AffinityRM vs. Blackbaud Award Management

Blackbaud Award Management is best suited for institutions that have many awards to track. From awarding amounts, student recipients, stewardship, reporting, etc this software is really helpful. If you are an organization with only a few awards, this software may not make sense and you may have a better tracking mechanism but for those, such as Universities, this software is very helpful.

Incentivized

• Reporting - pulling reports in AcademicWorks is so simple and quick. Whether I am putting together a report of applicants for a donor, or the pulling the applicants from a specific school or major, I can do it by the click of a button.
• Support - if I ever have questions or need help problem solving, the support desk is readily available.
• Flexibility - we can customize pretty much every aspect of how the user experiences AcademicWorks

Incentivized

• There could be improvement when attaching documents. Students sometimes get errors on uploading documents due to file names with certain characters.
• Room for improvement could be mobile functionality.

Incentivized

While the price is a bit high, the software provides everything we need to effectively award and track scholarships and awards within our institution. The ease of use allows for everyday users and occasional users to both be able to access the information they need without wasting time or resources

Incentivized

overall it's good, but the learning curve is rough

I lean on our centralized Foundation for support related to Blackbaud Award Management. However, any time I've had a question they couldn't answer, they were able to get the support quickly and efficiently. I give an 8, versus a 9 or 10, because our centralized office has had some requests in for changes to the system that have not been made. Some parts of the system are not working for our purposes, and we've asked for some changes that should be doable. However, the time it takes to get universal changes made is quite long

Incentivized

Before Blackbaud Award Management, our university was not using any centralized scholarship award platform. Each College or unit was responsible for allocating their own awards, and our Foundation (who manages the funds) had one person who would double-check each award to the fund restrictions before approving the scholarship. This long process caused a lot of colleges to skip awarding their scholarships altogether, because of the amount of work it took to identify students and go through the distribution process. However, after being audited, the university felt a centralized system was very necessary to negate these issues. Before this system, my college created an application in Qualtrics for students to complete. Once complete, we spent roughly 4-6 weeks compiling all student record data for every applicant and then matching qualified applicants to individual scholarships internally. From there, our reviewers received an excel spreadsheet with the data of all students and an excel spreadsheet with the funds available (including fund restrictions) so they could make their decisions. The entire process typically took around 3-4 months between applications, data gathering, decision making, and award notification

Incentivized

• There are many factors that go into an ROI and it is hard to determine the impact that the AcademicWorks System alone has had. However, I can say that the scholarship committee reviewers that used to help evaluate students using our previous system much prefer the ease of doing the reviews in the AcademicWorks System. This is good because at times some of the committee reviewers have transitioned to become scholarship donors.

Incentivized