Blackbaud K-12 Solutions

Very helpful for benchmarking

Puntos a favor:

We have used blackbaud for over 15 years. We use this for tuition payments and payables. Extremely easy to use.

Puntos en contra:

If there are 5 people in the system then you can't get in. Not a problem except for busy times of the month

A very capable behemoth

Comentarios: We had an in depth investigation process to determine we needed to replace our School Management Platform and with a very friendly and helpful sales person at Blackbaud we were convinced they were the best option for the price. While not the best option purely on features and output, they beat the top choice by being 30% less expensive. By no means inexpensive, they seemed the affordable option. The Toyota Camry of cars for this if you will.
Once we signed the papers, the on-boarding and implementation process was a highly templated meat grinder of a process. In some ways the deployment on rails process relieved a lot of stress in that it answered questions we didn't know we had and removed a lot of deliberation that would have slowed down our launch. However, in the areas that we knew there would be nuance to our situation, it also left a lot of frustration because of the inflexibility. Subject Matter Experts during the onboarding were also very niche. Two products might overlap and if we had questions about how one might impact the other, we would have a specialist in one and a specialist in the other but very hard for them to discuss the one that wasn't their or talk to each other.
Once we slogged through an on-boarding and launch we had purposely taken slow to build our internal capability, it has been like an old car that has a reliable engine, but that doesn't look very impressive and takes a lot of elbow grease to keep running.

Puntos a favor:

Through the longevity of the organization and their focus on the products as well as strategic acquisition of other products and services they have folded into the platform it is capable of being used for so many of the things we need in the operations of a school. If looking to simplify the number of organizations with whom you have to make contact for the variety of operations, aligning on a single platform can be attractive and sometimes cost saving.

Puntos en contra:

Because of the comprehensiveness of the platform and the longevity of some of its parts, there are many things about the systems that are incongruous or inflexible to the adaptation needed for an organization trying to remain nimble. I've used the analogy of building a wheel from the outside toward the hub before but also feel like it can be akin to the two teams building a bridge from opposite banks only to reach the middle and realize they will not connect because they were not aligned. There are part of the system that require you to build up to the end result in such a way that you cannot see that the end result is not what you desired until you are done with a lot of work that when failing at the end you have to unpack and redo again and again until it is right.

Teachers for Teachers

Comentarios: Overall it has been a decent experience using K-12. No software is perfect, but this software gets the job done and is functional.

Puntos a favor:

I love that there are so many different options available on this software. I can see my students' information, their parents' contact information, birthdays, grades, and assignments all in the same place. It is a good central location for all the important information of my classroom.

Puntos en contra:

This software can be hard to predict when it will time out. Unfortunately there were occasions when putting in grades that I would lose entire portions and have to retype the grades because the page would time out without warning, and the grades hadn't been saved. I had to be very diligent about saving the page manually after entering any grades.

Fantastic holistic program. Horrible implementation experience

Comentarios: In 2016, we made the decision to move from our former database (Rediker) to Blackbaud Cloud hosted products: Core, OnRecord, OnCampus, OnBoard, Raiser's Edge NXT, Financial Edge NXT and Smart Tuition. We wanted a holistic database for all of our departments to pull from and for information to move seamlessly in realtime. We are in the middle of the first year and we are very pleased with the functionality, User friendliness and wide variety of reports that are available. Customer support is phenomenal. Every person, without exception, has been friendly, professional and competent. I really enjoy using the chat feature and appreciate case central's ticketing system. Our implementation experience has been horrible. Most of it seems to be attributed to the Whipple Hill acquisition along with a confusing model. Even though we paid thousands of dollars for implementation fee, I felt like we did 90% of the work. Our Project Manager only provided a confusing project mgmt. software and introduced us to our product specialists. The implementation comprised of a series of useless group sessions and one-on-one sessions implementation consultations which were really training sessions in disguise. The grading setup is incredibly complex and non-intuitive, however our specialist was instructed to only setup our Upper School and we would have to setup the lower and middle schools on our own. The whole process left us feeling confused, frustrated and behind schedule. We highly recommend Blackbaud Products, but here are a few pointers for anyone considering the program:
1. Give yourself a year. No matter the timeline Blackbaud gives you, double it.
2. Keep your former SIS one more year and work in tandem with the new OnProducts. We are halfway through the year and we're still importing information over from our prior system.
3. Historical Grade Data ' This can only be done for current students. They will not do it for previous students and Alumni.
4. LMS ' Blackbaud does not integrate with any other LMS. OnCampus is highly functional, but lacking in a few features we like in Haiku.
5. Smart Tuition - The Smart Tuition integration is new and still going through development. We've been working at this for several weeks and delayed re-enrollment contracts pending their resolution. If you're considering a transition, you should wait another few months for the bugs to work out.

Puntos a favor:

Holistic, cloud-based platform which allows data to move seamlessly and in realtime.

Puntos en contra:

The implementation process needs a lot of work.

I use Blackbaud to look up information on alumni and potential donors.

Puntos a favor:

I love the "recently accessed" side bar that comes up every time I sign in. This allows me to go back to a record that I was previously looking at, which makes it much easier when researching donors and alumni. I also like that their constituent ID is right there next to their name for a quick reference!

Puntos en contra:

Blackbaud does pretty much everything I could want it to do. If there was something to improve on, I think it would be the constituent search screen. When I search for a constituent, Blackbaud brings up all possible matches. Sometimes, I use broad search words and the system will only show me the first 100 matches or so, limiting the number I can see. When I'm searching for someone with a very common name, this can make it difficult to go down the list and try to find the one I'm looking for.