff member dedicated to the Foundation which leaves me with lots on my plate to balance.

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

• It's messy- we can only apply a question to a certain amount of applications so we have 2-3 of a lot of questions
• The affiliate directors can't export an excel file from their dashboard
• If a question changes or becomes required or not required it impacts all past applications

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

We are so happy with the service that we just signed the contract for another year.

Incentivized

The platform is very basic. On the other and, our staff does not take advantage of its full capabilities because such features did not work well for us/fit our needs

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

We didn’t really use their support. I wish they would have told us more about the fact they were changing to get rid of the flash player as that was the main reason we left.

Incentivized

Their design team gave us the option to save some money by creating the forms ourselves for both the submission and review portals. This also allowed us to get to a point where we felt very comfortable in any future changes that would need to be made to forms since we were so immersed in creating them.

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

SurveyMonkey and SurveyGizmo are great to use for other programs and events that require collecting fairly basic responses and feedback, however, these don't provide the level of information and data that is needed for our grants processes. WizeHive provides a number of tools and other benefits that are just beyond these products' capabilities

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

• Zengine is definitely a time-saver, but there are a myriad of grant management software platforms on the market that save just as much time, some even more time-saving. But if you have a basic need to offer an application process of any sort (grant, scholarship, etc.) to the public, Zengine can be very helpful in saving time and keeping everything related to the grant handy in one location, and all connected (application, reviews, final reports, etc.).

Incentivized