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Blackbaud Education Management Solutions

Blackbaud Education Management Solutions

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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Recent Reviews

I'm a fan!

8 out of 10
September 13, 2022
I use EMS daily in Admission for intake of inquiries and applications to our school, running lists and data, and management of the current …
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Work needs to be done

5 out of 10
June 25, 2021
Incentivized
It is Being used across the whole organization. Switched SIS almost 1 year ago. I had used Education Edge for 3 years prior to changing …
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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

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Product Details

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.

Blackbaud Education Management Solutions Screenshots

Screenshot of Topics pages help organize units of learning throughout the year in the Learning Management SystemScreenshot of Blackbaud's education management solutions come with strong reporting tools to get the information you need quicklyScreenshot of Schedule view makes it easy for teachers to manage their daysScreenshot of Blackbaud Enrollment Management System Admissions Checklists help applicants track their progress in the admissions processScreenshot of Blackbaud's education management solutions come with strong reporting tools to get the information you need quicklyScreenshot of Keep track of all the key information about your students in one place

Blackbaud Education Management Solutions Videos

Blackbaud Education Management Solutions Competitors

Blackbaud Education Management Solutions Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported CountriesUnited States, Canada

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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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(228)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 47)
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Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Our whole organization uses Blackbaud Education Management Solutions. We use it for class management, grades management, and scheduling. It also releases our report cards and transcripts to students and parents, including grade calculations. Students, parents, faculty, and staff are all users. We have a brother school on the same system and sometimes these two systems sync well, but sometimes small differences pose problems.
  • Master rollover saves time
  • Calendar adjusts well for rotating schedules
  • Email communication with built-in groups (such as advisories or classes) is easy
  • The new transcript builder is essentially unusable for us - it won't include transfer classes, which is a tremendous gap
  • I feel that they need to streamline their site. Every function takes multiple pathways to reach and as a result, many functions are hidden from the average user
  • We are K-12 and our middle school teachers can't recommend classes for 8th graders going into 9th grade - this should be a basic function
In my opinion, their customer service is almost useless. I usually wait at least 24 hours for a response after opening a "ticket", and often the answers are incomplete. I recently inquired about allowing our 8th grade teachers to recommend students for grade 9 classes, and I feel the responder clearly did not test any of her suggested solutions before emailing them back to me, because I immediately realized the "solutions" didn't solve the problem. This is a common customer service experience. Then, after a full week of going back and forth, she told me she agreed the solution was impractical and complicated but that I should suggest it on the website.
March 01, 2022

