Item: Blackbaud Education Management Solutions
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Blackbaud Education Management Solutions

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Return on Investment

Huge amount of time saved
Much more professional look to our admissions process
Huge help during the school closure last spring--the academics piece allowed our school to deliver a seamless transition to distance learning because we already had a system in place for posting work, submitting work, and administering assessments all through Blackbaud Education Management Solutions.

Support Rating

I use the help chat and the knowledge database a lot--I literally could not do my job without these functions--and I have never been disappointed. The content of the help given is excellent, and the cordiality and professionalism of the agents offering support are superb.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Comments

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