The Top 5 Reasons to Upgrade Your Homegrown Award Management System

As higher ed financial aid and advancement leaders know, the right scholarship management software can make all the difference between getting awards to students who need them and having critical scholarship opportunities go unclaimed. A good award management system not only makes scholarships more accessible to students, but it also helps leaders and teams manage the most crucial tasks and provides visibility into each scholarship fund’s lifecycle.

Upgrading to a new award management system can be challenging, leaving some institutions reliant upon outdated, in-house award systems and cumbersome processes. But the benefits far outweigh those challenges. Here we offer the top five ways partnering with an established tech company and adopting innovative award software can help you deliver greater impact.

1. Access to Resources

Gain access to an unmatched community of peer users all working within the same framework to achieve similar goals. When other higher ed institutions are using the same technology, you can share how-to tips and ideas and work through challenges together. These types of opportunities aren’t afforded when operating in a vacuum of a system with which other institutions have no experience.

It’s easier to master technology and stay up to date on the latest best practices when you can collaborate with your peers. Blackbaud’s community groups, user conferences, and other champion programs empower users to do just that.

2. A Dedicated Team of Developers

By partnering with an innovative tech company, you also get dedicated software engineers and product managers working to ensure your success and the success of the solution. This means that there is a team focused on discovering ways to improve the product—including proactive development to address market & legal shifts—and solving issues when they arise.

Scholarship professionals rarely have the time and expertise to develop software and with homegrown systems, institutions must rely on the one or two IT staff available to help troubleshoot—and that is in addition to everyone’s other responsibilities.

3. Voice of the Customer

What better way to improve a product than by incorporating feedback directly from customers? The best tech companies know this and are constantly working with customers to identify ways they can address challenges and shortcomings within their software. In contrast, a campus IT department or small scholarship management team does not have the resources to focus on discovery work and find ways to improve their antiquated systems.

4. Connected Campus Solutions

At Blackbaud, we have created a solution that integrates with other software on campus including your CRM, student information system (SIS), and accounting software. It goes without saying how much of an advantage it can be to have your solutions connected and the ability to seamlessly share data across platforms.

Most homegrown solutions require manual data imports to keep up with changing student and fund information and extensive labor pulling together reports. This requires a lot of time and energy that your team could spend more productively awarding funds and stewarding donors.

5. Tech Support & Security

Upon implementation of Blackbaud Award Management™, you also gain additional support from product experts and dedicated customer success managers. This means being able to talk to someone who can fix problems in real time and who understand compliance and security standards. With a homegrown system, teams often must create workarounds that are not ideal and can add more work and security risk due to the lack of IT staff or support resources.