Wish I had more help

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used within the entire school system as the learning management platform. It is also used for course requests.
  • it appears to be straight forward
  • it has course request, prerequisites and other useful features
  • n/a
  • n/a
  • customer service is not accessible or very helpful
  • launching the gradebook added an extra step + committing grades
  • some features require extra steps to figure out
I recently spent time trying to get information about using Blackbaud as our scheduling tool. It took multiple people to try to get an answer and then the answer did not even address what it was that I was looking for. I received an email with an answer that didn't even answer my question. Most of us dread having to go through customer service as it is not efficient nor responsive. Black baud could be a good product but lacks simple features that Schoology and some other LMS have. It would be to their advantage to have more accessible customer service and look at some of the other really good LMS systems out there.
JT Amirault | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Blackbaud Education Management Solutions is used campus-wide as our primary solution for managing student information, learning management, admission/enrollment, public website, and athletics/extra-curricular, advancement, conduct, and accounting. Teachers post and students access class materials, assignments, assessments, grades, and schedules; teachers record class attendance, communicate with students and parents, view student progress and permissions/clearances for extracurricular activities; parents view student info, progress/report cards, and submit online forms. Grades and attendance data fuel program to determine and support at-risk students and eligibility for extra-curricular activities. Data also drives review of gender-based performance differences and classroom space utilization. Off-campus tutors access course information to keep in sync with on-campus classes. Resources are posted such as information sheets, how-to videos, school and area resource links, calendars, etc. Athletic teams, games and practice schedules, and results are managed. A school store sells logo'd products. Event registration and online giving is utilized. Parents, students, and employees access the authenticated area of the site while all the public-at-large access the front-face website. Tight integration with G-Suite augments Blackbaud and enhances collaboration.
  • Classroom management of rosters, assignments/assessment, and grading at a class grade book level and grades for report cards. The grading function is flexible in terms of how a teacher might manage their class grade book and support consistency for rolling up grades for report cards.
  • "Pushpage" communications to constituents is a powerful tool for targeted messages and for tracking results of messages read, bounced, opt-out, and clicked through.
  • In attendance management, there is a nice feature to alert parents and staff when a student reaches a threshold for number of times tardy. It is difficult to do the same for absences ... we have a policy that when a student reaches a threshold of number of classes absent, their grade starts getting reduced for each additional absence. This is hard to track at a class level ... 5 absences could be 1 day out missing 5 different classes or it could be across multiple days and be 5 misses of the same class.
  • Online forms have good basic functions, however, additional formatting control and ability to include/merge more data from student records would greatly add value.
  • easier integration with other SIS / LMS ... like CANVAS and google classroom
Tough question ... direct experience at two schools demonstrate this is well suited to private prep schools. It is not clear to me in which schools it would be less appropriate. Perhaps, a school without a 1-1 tech program would find less value as this is all about the online experience.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Enrollment Management on a daily basis. This is one product of the larger [Blackbaud Education Management Solutions] being used across the school.
  • User friendly for parents
  • Clean look
  • Good customer service
  • Customization
  • Better email options
  • Better graphic usage
Great for families when using Enrollment Management, but some parts are still a little makeshift on the back end.
Rick Geyer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Blackbaud's Education Management Solution is used across our entire organization. It is the main database that drives our organizational activities. Admissions, Registrar, Billing Office, Teachers, Administrators, everyone uses the system is some way to help carry out their job functions. The main problem this system solves is providing access to key stakeholder data without the need to duplicate data or update data in multiple locations. It also acts as our primary communication tool to our families.
  • The Enrollment Management solution works well in providing a user friendly experience for potential students, and also does a good job of tracking candidates through the various phases of the application process.
  • The parent portal and the use of community groups works well for getting accurate communications out to the appropriates constituents. As a larger school, it was challenging making sure everyone was informed about the upcoming events and information that was pertinent to them. With the use of the various groups in Blackbaud's solution, we have been able to tailor our communication so that everyone gets the right communication without having to send everything to everybody.
  • Blackbaud has several modules, but they all connect back to a Core database, that way common biographical information is shared between the various modules, and if it is updated, it updates everywhere.
  • Their system has an Open API and is OneRoster and LTI compliant. This allows their system to easily connect to other learning tools and systems to share information without having to perform numerous exports and imports to keep information in sync.
