Scholarship management made user-friendly
We currently Blackbaud Award Management as the management portal for scholarship applications and funds. It allows us to have one central …
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What is Blackbaud Award Management?
Blackbaud Award Management is a solution that aims to transform institutions' student awards programs and revolutionize donor stewardship practices. Built for higher education institutions of all types and sizes, this cloud-based solution is designed to serve as a catalyst to…
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What is Blackbaud Award Management?
Blackbaud Award Management is a solution that aims to transform institutions' student awards programs and revolutionize donor stewardship practices. Built for higher education institutions of all types and sizes, this cloud-based solution is designed to serve as a catalyst to improve student access…
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What is SmarterSelect?
SmarterSelect creates, manages, analyzes and evaluates online applications for the private and public sector. This application management system is designed for scholarships, grants and awards. SmartSelect, chosen by over 1,500,000 users for over 40,000 programs, was started in 2007 and is…
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- Competitors
- Tech Details
What is Blackbaud Award Management?
Blackbaud Award Management is a solution that aims to transform institutions' student awards programs and revolutionize donor stewardship practices. Built for higher education institutions of all types and sizes, this cloud-based solution is designed to serve as a catalyst to improve student access to awards and scholarship funds, create impactful stewardship practices, and enhance cross-functional visibility throughout the scholarship process.
Blackbaud Award Management Competitors
- AwardSpring
- Reviewr
- eForm Scholarship
Blackbaud Award Management Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
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(1-5 of 5)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
January 25, 2023
Scholarship management made user-friendly
We currently Blackbaud Award Management as the management portal for scholarship applications and funds. It allows us to have one central hub that store student applications and data, as well as award amounts and awarding history for scholarships. It's very easy to look up all the past recipients of a particular scholarship, or to view a specific student and see all their past applications and scholarships within the portal.
- Keeps awarding data in one central hub
- Allows users to easily review awarding history and application history
- Easily customizable for the average user
- The interface that students see is not the most user-friendly
- Exporting data sometimes results in weird symbols showing up throughout text in place of quotation marks or commas
- Support can be hit or miss
- Auto-match feature for scholarship matching
- Ability to run reports
- Ease of organization structure
- Donor Stewardship - Ability to store and pull thank you letters to share with donors
- Easy access to historical record of past awards allows us to determine when we may need to "ask" for more funding to increase impact
- Allows for quick answering of questions from donors regarding history or recipients
3
2
- Scholarship Management
- Award Management
- Historical tracking of awards
- Record keeping of thank you letters for donors
- Emergency Assistance Application
February 18, 2020
In a large public state university, we use this system to award over $600,000 annually - and we're only 1 college on campus!
At my institution, we are using Blackbaud Award Management across all 16 colleges and independent departments to manage our scholarship awards process. After being audited about 2 years ago, we were informed that we were not doing a good job allocating the scholarships we had at the university. The Foundation set out to find a product that would allow us the ability to award every scholarship in our portfolio with ease. My college awards the highest dollar amount out of this system and the largest number of awards, so we were particularly interested in how it worked and made our lives easier when awarding nearly $600,000 to 220+ students.
- This platform integrates our current university image, so students are not confused when they open the page. It was completely customizable so it had the same look and feel as our own university websites, which helps when switching to a new platform.
- This system automatically matches students to scholarship opportunities based on their existing data in the university system! This saved us a TON of time from having to individually look at student records and manually match them to scholarships across our colleges and units.
- We have had a few cases where we awarded a student a scholarship out of a single fund, and then later decided to increase that scholarship. Unfortunately, once a student has been assigned to a fund, we can't re-assign them or increase their amount - so we've had to clone opportunities in order to increase funds. This has been a headache when it comes to post-acceptance, because it prompts the student to complete the post-acceptance again as if it were a new award.
- With cloning opportunities, we are unable to rename the opportunity so it stands out. For instance, if I want to clone an opportunity so I can award the same student an additional amount, I have to "guess" on the drop down menu because the name of the opportunity is exactly the same as the original. It would be great if the dropdown menu gave some additional context into whether it was a cloned opportunity, which aid year it correlates to, etc.
