Blackbaud Award Cycle Dashboard Tips and Best Practices
Tip Sheet
We’re excited to unveil the Award Cycle Dashboard—a transformative experience within Blackbaud Award Management™ designed to simplify and accelerate your awarding process from beginning to end. This optional dashboard empowers you with a centralized command center that enhances navigation, streamlines task execution, and provides real-time visibility into fund utilization and award performance—all in one place.
Whether you’re planning weekly actions or guiding your team throughout the awarding process, this dashboard equips you with insights and tools to act with confidence. It doesn’t replace the Opportunity Dashboard, but complements it by surfacing actionable data and intuitive pathways to drive efficiencies. The dashboard is role-aware, so you’ll only see data relevant to your assigned awards. Here are our top tips to make the most of this opportunity.
1. Utilize the dashboard as an award administration hub.
The Award Cycle Dashboard offers a centralized view of the entire award cycle—from application to disbursement. It consolidates data and actionable links into one interface, helping administrators manage tasks more efficiently without having to navigate to multiple areas of the system. As an added perk, you also gain access to data visualizations with high level summaries of fund and application performance to simplify complex data, reveal trends, identify areas for improvement, and make more informed decisions.
2. Monitor application performance and fund utilization.
We’re eliminating the need for complex calculations and guesswork in assessing application performance and fund utilization of your awards. Now you can get high-level summaries of funds awarded, what remains, application review statuses, and post-acceptance completion percentages to make award monitoring a breeze.
3. Leverage stage-specific insights to drive action.
Whether you’re a new or seasoned award administrator, the dashboard empowers you to stay on top of your responsibilities. Stages of the award cycle surfaced on the dashboard— Application, Review, Awarding, Post-Acceptance, Disbursement and Cycle Management—
include in-line help, analytics, and direct links to areas within the site to take action.
4. Track reviews, award offers, and acceptances in real time.
Reviewing and awarding are two of the most exciting—but time-consuming—steps in managing scholarships. The new dashboard enables you to easily identify outstanding reviews, offers made, and acceptances in real time. This visibility allows you to reassign reviews as needed, nudge students to accept or decline offers, and identify any follow-up actions required to keep reviews on track and prevent funds from being unspent.
5. Improve system onboarding and adoption.
One of the most frequent asks we hear from awarding teams in both centralized and decentralized awarding offices is the need for onboarding templates and adoption resources to share with peers. Leverage the dashboard in your onboarding plan to scale site usage across teams or campus(es) and to support your administrators in utilizing Blackbaud Award Management on a day-to-day basis to successfully administer their awards.
Blackbaud takes your awarding and fund utilization seriously. We understand the value scholarships bring to your institution and how they support student success. Here are more resources to support you in achieving your awarding goals:
