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 …
Overview
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…
Recent Reviews
Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
Pricing
N/A
Unavailable
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…
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Would you like us to let the vendor know that you want pricing?
1 person also want pricing
Alternatives Pricing
N/A
Unavailable
What is Awardco?
Amazon are available through Awardco for rewards and recognition. Awardco has partnered with Amazon Business to bring millions of reward choices, lower vendor fees and dollar-for-dollar recognition spend to organizations. The vendor boasts more choice, more capability, and less spend, in a simple…
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…
Product Details
- About
- 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 |
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(17)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(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.
July 17, 2018
AcademicWorks has changed the game!
We use AcademicWorks to manage the applications, renewal applications and payments for over 250 scholarships. We handle the review process as well for our donors to evaluate applications that are submitted. As a community foundation, we have several different departments but scholarships is the only department using AcademicWorks. This has streamlined our application process as well as it keeps track of all transcripts and payments.
- Reporting - pulling reports in AcademicWorks is so simple and quick. Whether I am putting together a report of applicants for a donor, or the pulling the applicants from a specific school or major, I can do it by the click of a button.
- Support - if I ever have questions or need help problem solving, the support desk is readily available.
- Flexibility - we can customize pretty much every aspect of how the user experiences AcademicWorks
- Ability to personalize applications - we serve many companies, and we get requests all the time to use their logo, but we can't do that in AcademicWorks.
- Selective reviews - some review committees don't want to review specific parts of applications, but we can't pick and choose which questions are reviewable for specific opportunities.
- 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.
We used Award Spring and Smarter Select in the past.
January 08, 2018
AcademicWorks User Review
AcademicWorks (AW) is being used to manage our scholarship process. It is primarily used by me here at the foundation but other departments and scholarship committee members have limited access. It has helped tremendously in streamlining our scholarship program and saves time and effort.
- Customer Service - Although sometimes frustrating that reps are not immediately available by chat or phone, they usually do respond and resolve within two business days.
- Implementation - Training and working with IT and primary users to get the most out of the system.
- Listening - When users have suggestions to improve the program, AW actually listens and has an enhancement request list. If several users ask for the same thing, we are likely to see that addressed in an upcoming enhancement.
- Customer Service - Has slipped in the last year, since merging with Blackbaud. Not as responsive or knowledgeable overall.
- Time saving.
- Easier for reviewers to score applications.
- Easier for references to submit their recommendations.
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
N/a