  • I would like to see a wider array of fields available to their User Lists and Insight Designer. Currently, some information is only available through Advanced Lists, which is an older platform for querying data and is much more difficult for standard users to work with. Making more fields available to the User Lists would make it easier for standard users to gain access to the data they need without having to involve a data administrator or power user. Making all the fields available to the insight designer would allow me to build custom Dashboard for Administrators, which would make KPI data very accessible to those individuals and reduce my overhead to provide it.
  • I would like to see some workflow changes and enhancements made to their attendance module. While there are many great features, some of the workflows put in place make the use of this module hard to manage for larger schools.
  • I would like to see the user roles/permission module revamped to allow for more granularity when granting access to parts of the system. I know they are actively working on revamping this, but it is still currently an opportunity for improvement.
If you want to provide a more tailored user experience for your families, then I would recommend the Blackbaud solution. It is flexible enough to allow you to use the system in a way that best suits your school, and the seamless integration between the various modules provides a cohesive user experience. If you are a smaller school that does not have anyone with advanced technical expertise on your campus, it could be a challenge to get the system set up to meet your needs, but this can also be overcome with user training that Blackbaud can provide.
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use the entire "On" suite. It is being used across our entire school. We are able to have our teachers use it for their teacher web pages, parents use it for the directory and to see student information, we use it for events and for prospective parents. We send out pushpages or e-communications to all our constituencies. We also integrate other databases for our nurses database through Schooldoc and Titan HST.
  • The "front end" marketing side of the site is great with its mobile-friendly platform. The site looks very professional, yet student-centered.
  • Behind the password, class pages are informative and students can have access to their homework and schedules.
  • The site is there for parents to login and access information that they need from the school at their fingertips.
  • Parents have access to a school online directory and can assess parent-related links, resources, photos, and class inforation
  • The entire On record module needs immense improvement. It's extremely clunky and hasn't been updated in ages. It's an afterthought.
  • The event registration piece is not mobile friendly. We have had tons of issues with people having problems signing up for events on their phones.
  • The reporting and lists functions can be clunky and difficult to execute.
I really feel that if I took my business somewhere else I would have other issues that I would need to address. Ever since Whipplehill was acquired by Blackbaud, it has been less than a pleasing experience. Long wait times for support - not enough support. My account rep takes days to return my emails. It's really not a great way to run a business. They are trying to be cutting edge but they are behind with product development. I feel that is something Finalsite has done a lot better than Blackbaud.
Jim Maier | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used school-wide by faculty/staff, students, parents/guardians. It is our student information system. It replaced Blackbaud's Education Edge program. It has a very friendly user web interface for all users. The business problems it addresses is that the old Education Edge web portal was not as user-friendly and it was complicated to develop page content.
  • Very user-friendly for "non-tech" parents/guardians.
  • It covers all areas of school daily life. Academics, activities, athletics and community groups involving parents/guardians.
  • It is constantly improving in all areas of the user interface.
  • Some of the functionality of advanced lists require extra clicks to perform steps.
  • SKY lists are constantly improving, but have a ways to go. They are so easy to build and use but are limited to what can be displayed or filtered.
  • Bulk deleting of rosters would be a nice improvement.
It has been a great product for our parents/guardians. I have had very few of them contact me to say that they cannot figure out how to navigate and use the program. It would be nice to be able to build some "open to all users" front end web pages without having to purchase onMessage.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our school uses Blackbaud for the school website, for enrollment management, for class and employee management, for parent and alumni outreach, and for fundraising. Every part of the school uses Blackbaud systems. The biggest benefit has been having all of our information in systems that connect with one another. It has helped with communication and organization.
  • Allows sharing of content between classes and teachers.
  • Provides good integration of event and news items between internal and external (public website) systems.
  • Provides a single place for assignments, grades, and feedback.
  • Creating schedules is extremely complex and doesn't provide good opportunities for selecting between different options.
  • Customer support is sometimes extremely slow at finding and offering solutions to problems.
  • Terminology is sometimes hard to figure out: the system will use the same or extremely similar names for multiple different features or options (grades vs grading; assignment; assessment).
  • Knowledge base is mostly filled with articles that are outdated, offering instructions that are no longer helpful because the system has changed too much since the article was written, and the steps/menus that are listed no longer exist.
Well-suited to an environment that has the resources/manpower to dedicate significant time to training people to use the system, and there are people available to function as system administrators but who do not have much else in the way of responsibilities.
April 27, 2021