- At the College level, it has helped us ensure that we award every dollar we have available for scholarships. In the past, we had a hard time finding qualified students for some of our difficult scholarships - but this system allowed us the ability to identify those students easily.
- I was not part of the team who purchased this software, so I can't say what the direct return on investment is, however, I know that the university needed a centralized system such as this because some colleges were not awarding their funds at all. For that reason, I can imagine that the return on investment has to be high!
Before Blackbaud Award Management, our university was not using any centralized scholarship award platform. Each College or unit was responsible for allocating their own awards, and our Foundation (who manages the funds) had one person who would double-check each award to the fund restrictions before approving the scholarship. This long process caused a lot of colleges to skip awarding their scholarships altogether, because of the amount of work it took to identify students and go through the distribution process. However, after being audited, the university felt a centralized system was very necessary to negate these issues. Before this system, my college created an application in Qualtrics for students to complete. Once complete, we spent roughly 4-6 weeks compiling all student record data for every applicant and then matching qualified applicants to individual scholarships internally. From there, our reviewers received an excel spreadsheet with the data of all students and an excel spreadsheet with the funds available (including fund restrictions) so they could make their decisions. The entire process typically took around 3-4 months between applications, data gathering, decision making, and award notification.
We use AcademicWorks to award all scholarships offered to students by the Tarrant County College Foundation. With an enrollment of 52,956, Tarrant County College is the sixth-largest college or university in Texas in 2017. AcademicWorks provides the software to effectively manage the process of applying, reviewing and offering a large number of scholarships for students in an ever-growing number of programs, to our student body.
- 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.
- 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.
- There are many factors that go into an ROI and it is hard to determine the impact that the AcademicWorks System alone has had. However, I can say that the scholarship committee reviewers that used to help evaluate students using our previous system much prefer the ease of doing the reviews in the AcademicWorks System. This is good because at times some of the committee reviewers have transitioned to become scholarship donors.
At the time that we made the switch, NextGen was not able to offer the option that committee reviewers could rank a student and that their ranking could carry over into multiple scholarships. We already had over 70 committee reviewers and the process to review some of the more general scholarship applicants was taking more than 10 hours. The AcademicWorks System allows each applicant to be ranked by a number of committee reviewers (you set the number of reviewers) one time and the score can be propagated across multiple scholarships. This is an efficient use of the reviewers time and keeps the time commitment manageable.
January 11, 2018
AcademicWorks works for us!
UC Hastings currently uses AcademicWorks to house our continuing students scholarship application and use it for the reviewing process. The Financial Aid department is the primary department that uses AcademicWorks. However, in the last year, Career Services has used it for the Public Interest Career Assistance Program grants they award by utilizing the application and review features.
- Ease of set-up of the scholarship applications every year.
- The report functionality allows us to be able to sort through the applicants easily.
- The review functionality is user-friendly that anyone new to the system can easily learn it.
- There could be improvement when attaching documents. Students sometimes get errors on uploading documents due to file names with certain characters.
- Room for improvement could be mobile functionality.
- It has provided a positive ROI in our scholarship management, without having to outsource this function in our department.
- The help we get from the support team is phenomenal that yearly set up can be done with a few days.
- For what we get done with it, it is a good investment.
AcademicWorks is the first product I have used for scholarship management. I have heard of other services but have not have had personal experience with them.
January 08, 2018
AcademicWorks Review - Tamika Davis
When I worked for the Arizona Community Foundation, I used AW daily. It was incredibly user-friendly and streamlined the organization's application process for over 80 scholarship opportunities. As a team, we were able to communicate through the software by using the notes features, efficiently qualify student submissions, and award scholarships to deserving applicants easily. Client service reps were responsive and knowledgeable, and the annual Client Conference was always a place to grow our proficiency with the product. I'd strongly recommend AcademicWorks to those interested in making scholarship administration a bit easier.
- Customer service
- Sorting of student applications per scholarship opportunity
- The cycle review in order to set up the next application cycle was always great!
- Some users may like a bit more customization
- If it's not currently a thing, an "if, then" algorithm for the general application would be helpful
- Easier searching in their client resource portal
- Increase in new scholarship fund holders
- Streamlined qualification of applications
- Faster processing of awards
- none
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