Blackbaud Award Management Reviews

Let's discuss about this software....It is very easy to use and a cloud based software.using this single software we can combine multiple tasks.if we talk about accuracy it is very powerful tool.it save out lot of time.

The turnaround time for support is slow.the awards screen should be clear.rest of the things are fine.

I love that it's so easy to use and so simple for my students. It saves me so much time by sending out notices to the applicants and notifying me when students have completed their post-acceptance. The review process is also user friendly for my board members who take time from very busy schedules to review applicants' essays. The renewal process is even simple. I love being able to make queries...

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I love the product but the turnaround time for support answers is sometimes slow. I would also like to have ALL scholarship applications "auto match" so that we could truthfully tell students that completion of one application matches them to all opportunities they qualify for. After students are "auto matched" notices should be sent to them requesting answers to any additional questions for a particular opportunity or documents that they need to complete and upload.

Once reviewers were trained and set up, it made managing applications for scholarships uniform and consistent. It was easy to sort by various criteria, and the ability to have a totally blind review process for applications really made this software stand out in ensuring fairness in the awarding of university scholarships.

The lack of ability to quickly import users is a big drawback here. Individual reviewers and applicants do have to go in and finish their profile, which they often don't realize until it's too late, despite trying to communicate clearly and effectively.

I love the ease with which you can create and modify applications, the post-acceptance feature, and user messaging abilities. They enable you to craft applications in almost any way you need, easily address user issues, track recipient information, and ensure regular reminders to applicants and reviewers to increase response rate. The grid view and ability to modify columns is very user friendly and allows you to view a lot of information, and any combination of it, all at once.

Up until recently there was not a feature to automatically download uploaded materials, making it cumbersome to combine recipient applications into one portfolio. The feature has just been added, but does not work well with large numbers of entries and needs to be broken up. However, AcademicWorks is constantly improving and adding features.

Blackbaud Award Management has made scholarship awarding easy for our college. We can easily collaborate with multiple departments to award, review, and update our scholarships. I love that we are able to connect Blackbaud to Ellucian Banner for even more collaboration through our university. We are able to update a student account and the updates reflect with a minute or two.

I feel that there is a lot of clicking involved when trying to award to students. I wish that there wasn't so many screens and clicking on different options to award one student. It's not much of an inconvenience so not really much to complain over.

Once you get the hang of it, it's pretty easy to use. Like the ability to add notes, and ease of making changes. Warning screens are good too. Overall readability has been good.

The awards screen for students could be clearer. I spend a lot of time explaining where to find how much they were awarded. From an administrator point very difficult to award a student in two award cycles from same scholarship (Student A receives a Fall award, then is also picked to receive a different amount in Spring), have not yet found a way to make that clear in a scholarship.

I love Academic Works! The auto-match feature matches eligible students who meet donor criteria. Award letters are automatically sent through the system with a click of a button! Donor thank you letters are also sent easily through the system.

Once a student is identified as not eligible or withdrawn from the University, there should be an easier way to remove this student so they do not get pulled into the awarding pool. Notes on a scholarship account should copy over year to year when setting up a new year.

We really like having all the scholarships visible in one place for students, families and donors to view. No more searching the web for scholarship information. We have also like the ease in which you can communicate with students and others via the system which has saved time with individual emails. We have increased our scholarship applications due to the ease of accessing the application. Our students have given the software much praise. Lastly, real time reporting has been a life saver, not only with managing the day to day but providing data to management as a moments notice.

The Reviewer portal is a bit cumbersome. Our departments scholarship committees find it difficult to use.

It is easy to use and has great reporting functionality!! I like how there is multiple ways to access information within the system. The grid and dashboard are my favs!

There are some enhancements I would like to see in the near future, however I know Academic Works is working on these!

AcademicWorks makes it easy to coordinate reviews, autoassign reviewers, score applications and execute scholarships.

The interface can be clunky and often times, setting up a new scholarship can be problematic (redundancies don't always prevent transcription errors). It can be hard to track where scholarships are in the process.

Academic Works a great solution for scholarship management. It helps us manage the both the application and selection process for over 150 different scholarships. It's easy for students to apply and for donors and selection committees to review.

The software is pretty pricey. There are also a lot of features that were a bit more than we needed so at times it felt like we were paying for features that we just weren't using. However, we felt like we would grow into it and eventually begin using more features for our scholarship program.

We love the software because it is easy to use, and has revolutionized our process. The main reason we love the software is of the excellent customer support and service that we receive. The entire staff always goes above and beyond to answer questions, and find solutions that will work for the problem you have. They are always thinking outside the box for ways to make my job easier!

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Flexibility of the product and how it works across a very decentralized campus. We have ability to design different features for our various colleges and programs that fit their individual needs.

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I love how easy it is to close out a scholarship and clone the applications for the next scholarship season. The review process is also very easy to work with as a reviewer and admin.

I have missed updating dates in the application from year to year. It would be nice if the dates were highlighted or standout a little more.

User friendly. One-applications for campus...though you are likely to find old-timers in Department who are incapable of adapting to a new process.

takes a lot of set-up time on the front end and if your college hasnt provide ample support, its a lot of work for a few people

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As an instructor in higher education, I often help students find scholarships. Academic Works helps us to match student interests and qualifications with scholarships. I am most impressed with the accuracy and depth of the results. One word to describe this software is “personalized.”

Because academic works is cloud based then you’re reliant upon a strong WiFi connection. But, sometimes on big campuses the WiFi is not very strong or it malfunctions. Cloud based software can also cause browsers to crash more easily.

I love that the software is easy to use, even for gen X'r. I also love the chat feature and help desk!

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Easy to identify eligible applicants, great features , ongoing enhancements and fantastic customer service

It is difficult to award a student in two award cycles from same scholarship and it could be challenging.

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This is a good tool that we use for tracking interest in our graduate school programs. We can see exactly where someone is in the process of applying and who we need to reach out to to "nudge."

No real drawbacks, for the way we use it. It would be nice to have a few more prompts to remind us of all the options that are available that we might not be using as fully as we could.

It has a lot of features (which have yet to be implemented). It provides a fair way/approach for students to apply for as many scholarships as possible.

It has some limitations and you can't shut the website down. Students can continue to find it and apply even though the deadline has passed.

The software allows for an easy student user experience.

It's missing some functionality for logging in as an admin side, some tweaky things like creating a grid view and if your mouse moves outside the pop up it closes down.

I really like that AcademicWorks stores all of this information in a location I can access easily. Prior to AcademicWorks, I was doing everything through an Excel spreadsheet - which just isn't secure or reliable!

Our process has always been to have students write a single essay to apply for all scholarships that we offer. This allows us to match them with the scholarship that fits them best. Through AcademicWorks, the student has the responsibility to apply for the scholarships they match with. This sounds great in theory, but we have over 250 scholarships so our students get overwhelmed and lose attention before seeing the entire list.

User friendly in most all uses. Ease of finding students when information is needed. Ability to post awards with emails going out instead of paper.

Everything goes into an excel spreadsheet. Would like to have more ability to make queries with information needed. Would like my search bar to work. It only works half the time.