On Products review

Jennifer Cleary | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use the "on" products as a (somewhat) all-in-one web and database solution for the school. Currently we're using the full functionality of onMessage for our front end site, onRecord as the SIS, onBoard for Admissions, but are not using the full functionality of onCampus. We are still using Haiku as our LMS, and though we intend to explore fully using onCampus—i doubt we'll make the switch as it's user interface for teachers (i.e. posting assignments, classroom, etc) is not as streamlined. Also unable to use the Raiser's Edge sync tool (Connect RE) to streamline workflow as planned prior to purchase.
  • High level of customization (from the user's end) for onMessage pages
  • Nice user interface for several parts of the "back-end"/ portals
  • The chat help function is convenient
  • School forms (for online permission slips) - really awesome, and were a huge hit with parents. Except there is no way to organize prior years' forms, so I think they will be less than thrilled this year.
  • "Thinking through" features seems to be a problem, so most of them feel somewhat "incomplete." For example: School Forms are great, but without the ability to organize the dozens of prior years' permission forms for parents (i.e., re-order, or hide, or even change button color) the feature is going to go from great to terrible pretty quickly for parents. Same with SmartTuition integration, or the ConnectRE tool (which is perfect for maybe 40% of scenarios and requires manual exceptions for the rest,) Adding News is annoying (no WYSIWYG option for Header styles; can't enlarge the dialog box). Photo galleries are a problem when it comes to the responsive design. (No "lightbox" viewer, so any portrait images not only stretch to fill left to right, but also push content way down the page.) Navigation on the mobile display is ok, but requires an extra tap to get to a certain page. (i.e. Tap Admissions, then have to tap Admissions again, and then you see L2) I could go on about things that look/work great at first glance but still end up causing a headache. Still, by and large, the benefits are mostly worth the annoyances, though everything takes longer on my end to find workable solutions—including changing our own work practices to fit the website/database's demands.
  • The fact that the online event registration function isn't responsive is just plain ridiculous.
  • I'd love to see more ability to integrate, or even SSO, with other 3rd party solutions.
Workable when you have staff that can spend dedicated time with the products; troubleshooting, updating, managing, helping users, and finding creative work arounds.

Difficult to implement fully for the (natural) competing priorities of a school—i.e., should we use the onCampus LMS since there are benefit to our parents in seeing schedules/homework/etc, but more complicated to use for our faculty/students?
April 27, 2021

Blackbaud K-12

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use all of the ON products in our school. It is used on the admission/enrollment side, the academic side, and for communications. It meets one of our goals of having a single sign-on system, and we also use several ecosystem partners (Pic A Time, Magnus Health, etc.) for the same reason.
  • Single sign-on system for users (parents, students, faculty/staff)
  • One database to manage
  • Streamlined communications (Messages, Notifications, Pushpage)
  • "Holding tank" for posterity/evergreen documents
  • CMS - lots of weak areas that are just not up to par with competitors for website features
  • onBoard - lots of features that are lacking, especially in terms of lead conversion/tracking, drip campaigns through enrollment funnel, and reporting
  • Too often get support answers like "that's just the way it is" or "we know that doesn't work well, and it's on our HOT list" (meaning MAYBE it will get addressed in a couple of years
Probably better suited for smaller schools with less complexity and need for additional customization. Too often we are told that something can't be changed/enhanced because it would affect all users, but then we are left with an inadequate solution for our situation, or, worse, no solution at all to meet that specific need.
Brendan Haney | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Currently, we use Blackbaud on a daily basis for attendance, class pages, development, and website management. We are very excited to start using the schedule feature for students. This will allow us to track students and classes at any given time during the school day. This is a great feature, but not very easy to get set up.
  • Development database management through RE.
  • User end experience.
  • Online access to student documents.
  • The admin side of the education products section can be cumbersome to navigate.
  • Everything is built in a very visible block-like structure.
  • Hard to get customize information in and out of BB, most of the time it requires paying for consulting hours.
Blackbaud Education Management Solutions is a very specific type of solution and if your school is very dynamic or has custom needs, the software can be somewhat restrictive. When we went to BB On Products we ran into several situations of a "round hole and square peg" so to speak.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our entire organization, from our senior administration, to our faculty and staff, to our parents, and even to our middle school students use Blackbaud and access On Solutions. There is a core team of staff - myself and one to two other individuals - who use the On suite on the back end and help manage our internal resources. The program allows our community to stay connected, to gain access to incredibly important resources and information, and helps our admission team manage students.
  • All-in-one service
  • Linking to external programs to help manage the different databases an organization uses
  • Drag and drop user experience
  • Limited capabilities on back end design/templates
  • Downtime in OnMessage/Pushpages
  • Downed pages/URLs not working
I think that Blackbaud On Solutions work really well for smaller elementary school organizations, like mine. Something bigger would probably outgrow what BB has to offer and wouldn't enjoy the experience as much. BB helps our admission team take families from inquiry to admitted, and then helps our development office manage event registrations, registrar functions/class enrollment, and is the way through which I manage all communications to our community. I also use it to reach out to alumni and new families (and appreciate the way you can break out distribution groups in OnMessage).
April 27, 2021

Integration!

