Blackbaud Award Management

Academicworks

Comments: Well as per overall experience it is very good software.it save paperwork.it is simply and easy to create and manage records.user messaging ability is very good.as well as we can track recipient information.the grid view is very user friendly...We can see lot of information and any combination.at the end it saves our energy, resources and time.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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

One of the very first to trust in David Welch and Academic Works and STILL HAPPY with that decision!

Comments: Ease of use for my students; easy for my Satellite Campus Directors and Deans; Confidence that student data is safe.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

I used AcademicWorks to manage departmental scholarships awarded by a university.

Comments: Uniformity in the application for departmental scholarships was a key reason why we switched to this software.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

This software makes it incredibly easy to create and manage our all of our applications.

Comments: It allows us to easily manage all program applications in our department. It gives us the full ability to create and edit our own applications. In addition, it allows us to address user issues, compile all data in an excel sheet for our records, monitor opportunity acceptances and declines, and collect needed information during the post-acceptance process that has significantly improved our disbursement process.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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 is great for Scholarship Awarding

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

I love Academic Works the more that I use it! I am very happy that this is the software we chose!

Comments: I makes my world of scholarship processing and reporting so much easier and much more effective!!

Pros:

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!

Cons:

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

Steep learning curve, but once we learned it very easy to use.

Comments: Student accessability, streamline processes all over campus, saves paper and physical storage space. Easier to do research on students and share with donors.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Academic Works has changed the way I do my job!

Comments: Working more efficiently (no errors, make awards quickly and timely) and reporting is easier.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Software for Student Success in Scholarships

Comments: Academic works has provided me with the confidence that my students are getting some of the best help they can to find scholarships. A simple internet search cannot suffice when it comes to tacking the wide range of scholarships and as an education I want to ensure that all students know the opportunities available to them

Pros:

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.”

Cons:

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.

AcademicWorks is one of the top choices for scholarship management

Comments: AcademicWorks allows my foundation to coordinate thousands of applications and deliver several million dollars in scholarships each year. Without AcademicWorks we could not contain the high volume of communication and coordination needed to fulfill our mission.

Pros:

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

Cons:

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.

This system has been a wonderful in increasing efficiency and improve donor contact.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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

Academic Works has revolutionized our scholarship process!!

Pros:

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!

Great for scholarship management!

Comments: Blackbaud is an in-depth project management system and helps keep our contacts, notes, client history, scholarship donors, etc. all in one place. Using it for our scholarship management has helped increase our efficiency since we no longer have to print everything out for committees to review. Applications can be reviewed and scored online making the process much smoother.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Best support team I've ever worked with in 25 years of dealing with third party vendors.

Comments: We have streamlined our scholarships process from application to award and now have a single platform for use by students and staff ensuring consistency across all stages of the process

Pros:

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.

I love AcademicWorks for how simple it is for kids to apply for their scholarship applications.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Great product. If you are a decentralized school, good luck. Not an AW fault but college personell

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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

Award Management

Comments: Overall, learning to run the system and think like the system has been a hurdle, it's not always user friendly on the admin side. The more i learn the more it works for me.

Pros:

The software allows for an easy student user experience.

Cons:

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.

Second year of scholarship awards

Comments: I've been working with the software since we went live on September 1, 2014. We are in our second cycle of awards. We award twice in an academic year - once in the fall and once in the spring. Spring is the bigger of the two: 130 scholarships vs. 70 in the fall. Pros; organized, eliminates paper, screens applicants, communicates via email. Cons; students don't always take the necessary 'apply-to' step, reference requests are difficult, can't delete anything and sometimes changes can't be made. Customer Service: I rated Customer Service a bit lower than I would have last year because I have seen a significant change. I used to be able to call and get someone on the phone or online chat with someone. Now, I always have to leave a message and never get anyone on the online chat. I realize you have a much bigger customer base now and I can definitely see the results in the Customer Service. Conference: I was at the conference again this past year where the company spoke about the new direction it is going with donor information. I get that a company is always looking to find new opportunities and new customers but I was disappointed because I felt that your main focus was moving away from the scholarship management piece. I hope you will continue to try and improve the scholarship management software. It's a great product but I think it could be even better!

Great tool

Comments: We used to have a paper application process which would require many reviewer meetings to narrow down the recipients. This process has made it much more streamlined for both the applicant & the reviewer. It still takes a lot of work on the back end to follow through with students that have either answered questions incorrectly or not completed the required questions thereby disqualifying from being considered for a particular opportunity. Also while I know this system was started as a opportunity based system, it would be helpful to be able to have a bit more reporting functionality from the applicant side of the system. I have students that are applying multiple years & would love to be able to sort/filter their applications.
I think the BEST part about your system, is the responsiveness from your team. Even if I don't get the answer I want everybody is always looking at alternative ways that the system can be used.

Academicworks Review

Pros:

This is a scholarship software which is very useful for the institutions. I am working as assistant professor so this is very useful for identifying scholarship donors for my students and most attractive thing of this software is that by using this software we can easily renew scholarship.

Cons:

Very good software. I didn't find any cons.

I find AW' system to be inexpensive and very easy to use and

Comments: It takes less staff time to administer our scholarships since we went online with Academic Works. I also feel that we are getting better quality and more complete applications since we stopped accepting paper applications.

Pros:

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

Better communication with our students, management of scholarships. Easy to collect documentation

Pros:

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

Cons:

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

Great tracking software for Graduate admissions

Comments: This is a good system for our University. Even sporadic users (professors that need to login to review an application) can move through the process quickly. Quite intuitive.

Pros:

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."

Cons:

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.

Super Easy To Use!!

Pros:

Making changes is super easy and the ability to add notes is great. Customer support is also excellent

Cons:

It takes a lot of set up work when you first download the software.

It has been a bit challenging, but much of that is attributed to a shift in institutional approach.

Comments: It has allowed our institution to provide more scholarships and resources to students.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.