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Overview
What is Blackbaud Education Management Solutions?
Blackbaud Education Management Solutions is a unified student management system for K–12 private schools.Blackbaud Enrollment Management System™: Gives schools and families the ability to track admissions progress from first impressions all the way through the application process to acceptance, enrollment,…
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What is Blackbaud Education Management Solutions?
Blackbaud Education Management Solutions is a unified student management system for K–12 private schools.
Blackbaud Enrollment Management System™: Gives schools and families the ability to track admissions progress from first impressions all the way through the application process to acceptance, enrollment, and tuition payment.
Blackbaud Learning Management System™: Track students' academic performance and progression with 24/7 cloud access to submissions, assignments, discussions, online communities and tools.
Blackbaud Student Information System™: A source of data and information, ranging from schedules and grades to course requests and attendance history.
Blackbaud School Website System™: It allows users to leverage all the information sources within a school community for website content purposes. It allows schools to update content, change design, add pages, and create new sites with ease.
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Blackbaud Education Management Solutions Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
| Supported Countries | United States, Canada |
Blackbaud Education Management Solutions Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
Veracross, Senior Systems, from Community Brands, and FACTS Student Information System are common alternatives for Blackbaud Education Management Solutions.
Reviewers rate Blackbaud Learning Management System highest, with a score of 7.3.
The most common users of Blackbaud Education Management Solutions are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Reviews
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October 01, 2019
Blackbaud Education Management Solutions Review
We are currently using this software as our main SIS and are very happy with it so far.
- Easy to Navigate
- Intuitive
- Loads fast
- Update more often
July 16, 2019
Blackbaud Education Management Review
We use it across all 3 divisions for enrollment, scheduling, grading, attendance, and communication.
- Technical support is fantastic. Very well informed about the product and often go the extra mile to help find an immediate solution or guide you.
- Grading has greatly improved over the years and is becoming easier to create and manage.
- Scheduling students is uncomplicated and intuitive.
- Attendance could be improved if it could be specific for a division and not across the board for all. A PreK's reason for absences are very different from a high schooler.
- List building is anything but intuitive; terms used not clear.
- Forms need to be updated so a parent doesn't have to reenter information each year if it's already in our database especially on the medical forms.
July 12, 2019
Blackbaud is great with minor improvements needed.
We use Blackbaud across all divisions in our school. The education management solution, in particular, is used by both the Middle and Upper Schools for SIS and LMS purposes, and in the admissions division for student enrollment.
- LMS works well. It's easy to manage classrooms and curriculum with Blackbaud.
- We like the ability to use the Blackbaud ID to SSO with third-party providers and integrate with Azure AD.
- Blackbaud Enrollment management allows for paperless student enrollment at school.
- We'd like to have better integration options, especially with the Microsoft EDU suite and OneNote.
- Blackbaud still uses an old podium interface in many places. It needs to be aligned with more modern web design elements.
- The query tools are not as robust as we'd like them to be.
We use it to manage our day to day school business, admissions, academics, advancement and use it as a portal platform for all students to have access to online educational resources.
- Organization of class groups and course content in order to better manage the day to day in a school
- Great area to share resources and collaborate with colleagues
- Scheduling (creating a schedule within a blocking setup)
July 11, 2019
Overall Happy Customer
We have drunk the Blackbaud Kool-aid and have most of their products on campus. We use the (formally known as) On Products in our Admission office, registrar office...all our class pages, grades, transcripts, etc. Our Development office has RENxt and some other components. And our Financial Office is running FENxt.
- The interface from the parent side has been very easy for our families to use.
- The product is intuitive, and was a easy migration for our Faculty to move from FAWeb to the cloud based gradebook they now use.
- I love having everything in one spot.
- The migration from EE to "ON" was rough and a bit clunky. It also took us a long time to complete.
- I find it frustrating that on the Admission side they can change a student status to Withdraw...but it doesn't "speak" to the Registrar side.
- From an administrative asst role, many of my AA's complain about lack of labels. Some areas offer them, others do not.
- I feel some of the reports don't allow enough manipulation.
- Advanced Lists are a "nightmare" and there isn't any training available to the end user on how to navigate them.
We are using it across our private, independent school environment. It assists us with admissions, academics, marketing/website, and some advancement. It makes it a seamless process for the user whether they are employees or potential candidates.
- The solution definitely is user friendly for our families and potential applicants.
- The enrollment management solution is very user-friendly for the admission office and we are very excited about the new candidate recommendation form.
- Core's new look is very easy to navigate! Thank you for changing this design.
- The integration between the contract and smart tuition. There are too many errors that occur.
