Space Utilization

Mark Becker
Mark Becker
Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud K–12 Education Solutions™ General Discussions

Greetings Friends, We are a PreK-12 single-facility school and are performing a Space Utilization study to determine our use of the building and each of its classrooms. We use the ON/Whipple Hill products, as well as FE/RE NXT.

Do any of the current Blackbaud solutions offer a master calendar or space utilization feature, or is this a 3rd party solution we should be looking for? Any insight and direction from those who have done this would be appreciated!

Comments

  • Gregg Miller
    Gregg Miller
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    You can add rooms to the scheduler and then run a conflict report to see which rooms are open, when.

    For common spaces, we created a “Resource Calendar” with all of the other rooms identified with their own calendar. All of these room calendars can be seen by faculty/staff to see when rooms are free, but we assign one person to “manage” each room, so when a faculty/staff member wants to use the space, they email or message that room's manager.

  • Marie Campione
    Marie Campione
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    We also use ‘resource calendars’ like Gregg mentioned for our different board rooms (ones that need to be scheduled). One person has access to update those calendars.

  • Amber Buehlmaier
    Amber Buehlmaier
    Fourth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    While I do not have experience with all of the mentioned products, I do see the ability to synch most calendars through iCal. Would you be able to synch the calendars in question onto one Calendar? Other than this, if your buildings, rooms, and times those areas are occupied for any purpose are informational fields in your databases, you can usually run a report to export the necessary information, add a column to indicate where the information came from (Whipplehill/FE/RE/ETC) and then merge the spreadsheets. From there you can create a schedule or run rules to see what rooms/buildings are used the most and when.

  • Jim Robb
    Jim Robb
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Participant Facilitator 1

    Mark,

    You do, of course, have Room Reports you can run under Core > Reporting > Scheduling.

    These might give you some insights into utilization.


    “Free Rooms - By Block (Manager)”
    "Free Rooms - By Meeting Time"
    “Master Schedule Run”
    "Room Utilization Matrix"

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