School Launches Successful Self-Serve System Driven by Integrated Blackbaud Solutions

Greenwood College School is an independent co-ed/gender inclusive school for students in Grades 7–12 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Prior to Blackbaud, its student information system and peripheral services were not integrated, causing inefficiencies, inconsistencies, and difficulties in managing data across teams. Consequently, this made it challenging to ensure demographic accuracy between the systems, as well as to track and maintain updated records of their students’ family relationships within each platform. The end-user experience was disjointed and inconvenient as parents had to log in to multiple portals to access frequently used resources, such as student performance data, enrollment information, and the school calendar.

Jonathan Tepper, Greenwood’s executive director of information and learning technology, was concerned by the significant impact inaccurate data could have on students and families, particularly in instances involving contact, medical, or family relationship information.

Circumventing Siloes to Achieve Alignment

Tepper recognized the importance of aligning all of Greenwood’s stakeholders and envisioned a unified system. He saw the success that Greenwood’s Business Office had experienced with Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT since the school’s inception in 2002 as a strong foundation upon which to build. This demonstrated the platform’s reliability and effectiveness, and Tepper saw the potential to extend these benefits across the entire school.

“I come from the teaching side of things, and when I learned more about the software, I was quite fascinated by how nicely it was made for business office,” said Tepper. “Because we were already using Financial Edge NXT for finances and Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT for fundraising, I felt we were well positioned to work with Blackbaud’s solutions for education and admissions.”

Greenwood decided to go all in with Blackbaud, adopting Blackbaud’s full K–12 education management portfolio and continuing to use Financial Edge NXT and Raiser’s Edge NXT. Doing so allowed them to overcome siloed systems and data, one of the main obstacles Greenwood faced prior to the adoption. Tepper was pleased to find that Blackbaud’s solutions not only integrated well with each other but with third-party platforms they already had in place, such as Blackbaud partners BrightArrow (for emergency communications), SchoolPass (for managing school visitors), and pickAtime (for booking parent-teacher conferences).

With the implementation of Blackbaud’s Total School Solution, Greenwood has been able to create a unified and robust system that integrates various functions such as admissions, financial management, and academic data. This integration has allowed for better data consistency, improved communication across offices, and easier access to information for all stakeholders.

Tepper shared that his team’s help desk has seen a dramatic 80 percent decrease in the amount of support requested because there is now a single portal to access financial, academic, and co-curricular information. He credits this to the connected system of Blackbaud solutions Greenwood now has in place.

“The connected system of Blackbaud’s solutions has allowed us to ensure that all the data coming in is able to flow from one system to the next, which helps with reputation, data consistency, and communication between stakeholders and various offices,” said Tepper. “With the correct permissions, staff can access data without having to send an email requesting a spreadsheet and for the most part self-serve and generate their own reports. We also have a dedicated person managing our database and creating custom reports from Blackbaud. As the executive director, I can assign roles and create custom roles to ensure teams have the necessary access while maintaining confidentiality.”

Enhancing the Family Experience with Billing Management

A key area of the new integrated solutions that Greenwood was eager to take advantage of was billing management. Blackbaud product managers and Greenwood diligently worked together to continue building out Blackbaud Billing Management so that they could navigate and conduct their financial processes more effectively.

“With Blackbaud Billing Management, parents can log in to view itemized billing statements, which include charges for cafeteria purchases, printing, and other expenses,” said Tepper. “Parents now can track and better understand their child’s expenses without the need to request additional information from our Business Department.”

Another way Greenwood has enhanced the family experiences is by providing them with payment options that can be accessed in the same place that they check their students’ grades and schedules.

“Blackbaud has been responsive to our data requests, which has allowed us to implement customized in-house solutions to meet the needs of our school,” added Tepper. “We are hopeful that this responsiveness will continue.”