- Once a student is withdrawn from the school, their grade history should not be removed entirely from a class history. We should be able to recall this in the future should a parent have questions.
- Transcripts - We'd like the ability to write on individual students transcripts. For example, if they have a language exemption, etc.
July 10, 2019
Blackbaud from the perspective of a daily user
I run the alumni department so I constantly use push pages, Raisers Edge, and NXT to help communicate and cultivate my alumni. However, it is used all over the school, and not just in my development department.
- The collection of information and the ability to organize events, etc. during the year.
- The ability to send mass emails either through push pages or online express.
- Event creating is a very big deal for me, and it makes my job a lot easier.
- The push page feature could be a little more user friendly, the formatting makes it tough.
- Creating a query could be made a little easier.
- It would be nice to avoid all the signing in that is required.
July 10, 2019
Blackbaud, economical and integrated solution
We use Blackbaud Education Management Solutions for all aspects of student scheduling, report cards, and LMS across all divisions of our school. It enables communication between our faculty and parents/students for classroom related activities. It also allows our administration to manage other aspects of the school relating to student data.
- Easy for teachers to have class webpages and present media like pictures and videos as well as classroom details, like assignments.
- Allows for a central database of student and parent contact data that the parents can update themselves and then share to partner applications.
- Provides a CMS for building a public facing web page.
- User management, with regards to permissions, can be challenging.
- Scheduling if not built on top of a block schedule must be done manually and can't utilize automated tools.
At Calvary Day School, we use Blackbaud Education Management Solutions to manage the educational process for our students. This includes the management of admissions, student information, grades, transcripts, development, and alumni. The software gives our teachers a way to manage their classrooms and parents a portal to see into the experiences that their students are having at our school.
- Student Information Management
- Classroom Information Management
- Website Design and Marketing
- Athletic Team Management
- Reporting and List Management
- Idea Implementation Timeframes
July 09, 2019
Exciting improvements in Blackbaud systems has streamlined parish and school administrative processes.
We use Blackbaud Education Management Solution throughout our K-12 school. It allows us to integrate our solution across our Tuition Office and Admissions Office. It also allows integration between our Tuition Office and our Business Office. Using all of the Blackbaud products has really streamlined many of our school administrative processes.
- We love the new Sky Lists. They allow the average user to access data that they previously had to come to our IT department to get.
- Our HS faculty use the class bulletin boards and topics to keep students informed regarding class assignments and expectations.
- The integrated contracts allow enrollment data to flow seamlessly between the Enrollment Management system and the Tuition Management system.
- Registration forms for summer camps could be improved. It would be nice it they worked more like school forms.
We use Blackbaud's education management to support our 6-12 school. Our teachers/staff, students, and parents use this product. We use this product across the entire school and it helps us maintain data in one place for everyone to access.
- Parent/student access to grades and report cards because it helps cut down on the number of questions/requests for this data.
- Directory information is available to families and they can update it any time.
- Athletic management is a great feature for all of the teams we have on our campus.
- GPA calculations are not very easy to setup/maintain if you are excluding courses from the calculation.
- There is not an easy to setup group for our theater shows and I would love to see something implemented like we have for athletics.
- Customization of a student schedule report. Currently, there is no easy way for a student to see their entire list of courses in a report form without having extra information included.
- It would be great if the attendance count on the student progress screen could be removed. It causes a lot of confusion for parents/students.
May 03, 2019
Moving to the future and being paperless
Our entire school uses Blackbaud Education Management. It has helped improve our paperless environment with student records, directories, storing information and uploading files. It is our website and we were able to launch a new and improved website. Our school forms are much better. It is a great communication tool.It has improved our enrollment and admissions process.
- The Resource area is a great place to upload documents and have forms and lots of information to communicate with parents, students and alumni.
- We no longer have a paper directory, the online directory is great and very useful and being online it is up to date as soon as information is entered.
- Enrollment Management is great. The contracts are easy to make and integrate with SMART tuition. Parents can easily find them.
- School forms are fabulous and parents have mentioned how easy they are now to complete.
- The new and old report card builder aren't so great for a lower school report card with using skills to evaluate.
- It would be really great if we can lock parents and students from seeing grades and report cards if tuition isn't up to date but allow them to see homework being assigned.
- If a parent fills out a form it would be great to then have it submit to the SMART tuition account so everything is paid in one place.
April 03, 2019
I love Blackbaud!
We currently use the Enrollment Management system, and I believe the academic component. I use it to build the application components, beginning with the Inquiry Form, then tailor the user experience using the checklist, communication tools, application, enrollment contract, and finish through the time the students end up actually enrolling at our school.
