End-to-end solution that's getting better with every release.
December 20, 2018
End-to-end solution that's getting better with every release.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Blackbaud Education Management Solutions (formerly Blackbaud K–12 ON Solutions)
Our admissions office, registrar, faculty and finance office all use Blackbaud's education management solutions, to different degrees. It proved a necessary tool for de-siloing information across these offices and making the flow of data between these offices more efficient.
- Moving constituents from Inquiry, to Applicants, to Students and on to Alumni is much easier for us now than it used to be.
- The tools for students and faculty to keep track of their assignments, activities and scheduling commitments are robust and easy to use.
- The integration between the teacher gradebooks and marking period grade-entry is useful.
- Blackbaud's legacy products, Education Edge and Faculty Access for the Web/Netclassroom, had features that are now missing in the new Education Management System. Custom reporting, lists and queries are still lacking. There are some data points that simply can't be accessed/reported on using the current tools. Blackbaud is apparently working on delivering better features in these areas but progress is slow.
- Customization, in general, could be greatly improved. Every school works differently, and as an example the GPA calculations, transcript and report card builders, though improved, are still not anywhere near as flexible as they should be to fit the needs of some schools.
- Implementations are often rushed and the quality of support you get while implementing varies widely depending on which implementation consultant you get. Blackbaud needs to re-structure the timeframe of their implementations to address the realities of K-12 school life, meaning schools should get to keep their implementation consultant through a full calendar year (or more!) and there should be more guidance as to where to start, first, with an implementation when a school is purchasing the full product suite. Currently there is bureaucratic pressure to complete all implementations within 6 months of purchase, which is a really tall order for most K-12 schools.
- The lack of "data-polishing" features is really astonishing and actually a step backwards from Blackbaud's previous product (Education Edge). This has added to the number of hours we spend making our data meet our standards.
- We've saved ourselves many many hours of transcribing data between systems.
- We are better able to target communication to specific constituencies.
- We finally have a robust central online location for storing and sharing curricular materials.