In a large public state university, we use this system to award over $600,000 annually - and we're only 1 college on campus!
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!

Ashley Milton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Blackbaud Award Management (formerly AcademicWorks)

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.
I lean on our centralized Foundation for support related to Blackbaud Award Management. However, any time I've had a question they couldn't answer, they were able to get the support quickly and efficiently. I give an 8, versus a 9 or 10, because our centralized office has had some requests in for changes to the system that have not been made. Some parts of the system are not working for our purposes, and we've asked for some changes that should be doable. However, the time it takes to get universal changes made is quite long.

Do you think Blackbaud Award Management delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Blackbaud Award Management's feature set?

Yes

Did Blackbaud Award Management live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Blackbaud Award Management go as expected?

No

Would you buy Blackbaud Award Management again?

Yes

This system has all the intentions of being fantastic. It is a great system if you have scholarships that are blindly rated or scored, or if you have multiple users with a few scholarships each. However, as a college with hundreds of scholarships that have 200-300 qualified students for each one, it is difficult to have a blind process. Plus, if the university gave our college the ability to edit some things, they would have to give those permissions to every person with a login. Needless to say, the system is not quite equipped for multiple users within one university who all have different editing privileges. However, as cumbersome as it has been to learn and manipulate for our purposes, it has allowed us to award more funds than any year prior due to the ease of having all of the student data in one place.