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ON point with Blackbaud's integrated school solutions
August 29, 2017

ON point with Blackbaud's integrated school solutions

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

Overall Satisfaction with Blackbaud K-12 “ON” Solutions

We use the ON Solutions throughout the entire school, as our Learning Management System (LMS), our Student Information System (SIS), our enrollment and re-enrollment system, our main communication tool with our constituents (faculty, staff, alumni, and parents), and the Content Management System (CMS) for our external facing website. It is the central hub and main location for users to find the information they need and perform their daily tasks, such as attendance, communication, grading, etc.
  • Provides a good consistent user experience for students and parents to get information from the school as well as interact with teachers and administrators.
  • CMS for building external facing website is powerful and allows us to build and maintain high-quality looking sites.
  • Regular (monthly) updates to the products that really enhance the features.
  • Access to data on the backend is improving, but still difficult and sometimes impossible.
  • Product is very focused on high school features, would be nice to have features that cater better to kindergarten/elementary teachers, parents and students.
  • While support is always available and through multiple channels (chat, phone, email), it is always a cumbersome process taking too much effort and time for a resolution.
  • Need much better user controls in the CMS (onMessage). Currently it is all access or no access. No version control or approval process exists for changes to websites.
  • The positive ROI is linked to parent satisfaction.
  • Negative ROI when looking at costs or time-saving.
We made the decision to go with Blackbaud (WhippleHill at the time) back in 2008, at that time the landscape of available solutions was very different and this provided the best combination of features we wanted and ease of use.
Have not seriously reevaluated a new solutions since.
If the school is fairly large (>450 students) and technically capable employees with a good grasp of databases and data maintenance are available then the ON Solutions might be a good fit. The solution really shines when it is used by students, so I would definitely recommend it more to a school with a middle and/or high school. I would not recommend this to a small school or a school with no dedicated IT staff.