Blackbaud Education Management Solutions

I think it is very user friendly and support is for the most part helpful and knowledgable.

It's well suited for the applicant portal but could use some improvement on the reporting side. It is also well suited for the parents to access their kids' information and the kids like it okay for their access. I have heard that the faculty would like some improvements so that they can post more things on their pages.

Since Blackbaud acquired WhippleHill, the product has been gradually improving. Support is also responsive and well done. Google Classroom is eating away at our use of the class pages and grading, and I don't know if BlackBaud Education Management Solutions can match the pace of innovation there.

Blackbaud Education Management Solutions is well suited for any school, particularly if the school has more than 100 students. For a school smaller than that, I am not sure Blackbaud Education Management Solutions would be worth the investment. The switch over to Blackbaud Education Management Solutions was difficult, as is any change from one database management system to another, but the training along the way was excellent and the chat support has been superb. I find myself on the help chat at least once a week, and am routinely satisfied with the quick and effective response.

It is very useful for teachers to present material, links, assignments, etc. to students.

Blackbaud Education Management Solutions is particularly strong for grades 6-12, where students are fully interactive with the LMS--for assignments, schedule, grades, etc.

Blackbaud Education Management Solutions gives all users a platform that meets multiple needs. It has the ability to organize sports teams, classes, student groups, community groups, boarding groups (we do not use this). Overall, we are very pleased with what it accomplishes and allows us to do. They have frequently updated features over the last 8 months in response to distance learning, hybrid learning, and in person learning.

Their website tools are not adequate. Anyone is better off with a WordPress site than using their website tool. They should abandon it and become a WordPress design firm and work on plugins for integration with WordPress.
The LMS is great. I love the grade book, integration with Grading Report Card.
There is a need to improve assessment tools and their reliability.
Their messaging system needs the ability to cc Reply or Reply-All. It should mirror an email system instead of a message board.

It is well suited for parents, students and employees being able to access information from anywhere. During this time of so many being quarantined, it has been so helpful to everyone to be able to continue working from home.

Works great for a small admission office. You will need help though if you are looking to do more in depth reporting without the help of an IT department. The Advanced reports are very complecated to figure out on your own and you feel like you need an computer science degree to create reports.

Blackbaud Education Management Solutions is well suited for private schools with relatively tech savvy users. It's a little difficult to implement with older/less tech savvy users.

Blackbaud On products are well suited for the school that wants to integrate all systems into one platform. While it might take time for the transition, it is well worth the effort. With the customization of the products and the "self-serve" functionality in which schools have control of the customization, options are endless. Schools that do not have a "growth-mindset" may be resistant to jump in to a total solution.

It's well suited for connecting the various aspects of the school together for the benefit of student learning. Some of my teachers find it too cumbersome to import their assignments but that is more due to the unwillingness of our teachers to learn ANY new system, rather than specifically onCampus.

LMS aspect is extremely strong. The user interface is intuitive and pretty easy to learn even for less tech-oriented teachers and families. Initial set up is extremely cumbersome and needs to be thoroughly planned prior to beginning—there are nuances that will sneak up on you and cause issues if not considered well in advance. An example is setting up your grade plans correctly so you can have report cards appear as you want. Be sure you speak in-depth with your product manager about importing data from your previous SIS and understand what will and will not be imported. It is very difficult to harvest data for analytics and Blackbaud's current analytics package is not as robust as I would like at this point.

Very well suited for providing resources for students and parents if needed, but not as good for being able to connect teachers with students for assignment completion and more. In terms of the set up side on the admin or teachers end everything is relatively easy to use. I have not used the student portal side extensively to be able to know more about it.

If a school already uses EE, the ON products are the way to go. I'm not sure I would recommend ON to a newbie. The training is horrible.

It is well suited as an integrated program suite for schools. It fails miserably in my opinion as even a satisfactory solution. Having used Blackbaud Education Management Solutions for a year and a half now as a teacher, it is not user friendly and is barely sufficient for my purpose as a teacher. I find the learning management module a poor excuse for what a learning management system should have. It is not at all flexible and does not meet my needs at all. The assignment and assessment module is next to unusable as it has no feature to use a lock down browser, which means there is no security when a student takes a test. It is useless when I want to ensure a student's work is his and that he has not gone around the web for his answers, or used some other program to look at his notes while taking the evaluation. The learning management system is cumbersome at best when trying to create lessons. Some requests for features in the suggestion board have been there over four years and just marked "under consideration." I haven't touched on the problems our administrators have with other components.

Well suited to collect information from applicants for years. Less appropriate to keep accurate data numbers from students, applicants, offered, withdrawn students. It is always changing, it's hard to find specific numbers on the population.

This product does a stable job for school management, where there are limited tech people involved and we want an out of the box solution that works well. I wish the database, as well as the features in the School Website, were more customizable. Also, it would be great if the UI was better too. Or again, the ability for the super admin to be able to customize that. I think of other products that I've used, and having certain features not available is troubling.

If your budget allows having many of the Blackbaud products, it is a good solution overall - a one-stop-shop is always convenient. We use Financial Edge, Education Edge, and Raiser's Edge so to have the Education products have been beneficial overall. As with any product, you must keep in mind some of the limitations that will not be mentioned when they are selling the product to you.

It's easy for us to send out contracts, communications, and to have a parent directory now. Our business office is especially pleased since they can request payment through it, although they did say they don't like how they can only have one payment method. We have eliminated most paper enrollment forms thanks to the ability to create a digital form on BB EMS. We're still trying to implement integration between RE and BB EMS.

Suited for academics and open grade book. Less suited in marketing and design elements in comparison to other web designers. I wish the integration of other marketing apps was more applicable to our system. I wouldn’t recommend Blackbaud if schools were giving up their marketing platform e.g. website front end.

Blackbaud Education Management Solutions is great for any traditional school - both day school and boarding. Our bell schedule has some special nuances but Blackbaud is able to handle them fine. I don't feel the solution would work well for online schools, especially if there are rolling enrollments. Blackbaud has a definite start/end date to terms and would not accommodate a personalized assignment schedule for a student who enrolls after the term begins.

This is a great solution for just about any independent school.

The ability to create reports based on specific school needs is a bit lacking as well as the ease for a Registrar to pull needed/requested data has room for improvement. Lists does help but maybe more specific training on advanced lists would be good. There are groups created that are very helpful and the access to the knowledgeable thru the system also helps.