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Helpful when it works smoothly, but excessively complex to get set up and to operate.
November 05, 2020

Helpful when it works smoothly, but excessively complex to get set up and to operate.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Overall Satisfaction with Blackbaud Education Management Solutions

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.
  • 50-149
  • 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  • Knowledge base is mostly filled with articles that are outdated, offering instructions that are no longer helpful because the system has changed too much since the article was written, and the steps/menus that are listed no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.
  • We are still in the first couple of years of using the system, so there has been very little that I would consider time savings—the amount of time and effort that has gone into the front end of getting everything set up and figuring out how the system works has not yet had the opportunity to pay off long term. That said, I can see how this will make things start to get easier once we have had everything in place for a good while.
  • Operational efficiency
  • Advanced automation
  • Improved internal and external communications
  • A connected school solution
Things have started getting more efficient, but we are still working through some of the initial stages of getting set up, so many tasks still seem incredibly inefficient because they entail a lengthy learning process of figuring out how to get them set up. External communications are smoother than they were with just email, allowing updating of information in real time, but the internal messaging system is incredibly limited.
We have benefitted from this, but I cannot offer great insights into how that has worked because I have not been involved in our implementation and use of NXT.
It is a helpful and effective system, but it also often seems overly complex, and there are a number of glitches. Many times, performing the correct task doesn't actually do what it is meant to do, and the task has to be repeated a number of times. Support staff have indicated this is because of caching issues, and so the same action has to be repeated numerous times before the system catches up. As another common example, clicking on the gradebook for a course sometimes opens it in the same window, and sometimes as a new window. Inconsistencies like this make the system as a whole unpredictable and thus makes it feel somewhat unreliable.
Our school uses this system. My interaction with it has not been extensive.
As stated in previous comments, this system is very clunky on the back end, and it is prone to a number of glitches and inconsistencies, making it less helpful than it could be.
Good for long term, but very limiting in how historic information, grade reports, and transcripts can be accessed and presented.
We just started using the website feature a few weeks ago, so we have not had enough time to get a real feel for how well it works for our needs
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.