Blackbaud Education Management Review
Updated April 27, 2021

Blackbaud Education Management Review

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Blackbaud Education Management Solutions

Our entire school is using Blackbaud Education Management, including administrators, teachers, parents, and students. It is keeping most of our data in one place, although we do still have a few different databases for various things.
  • Data Management - Family data is organized easily and it is very user-friendly.
  • Attendance - This is easy to manage for all involved.
  • Enrollment - online contracts are convenient for school and families.
  • The "new" report card builder is archaic - not easy to format and not very intelligent.
  • Financial aid awards can be difficult to manage unless you use Smart Tuition.
  • Scheduling of school tours is frustratingly difficult.
  • It has not saved any time at all yet. In fact, it has taken more time to implement than we ever could have imagined. We hope that changes soon.
The support team is very responsive! I would give them a 10, except that often the answer is that the system just can't do what we need it to or is experiencing a technical difficulty and we just need to wait for it to be fixed.
If you don't have any sort of system in place already, this might be a good option. If you are coming from another system, you may be frustrated that a lot of what you are used to doing is now more difficult.

Integrating Blackbaud Education Management Solutions

Blackbaud in general is more complicated to use than we would like it to be.
  • Smart Tuition / Smart Aid
  • Diamond Mind
  • Raiser's Edge
Diamond Mind integrates quite easily, Smart Aid is a little more complicated but also integrates well. Raiser's Edge is also a Blackbaud product, but it was much more complicated to integrate than we had anticipated.
  • Smart Tution
We have considered integrating with Smart Tuition for tuition management, but we have used the product prior to Blackbaud and found that we prefer FACTS. We may move to Smart at some point because it integrates with Blackbaud, but don't have a plan to do that just yet.
  • File import/export
  • Single Signon
Be sure you are happy with your Blackbaud products before you integrate too many things. They like to sell you many different pieces that can all be integrated, but some don't work as well as others.