- The checklist system.
- The ease of use for users.
- Good data management.
- The financial aid module. It needs to be easier to enter information, and to see charts and overall data.
- I would really love some better tutorials when it comes to the dashboard and analytics.
- Having some automated data scrubbing would be wonderful, for things like phone numbers or prefixes.
April 03, 2019
On board with Blackbaud!
I use the Whipple Hill Enrollment Management program. It aides in everyday use with contacting candidates and keeping me informed of inquiries, applicants, and enrolled students. Most departments at my school use Whipple Hill On-Board products.
- The official notes to multiple candidates.
- Allowing families to send me messages.
- Updates each time someone inquires, applies, or submits a contract.
- Make creating specific lists easier.
- Require gender for parents/guardians.
- Add multiple children to one inquiry form.
April 02, 2019
Blackbaud Education Managment Solution: Providing Institutional Digital Efficiency and Clarity
Our school uses Blackbaud's education management solutions system across the majority of our organization. The Blackbaud systems have vastly improved the organization, accessibility, and digitization of our school's day to day management. I have personally worked with their OnRecord, Enrollment Management, Core, Faculty, and Parent functions. OnRecord has made attendance taking straightforward and detailed. The system makes it easy to create and maintain user profiles, as well as to populate resources for users, such as community groups. It is a great system to help promote internal communication, accessibility, and growth.
- Teachers get a digital advisory roster each morning and can individually mark who is present or absent. All of those lists then feed into the greater Attendance list for the day, and the office can then see only the students who were marked as absent and follow up on it. Instead of having to hear from each teacher individually or manually collect attendance sheets, the administrative assistant can have all of the attendance data and follow up on all absences within an hour.
- User profile management is so easy that information can be easily and quickly updated by the school's administration or the user themselves!
- The drag and drop functionality of page design makes it incredibly easy to build and customize various pages and community groups within the system.
- Address sharing should not be reliant on specific relationship types. Sometimes students/users reside at the same address or with the same guardians, but are not legally related to one another. It is still prudent to share the addresses between all of the users, but it messes up our records when we have to mislabel a relationship (like mark them as step-siblings) in order to share the address.
March 20, 2019
A great all-in-one-place solution for K-12 schools!
We are a PK-12 independent school. We currently use Blackbaud education management solution as our LMS, and we will be migrating to use it for our SIS. Our whole school uses it. We love it because it has everything our users need to do in one place: assignments, directory, calendar, athletics, etc.
- We love the Resources area -- it's a great hub for information that can be tailored by role and level. It is a bold, graphic, visual way to provide information to our users.
- We love that Athletics is not separated out of the solution. Athletic participation, especially for older students, is an important part of their overall responsibilities. It is really nice to have all commitments at a glance for students and parents corralled in one place.
- We also love the schedule views that having a rotation set up provides -- parent, student, teaching faculty can see their schedules in their My Day or Schedule tabs. Find Me Now shows their obligations.
- We love that we can edit/update our front-end website with shared content from the back end. Also, the template and styles are pretty easy to work with after you get the hang of it.
- Oh lordy, registrations. Improve it or lose it. They are so limited in not only their function, but in the interface as well. There has been only one change to the software since I started, and that was to copy over the payment method if CC's were used.
- Learning profiles. Same as above. We need an easier interface, with the ability to restrict sensitive medical data to non-medical professionals, without having to recreate a whole new "accommodations only" form. The data is extremely restricted as well. It makes it really prohibitive on the counselors who have to enter and use this section.
- We would like a little bit of control or some content options for the Featured News page. Keep News and Events, but let the user select a third choice. We would love to pin announcements there at certain times of year instead of having photo galleries.
- We would love a social media feed where we could display recent posts from Twitter, Facebook, etc.
January 28, 2019
Years of Satisfaction
We use all of the solutions provided by Blackbaud's education management suite: Academics, Enrollment Management, Extracurriculars, and School Website. In addition, we use Smart Tuition, Raiser's Edge, Financial Edge, and several integrations with other products, such as Magnus Health, Turnitin, and Blackboard's Connect 5. We use it across our whole organization, which includes students from preschool through high school, the admission office, the business office, the nurse's office, and the school website. It has solved the huge problem that we had in supporting multiple databases across campus. The flow of information among various divisions and departments is basically automatic now.
- From application to enrolling students into classes, Blackbaud allows management of the admission and enrollment process to flow easily and quickly. It allows everyone to receive timely, accurate information about where applicants stand on their journey to becoming students. It also provides an easy mechanism for communication with applicant families.
