Blackbaud Education Management Solutions

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.

Go searching in forums. There is a rich community of users sharing questions, ideas, challenges, and solutions.

a better organized cross-discipline "team"

not sure of our specific support agreement

Would have to look back at details, but, a particular case was causing difficulty for teachers to view assignment information. I felt my case was the first one to report the issue and there was a fix posted the same day. But, may times, I a strong and quick answers that help me over hurdles in my path.

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.

Use another platform. EM is terrible.

I probably would have been more involved in the transition and maybe looked at some other admissions modules/tools out there. There are so many other robust admissions platforms. I know EM is lacking in many areas.

I didn't know there was such a thing.

There have been times when my issue gets resolved quickly. I can't pinpoint one time where someone went above and beyond recently, however.

We are currently migrating from Education Edge to the new Blackbaud Education Management Solutions. We will use it across the entire organization. Currently we do still use Canvas but may eventually use the LMS. We are using it across the Lower, Middle and Upper School. We also use the Enrollment Management System for the Admissions Department.

I feel like they could build some additional queries or reporting that would improve the data analysis that is contained with in the system. This would help more non-technical users be able to pull the information they need quickly and easily. I often find myself having to pull data for other users.

I would encourage the team to list out all the business requirements needed in the system prior to evaluating any new software. There are some things that were not discovered until after we had installed the new software. It would have been helpful to know this up front and evaluate whether there were alternatives or some business processes needed to be changed.

I am not sure if we have the premium support package. I feel that we should be able to get our issues resolved with the basic package. These are functionality issues within the system. You should not have to pay extra to get basic functionality working correctly.

Once I was having trouble setting up my new yearly transcript. The support team was able to quickly diagnosis what setting I had incorrect and provide instructions on how to correct the issue. The support staff is always very friendly and helpful when thing are within their control.

The platform is being used to manage all aspects of the school. Our goal is to have all staff use it - from teachers to all administrative staff. It is keeping all the pertinent data in one place for the school and is being used to help digitize past records for alumni whose info we would be using fundraising.

I would like to have more options in integrated products. It is not as inclusive as it should be. This is probably due to the fact that companies have to have an agreement in place perhaps that is what is holding the process back. It would be easier if there was more support staff available to help customers for longer than 15 minutes

I would need to know more about the other program before purchasing. There are many features that are useful however we were not aware of them before purchasing the program. This would have been good to know, also if we had known how to program it for a school our size before purchasing it.

No. We are a small organization and would not be able to sustain having to pay extra for a premium use of Blackbaud to have an answer. The community seems to be sufficient for answers to be answered. There seem to be a lot of extras for the system to work well

We were once in need of raw data for emergency cards, we were able to get someone on the phone after hours. This has helped us tremendously in downloading all the information we need and manipulate it in a way that will be useful for years to come. We were grateful to have this solution

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.

Just know that your information will come from Blackbaud but information will not be received back from integration

We would look more closely at the back end and how information is entered and managed.

Not Available

When the chat function was introduced the wait time for more simplified issues became very fast and effective.