Item: Blackbaud Education Management Solutions
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Blackbaud Education Management Solutions

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are an academy, educating students from 1 year old through seniors in high school. We use [Blackbaud Education Management Solutions] to manage student data, maintain academic records, process communication with parents, and connect to our fundraising solutions. Teachers use the gradebook portion on a day to day basis for daily grading, and those grades are processed to be printed on custom report cards for our academy.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Versatility in product options -many components are customizable to meet the needs of the individual school.
Customer support - options between email, chat, and phone provide access to a knowledgeable and friendly associate when needed (during business hours).
All areas of school life seem to be covered - space to work with athletics, clubs/activities, academics, counseling, business office, advancement, etc.

Cons

It takes a long time to learn to navigate the interface. It's not always very intuitive
While the knowledgebase and support are generally helpful, when you are looking for a quick answer to something it's not always easy to access quickly. Knowledgebase takes a lot of time to navigate to find just what you want.
Report building is a skill that takes time to learn and there aren't a lot of training options to learn it. I've had to learn by trial and error.

Return on Investment

I don't know exactly what the investment was, so I can't really speak to this. However, our families (parents in particular) really like the ease of access to student information as opposed to other programs we've used in the past.

Support Rating

It was very weak for a while there, but they seem to have invested a lot recently in getting support techs who actually know the program to be available. Infinitely better in the recent past.

Likelihood to Recommend

I love the program. After diving head first into it for 2 years I've become really accustomed to speaking the lingo and navigating the various areas. It is a major expense though for a school our size. In that vain it's not well suited to smaller schools on a smaller budget. And it takes a team of dedicated individuals really diving in to learn it all. If school admins think it will be an easy transition and they don't need to take the training seriously they are mistaken.

Comments

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very helpful product with a lot of diversity