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Helpful when it works smoothly, but excessively complex to get set up and to operate.
Updated May 02, 2021

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

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.
  • 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  • Knowledge base is mostly filled with articles that are outdated, offering instructions that are no longer helpful because the system has changed too much since the article was written, and the steps/menus that are listed no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.
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.
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.

Integrating Blackbaud Education Management Solutions

NOT DIFFICULT TO DO, BUT SOME INTEGRATIONS REQUIRED GETTING THE ASSISTANCE OF AN ONLINE REP RATHER THAN SEEMING LIKE SOMETHING WE COULD JUST DO ON OUR OWN. IT IS ALSO DIFFICULT TO FIGURE OUT WHICH SYSTEMS INTEGRATE EASILY AND WHICH ONES DON'T. A MASTER LIST OF ALL INTEGRATION OPTIONS, ALONG WITH A RANKING OF HOW POPULAR THEY ARE, WOULD BE HELPFUL.
  • SOFTCHALK CLOUD
  • GOOGLE DRIVE
SOFTCHALK INTEGRATION ALLOWS DIGITAL TEXTBOOK ASSIGNMENTS TO BE LISTED DIRECTLY THROUGH BLACKBAUD. IT WAS VERY EASY TO INTEGRATE. GOOGLE DRIVE ALLOWS STUDENTS TO SUBMIT FILES FROM DRIVE THROUGH THE ASSIGNMENT SUBMISSIONS IN CLASS PAGES. THIS WAS ALSO VERY EASY TO INTEGRATE.
  • VHL
  • MATHXL
WANTED TO INTEGRATE THE ONLINE SYSTEM FOR THE VHL LANGUAGE TEXTBOOKS, BUT IT DOESN'T SEEM TO BE AN OPTION. FOR MATHXL, THE LEVEL OF INTEGRATION AVAILABLE WAS TOO MINIMAL TO BE WORTHWHILE.
  • File import/export
  • Single Signon
  • API (e.g. SOAP or REST)
NO
REACH OUT TO A TECH REP IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS. SPEND SOME TIME IN ADVANCE LOOKING IN THE FORUMS TO SEE WHAT ADVICE OTHERS CAN OFFER. THE PROCESS IS BY NO MEANS INTUITIVE (MUCH LIKE PRETTY MUCH ALL OF THE BACK END OF BLACKBAUD SYSTEMS). TRY TO AVOID LOOKING AT OUTDATED ARTICLES IN THE KNOWLEDGEBASE (OF WHICH THERE ARE VERY, VERY MANY).