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our entire school uses the Blackbaud K-12 “ON” Solutions. It is great having a fully integrated system and integrated with Raisers Edge. We also use the SMART Tuition system. Blackbaud has made some great improvements over the years. Our Entire school from Admissions to Development to Business Office uses the Blackbaud systems. Our new website throught the ON Products has been a great improvement and the log in access has been much more organized then our old site. We have simplified a lot using the new system.
  • Integration with our Website
  • Email broadcast fully integrated so no more uploading data to a third party system
  • Resource boards are very handy in organizing important information
  • Enrollment Contracts are integrated with Blackbaud Tuition Management which has made the parent process and Admissions /Business Office much easier
  • Clicking thru from record to record no next or back button
  • Advanced lists are not so user friendly to an average user
Blackbaud Education Management is a great tool for a K-12 school. Everything is integrated from students biographical information to family information onto Academics, Website and much more. We have truly become a paperless school and no longer take in school payments with all the forms that can be used with online payments.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it for both our Preschool and Elementary/Middle School campus. It is used for admissions, enrollment, scheduling of classes, assignments, grade books, report cards our website and events such as our summer programs. We also use it to push our our weekly newsletter to parents We also track attendance and we now use it to send out required forms. It has streamlined our processes for students moving from preschool to elementary, collecting forms and giving parents visibility into students assignments. Parents can communicate with teachers through the tools available. Teachers love the easy of processing grades for report cards.
  • Report cards are quicker to complete with the calculate functionality.
  • Recording grades for assignments and comments is better, no lost papers.
  • Collecting back to school forms is more efficient.
  • Website
  • Events and registrations
  • Pushpage
  • The ability to assign checklist to preschool transfers.
  • It is not always easy to find the report you need due to naming of reports.
  • Contracts for Preschool students because they change constantly
Once you get familiar with the tools it is great and is a time saver.
The training classes are long and not always convenient to take 3 hours out of your schedule to do.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used across all divisions (lower, middle, and upper schools). As previous users of the Education Edge products (NetClassroom and FAWeb), this product allowed us to have a relatively seamless transition into a much better SMS interface. Better for parents, better for students, and better for teachers.
  • I like the ability for teachers to customize their individual bulletin boards for their classes. Allows them to provide information and enrichment materials that students can access at any time.
  • I like the SSO integration available for things like PTC Wizard conference scheduling software.
  • I like the ability to imitate parents\teachers as it makes troubleshooting issues easier.
  • There should be the ability to making changes to the interface to help the visually impaired.
  • The changeover to the Blackbaud ID was unnecessary, consider restoring LDAP.
  • Some of the management interfaces to do tasks in Core are clunky, they could be redesigned to be more clear and streamlined,.
It is certainly well suited to any system that is currently using Education Edge. Obviously, I believe that it is appropriate for any school system looking to have an SMS that allows for rich content would be happy with this. It is less appropriate for lower grades. Perhaps a change could be an interface that is more appropriate to the needs of, say, a 2nd-grade teacher.
Glen Renzi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Blackbaud Education Management Solutions in our digital marketing school. I am a programming teacher and this tool has allowed me to automate my day-to-day activities allowing me to be better organized and have all the student data I need in the cloud. Blackbaud is a tool that integrates almost all aspects of administrative management and data storage that an educational institution needs. Our work with the application starts from the moment a student enters until the end of his or her studies. We give the application a good rating even though it requires a lot of training for its use since it is complicated in some aspects.
