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

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our entire school uses the Blackbaud K-12 “ON” Solutions. It is great having a fully integrated system and integrated with Raisers Edge. We also use the SMART Tuition system. Blackbaud has made some great improvements over the years. Our Entire school from Admissions to Development to Business Office uses the Blackbaud systems. Our new website throught the ON Products has been a great improvement and the log in access has been much more organized then our old site. We have simplified a lot using the new system.

Pros and Cons

Integration with our Website
Email broadcast fully integrated so no more uploading data to a third party system
Resource boards are very handy in organizing important information
Enrollment Contracts are integrated with Blackbaud Tuition Management which has made the parent process and Admissions /Business Office much easier

Clicking thru from record to record no next or back button
Advanced lists are not so user friendly to an average user

Return on Investment

Easier to find things when parents log in such as important information
Logging in and not having to go thru Citrix
Single Sign on so you dont have to remember your password

Support Rating

Always very helpful and informative. They always have an answer or are willing to research it. Also if the system has been down in after hours the emergency support has been helpful. I do use Chat primarily and I find if you ask a very detailed question they get straight to the point and support is very quick.

Likelihood to Recommend

Blackbaud Education Management is a great tool for a K-12 school. Everything is integrated from students biographical information to family information onto Academics, Website and much more. We have truly become a paperless school and no longer take in school payments with all the forms that can be used with online payments.

Ease of Integration

Being integrated and the process being so easy has been very helpful. Updating biographical data in one system and having it push out to wherever is necessary is a big time saver.

Systems Integrated With

BrightArrow
ConnectRE
Blackbaud Tuition Management
SchoolPass

ConnectRE and Blackbaud Tuition Management are both Blackbaud products so they were easy enough to integrate it was just a bit time consuming making sure fields and field names matched. BrightArrow is our text blasting system and it was quite simple as they do the backend integration once the API code was set up. Being integrated is so much better so data is cleaner from system to system and you dont have to do constant imports and exports to updated each system.
SchoolPass again they did the integration once we had the API and I love how when a student enrolls it automatically uploads to SchoolPass.

Future Integration Plans

Cafe Enterprise
NWEA MAP testing

Currently both do not have plans to integrate. MAP I have to upload each semester the students information and in the reverse I would love their test scores to live in Education Management. With Cafe Enterprise it is our Lunch system which we have to update yearly and sometimes twice a year. It would be great if students would automatically sync with Cafe Enterprise.

Types of Integration

File import/export
Single Signon
API (e.g. SOAP or REST)

I am not sure if there are any others. Single Sign on is great. Teachers and students never have to worry about their password. Parents are slowly being transitioned over.

Integration Lessons Learned

Make sure to think through the process carefully to make sure everything is integrated correctly. Mistakes can happen but it seems many of these integrated companies are open to change to keep improving their products.

Integration!

Overall Satisfaction with Blackbaud Education Management Solutions