- The grading system in Blackbaud's education management solution is totally customizable. We have used the system for twelve years and it has allowed us to make changes requested by new administrators while retaining the historical records for report cards and transcripts.
- Blackbaud's integration of its school website software with the rest of the education management solutions allows for entering information once and pushing it to various locations as needed. It is a huge time-saver while ensuring accurate, timely information available wherever you need it.
- Sometimes administrators request data that is in the system, but difficult to extract. For example, if we need numbers of students enrolled in specific classes going back for several years, it would require running a report for each year one at a time. Reporting is improving, but I feel that, if it is in the system, we should be able to extract it.
- Teachers would like a friendlier interface in creating course pages. Google Classroom is simpler for them to use, so it's hard to get them to buy into creating a course page only in Blackbaud. Parents, however, wish that they would stick to Blackbaud only, so they can learn one system and be done.
- Athletics (extracurricular solution) could use some improvement, making the interface easier for coaches.
January 19, 2019
Powerful system with practicality flaws
We are utilizing Education Management, SmartTuition, and RaiderEdge NXT.
- Attendance system is straightforward.
- Duplicate identification at the core level.
- Good telephone support.
- Integration between segments of products — too many barriers between the parts core vs academics vs extracurricular. Continually having to change to find the right segment for a particular data field.
- Security rights are too pre-bundled. It is often necessary to provide editing rights when only viewing rights are wanted, but the separation between view and edit do not exist. Those who only need to look up data have to be given edit rights, which jeopardizes data accuracy.
- Integration between ed management and other Blackbaud products is lacking. For example, with NXT it is one-way only and data in NXT can easily be DELETED if it only exists in NXT and not Core! However, all constitute types cannNOT be loaded into Core, thus staff has to do basic updates in two completely separate systems...for example, a simple address change that arrives with a donation requires many steps. First update invite, second run Connect RE, third review and approve, fourth open NXT and enter the donation. (However, process has to be different if constitute is a “friend” or “trustee” as that data can’t go through Connect RE... so requires double entries in both systems!)
- Custom reporting (manage lists) is not able to many, many fields from the dB.
- Emailing from ed management is useless — no BCC! Doesn’t have any integration for Gmail for Google schools, either. Requires old manual cutting and pasting.
- Groups - Community, Advisory, and activity groups are similar, yet not. The functionality is mostly the same, but the methods to configure are different and not very intuitive.
- NO user end documentation. None! Every school has to write their own. No templates, no pre-recorded webinars exist- nothing! It is a figure-it-out-yourself methodology.
- New (summer 2018) navigation has improvements, but no one seemed to test it in a logical manner. For example, a screen may have 2 rows of 5 tabs that are used to set up, say, groups, but those tabs will not be in the order in which you need to configure the items. In addition, many things could be streamlined by placing data from several tabs onto one, so that tab switching isn’t needed in the first place. So a minimum, they should be ordered from left to right as one would use when completing the setup. Not in a random order. The order even confuses Blackbaud support and consultants as there seems to be no thought to the order.
January 09, 2019
Recommend
Our organization uses Blackbaud's Education Management Solutions to manage our student and faculty database. It is used across the whole organization. A frequent complaint from our constituents is that they don't know where to find information. The learning management system provides a very user-friendly interface and intuitive design to solve that problem.
- Blackbaud is very good at designing end-user interfaces that are intuitive. Users can click around and easily navigate to where they want to go.
- Besides the design, the functionality of the solutions is on point. Almost everything I need to do in the system, I can do. And if I can't, there is an easy platform to request design enhancements.
- The solutions are consistent as far as usability goes. There is continuity between the different solutions.
- While the front-end user-interface is extremely well designed and intuitive, the back-end administration can be tricky. The back-end settings require training and a deep understanding of Blackbaud's terminology and system structure.
- While the front-end has many features that are outstanding, there are still gaps in functionality. There are several enhancement requests for critical pieces (such as medical information) that are pending in the enhancement queue.
December 20, 2018
End-to-end solution that's getting better with every release.
Our admissions office, registrar, faculty and finance office all use Blackbaud's education management solutions, to different degrees. It proved a necessary tool for de-siloing information across these offices and making the flow of data between these offices more efficient.
- Moving constituents from Inquiry, to Applicants, to Students and on to Alumni is much easier for us now than it used to be.
- The tools for students and faculty to keep track of their assignments, activities and scheduling commitments are robust and easy to use.
- The integration between the teacher gradebooks and marking period grade-entry is useful.
- Blackbaud's legacy products, Education Edge and Faculty Access for the Web/Netclassroom, had features that are now missing in the new Education Management System. Custom reporting, lists and queries are still lacking. There are some data points that simply can't be accessed/reported on using the current tools. Blackbaud is apparently working on delivering better features in these areas but progress is slow.
