Blackbaud Tuition Management vs. Salesforce.org Education Cloud

Smart Tuition is a good platform for schools that want to incorporate the financial aid application process and billing together. Parent use is easy to navigate, and it reduces the time spent by school staff to manage accounts. In a school where the financial aid application process is not done by a third party, Smart Tuition may not be the option they are looking to implement.

Incentivized

It is most suited for those within the education industry. For students and staff in particular, the Education Cloud allows seamless connectivity between each person and helps students stay on task. It can be very overwhelming as a student to have so many responsibilities in different areas, so Salesforce does a great job of offering many features that ease this process.

Incentivized

• Website is easy to navigate
• Customer service is very professional and helpful
• Multiple options for making payments and setting up accounts

Incentivized

• Great use of integrating across all aspects of enrollment.
• Easy to create tasks for counselors to remember to call prospective students and keep up to date on goals.
• Reporting is fabulous inside of Salesforce.
• All of the Apps in the App Exchange.

Incentivized

• I have been happy with Smart Tuition and have not had any issues.

Incentivized

• It’s hard to run reports or create working “views” for Enrollment/Student Advisor teams that include both Leads and Contacts in the same report.
• Some fields do not map from Lead to Contact object. When a student transitions from application to acceptance, some dropdown and fill-in fields completely disappear from the student’s page in Salesforce. Every version of Salesforce I’ve used has this problem.
• Salesforce overall is clunky and confusing for the average user. We require thorough Salesforce training for new hires on all teams because it’s not user-friendly or obvious what to click on to achieve a specific task.

Incentivized

It was really so easy to sign up and get going with the whole process

Incentivized

People will respond on time even though Salesforce is such a large organization. This also includes various methods of getting support beyond just calling - they have dedicated reps, chat, chatter, etc that all make the experience more pleasant.

Incentivized

I use FACTS in my role at work, and my children's school uses Smart Tuition. I am more familiar with Smart Tuition as a parent, but it seems to be a good solution for the high school. Since we do the financial aid in-house at my school of employment, FACTS works better for us.

Incentivized

I have not used similar products and I am new to this role. Salesforce has been very easy to learn and I appreciate the support and ability to access the platform when I need to. I was able to easily learn the program and become skilled in what I needed to do. It also made the transition to digital forms quite easy

Incentivized

• Excellent tracking of accounts for the school
• Customer service interacts with the parents' questions
• One system for the school staff to manage

Incentivized

• Positive: Our entire company is more aligned because while still complying with FERPA, the right people have access to student records while also having the correct permissions.
• Positive: we can integrate with our partners who also use Salesforce, while still complying with FERPA.
• Negative: we've needed to hire a Salesforce Development team with multiple people to accurately customize the tool to work for us.

Incentivized