  • The application has provided us with a complete management of the administrative processes in our institution, from providing us with an enrollment form to the billing process through Smart Tuition.
  • We can send pre-established contracts to our educators online.
  • It also allows us to open documents containing student information in case we need to consult or edit any data.
  • We have problems with the customer service that integrates the application, users who need support to solve a problem we have to manage them in person or through other channels.
  • Also, when creating and configuring an admission or billing form for the first time, we consider that it requires an advanced and prolonged level of knowledge and time.
We consider that the program is an indispensable tool to automate and digitalize all the administrative processes that an institution needs. With this application we have the opportunity to put aside the use of paper and manage information and store data digitally. Therefore we recommend it 100%.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Blackbaud Education Management is being used [by the] whole organization, from Alumni and Development to Business Office needs.
  • If there is a concern, Blackbaud responds quickly with a solution.
  • They have very friendly teams of support.
  • I felt like the demo we had was rushed.
  • The feature of subtracting amounts when transacting with Smart Tuition's set up screen.
Blackbaud Education Management definitely is well-suited for the end user, but [I] just question some of the templates when using the tuition portal.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use the admissions piece of Blackbaud Education Management Solutions. I am the primary user, and use it for collecting applications and required documents, scheduling school tours (Open Houses), and student interviews. I track each applicant's progress through the system, with the final step being issuing a contract where families confirm their enrollment and set up their Smart Tuition account.
  • Applications are easy to submit, and save / remember information for families to come back.
  • Documents can be directly uploaded, and then are saved if we ever need to go back and refer to it.
  • Issuing contracts to new applicants electronically is great.
  • Creating reports is not as user friendly as it could / should be.
  • Some parts of the system still have a "back end" user look and feel as opposed to a more front end user look and ease of use.
  • There is no way for users (applicants) to reach customer support for issues that they are having, so I have to try to play middle man to rectify any issues - that can be frustrating.
I have been very happy with Blackbaud Education Management for our admissions solution. The online application and all electronic submission of documents, decisions and contracts, etc is seamless, effective and efficient. Exporting the data that is captured through the application can be difficult to export and manipulate for other purposes. I often struggle with finding ways to easily see details of the applicants, their progress or status in report format.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our school utilizes Blackbaud's product as a complete database. It serves our entire organization, including faculty, staff, students, and parents. It is also responsible for generating our external content through our website. My department heavily relies on this product as our tool for admission and enrollment management. Blackbaud Education Management provides a full software solution to multiple constituencies, and allows us to simplify our admission process internally and for our prospective families.
  • From the admission side, Blackbaud streamlines the process, allowing for templates that look and feel personalized.
  • The product is easy to use from the back end and for our parents.
  • Data is easily accessible in the form of lists and reports.
  • Our Business Office would like for the software to work more seamlessly with our billing system.
  • We would love the option to create surveys through the software.
  • Creating and setting up templates for the first time is very time-consuming and requires advanced knowledge.
Our Admission department finds the Education Management product to be very well-suited to our line of work. Our Business Office prefers other systems, as there is more capability than currently provided through Blackbaud's solutions.
November 09, 2020