- Customization, in general, could be greatly improved. Every school works differently, and as an example the GPA calculations, transcript and report card builders, though improved, are still not anywhere near as flexible as they should be to fit the needs of some schools.
- Implementations are often rushed and the quality of support you get while implementing varies widely depending on which implementation consultant you get. Blackbaud needs to re-structure the timeframe of their implementations to address the realities of K-12 school life, meaning schools should get to keep their implementation consultant through a full calendar year (or more!) and there should be more guidance as to where to start, first, with an implementation when a school is purchasing the full product suite. Currently there is bureaucratic pressure to complete all implementations within 6 months of purchase, which is a really tall order for most K-12 schools.
- The lack of "data-polishing" features is really astonishing and actually a step backwards from Blackbaud's previous product (Education Edge). This has added to the number of hours we spend making our data meet our standards.
December 06, 2018
Blackbaud K-12 ON is moving us forward!
Blackbaud K-12 ON is currently being used for admission and student record management by our Pre-K-4th grade independent school. Blackbaud K-12 ON is being used both by our Admission department and for logistics across many various departments on our campus. Blackbaud K-12 ON is used by teachers, administrators, and our support personnel.
- ON is extremely user-friendly and visually well-organized
- ON is great for finding students in their every day schedules
- ON is perfect for executing and organizing the admission process from start to finish
- Integration with Blackbaud NXT has space for improvement
- Parent portal interface also has a little room to improve
- Some of the points of improvement may simply be the learning and transition curves
November 19, 2018
Blackbaud K-12 Solution - We are ON our 3rd year
We use K-12 ON across all divisions as our SIS and LMS. Our development office uses Raiser's Edge and our business office just moved to Smart Tuition.
- The external interface with students and parents is excellent. Pretty intuitive and well designed.
- The support staff is EXCEPTIONAL!
- The emerging enhancements are responsive to users' requests and adding some helpful features to the system
- Implementation and training did not go as smoothly as one would expect or desire. I recognize if there are 10 schools, 10 things will be done 10 different ways; however, there are fundamental underpinnings that need to be understood to make the transition into the product easier.
- ON Products are "new" to Blackbaud. Whipplehill had the interface. Blackbaud had the database. The development team - who are great - are busting a tail cleaning up the back-end of the ON system so it can be as versatile as Education Edge was. ON Products keep the teachers, students, and parents happy with its easy interface. The number crunchers and data people loved the accessibility of the data in Education Edge. When these two things are completely reconciled, the product will be awesome.
- Synching between On and Raiser's edge is neither easy nor fun. Be sure everyone knows what their bone is - what must they have so this software helps them with their jobs and be sure it does it.
November 13, 2018
onCampus - good for parents who aren't on campus every day!
onCampus is used by my children's high school. It allows for one login to access the various portals for student and parent use - billing, lunch account, communications, grades, college planning, and general school information. It reduces the number of individual login points of access for parents and students.
- Updated and timely access to all points of interaction with the school.
- Ease of navigation.
- Communication with school staff with one click.
- Due dates on assignments are a bit confusing if not updated by the teachers.
August 03, 2018
Blackbaud K-12 for life!
Our school uses ON for our internal and external audience. Our public website is managed on the back end by OnMessage, and our internal community logs in and uses the ON products to access password protected information.
- Support is fantastic; I love the chat feature and how every time I have an issue someone is there to help me. If they can't help me right away, they always research my issue and get back to me promptly.
- One of Blackbaud's greatest strengths is that they listen to their clients. Their regular updates and software changes are a direct result of client feedback. It makes us feel as if we are heard.
- Blackbaud makes a great effort to make sure their software is reliable and easy to use.
- Some items of how the software works don't seem intuitive to me. For example, when a parent looks up a student in the online directory, only the parents names' appear, not the students.
- It would be nice if some of the features of the back-end software had more flexibility.
- Some areas of the back end are still on the old platform, Podium, and those need to be updated.
July 06, 2018
Blackbaud K-12 “ON” Solutions Review
We use Blackbaud's development and schoolhouse solutions including onCampus to enable our alumni, parents, administration, faculty, and students to access the information they need in one easy-to-access place. We had separate places people needed to go to for their information previously and the systems put everything in one spot. It has been pretty easy for people to use computers and phones to access their information in the system.
- Allow students to see their homework
- Enable teachers to maintain a gradebook
- Update parents on academic progress
- Integrating with third-party tools that extend learning
- enable students to create and edit a learning portfolio
- make a place to be able to do secure student testing