Blackbaud Award Management

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 in the grid and manipulate the way I need to view the data during the award process. The lady who used it the first year for our Development office suffered a stroke and was totally incapacitated No one else in the college had ever used the software I was assigned to take over the entire scholarship process and the staff at Academic Works made it so easy for me. I was in on the initial decision making and review of the product but actually being the administrator was different. I couldn't ask for a better support team. Last week I attended the round table in Murfreesboro, TN with Brandon Phipps presiding. It was a great day and it was so good to have a meeting with other users that was within driving distance.

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.

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.