Coolin' Review

Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Blackbaud Education Management for K-12 admissions, enrollment, and employee management. It is being used by our admissions staff, IT, and HR. It allows us to manage employees, current students, and prospective students. It is helpful for keeping track of inquiries and candidates in the admissions funnel for the school year.
  • The ability to send "official" notes to candidates and internal employees.
  • The filtering and columns feature.
  • The potential duplicates feature.
  • There should be more automation across the board. Once a candidate "raises their hand", the system should automatically send them the appropriate email or official note.
  • There is a steep learning curve. It would be great to have more YouTube video tutorials. The support section within Blackbaud is great, but some folks learn better with a visual example.
  • There should be a way to text customers through the app itself.
Blackbaud is really great for maintaining and managing users. It isn't appropriate when wanting to keep and make records quickly. I don't like having to use the Notes section to type notes. It would be better to have a large dashboard where I can see a bunch of items all at once. For instance, if I could see how many are currently enrolled, how much space we have to fill, who recently called, etc.
November 07, 2020

Blackbaud to the rescue!

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Blackbaud Education Management Solutions across the whole organization for education management, Raiser's Edge, admissions, academics, etc. It is our database management, donor database management, platform for all academics (including database, online posting and submission of work, report cards), and all admissions and enrollment work including admissions profiles, enrollment, and reenrollment contracts.
  • The help chat is amazingly efficient, professional, and helpful.
  • The structure and management of data for candidates for admission is superb and saves our admissions team a huge amount of time, enabling us to focus more on interactions with prospective families.
  • Core links all of our databases so that admissions, academics, and development share information efficiently.
  • In the Enrollment management portion, once a candidate has a profile and then registers for an event, there are too many required questions in event registration forms. In addition, each time a candidate registers for an event, I am asked to assign a checklist, which makes no sense since the checklist has already been assigned. This leads to many errors on the part of the admissions associate, who unknowingly reassigns the wrong checklist. This creates extra work because it generates duplicate candidates.
  • I still struggle with efficient and effective reporting. There is the analysis area, but then there are lists and advanced lists, and after more than three years I still have not come up with a smooth means of creating reports that have consistent information.
  • I wish there were an option in Enrollment Management for creating an event registration form intended for parents of candidates. When we host events aimed at parents, they have to register using the candidate's information, but they often do not understand that and register as themselves. If we don't catch that and go in and manually edit their registration forms, we end up with parents in the system as candidates. It can be a mess when many parents do this.
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Blackbaud Education Management Solutions as our education management system across the entire organization.
  • I like the appearance and design options
  • The grade book functions well
  • There is a good variety of reports available
  • There is nowhere to record lesson plans
  • In-program assignments have usability issues
It is very useful for teachers to present material, links, assignments, etc. to students.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use the platform across all divisions as our SIS and LMS.
  • LMS: flexible, integrates, fairly easy for faculty to use.
  • Support: Outstanding support. Their front end is truly exceptional
  • Responsive: As we moved to distance learning spring of 2020, they focused on development/enhancements on aspects of the product that supported distance learning based on suggestions in the community.
  • Cross-divisional course enrollment: A total nightmare having a middle school student enrolled in an upper school course. The enrollment is easy enough but good luck creating a report card, tracking conflicts in scheduling, etc.
  • Analytics: Getting better but attempting to get data out of the system to analyze is not intuitive. The new Insights feature is moving in the right direction but mostly focused on admissions and not academics at this point
  • Update releases: Blackbaud updates regularly which is great except their timing of releases can be lousy. For example, updating how the scheduling system works at the beginning of the new semester when students are attempting course changes, revamping the report card builder at the end of a marking period. Everything may be working fine Monday when you leave but then it is "changed" Tuesday morning. Also, when enhancements are released, they should explain how to use the new enhancements, not just announce they have been released.
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.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is not used across the whole organization but used by certain majors within the the school to be able to connect students and teachers, students with other students, and more. Is effective in providing resources right away to others and also creates more efficiencies for both the school and for students.
  • Efficiency
  • Messaging
  • Payments
  • Overall hard to use
  • Better for smaller schools
  • Collecting assignments
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.
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using the entire suite of Blackbaud's Education Management Solutions. It is supposed to allow us to consolidate our student and alumni data in one program to allow access to the information as our clients move from an applicant showing an interest in attending our school through their four years in our school, and afterward as alumni. We also use their accounting program to manage our financials and control our student billing. Once the data for a student is entered, it is shared across the programs in the platform. Using Blackbaud Education Management Solutions prevents the entry of duplicated data that would be required with a non-integrated system.
  • The company seems committed to updating the software on a regular basis, addressing concerns that the user base raises in the on-line discussion board.
  • I find their support prompt, and it never seems to be a long wait to get an answer, even if the answer is a non-solution to a problem.
  • Stop updating the programs in the middle of the week when you change the functionality of the programs and the features we have become used to using get removed or moved.
  • Stop buying companies and trying to integrate that company's program and/or features into what used to be a solid program that worked how we wanted it to work. You are trying to become everything for everyone, and you are becoming nothing for most.
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.
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