Introduce Yourself!

Crystal Bruce

This is a thread for all Blackbaud Higher Education Solutions™ users to introduce themselves! Tell us about you, where you are from (if you are comfortable sharing), a fun fact about yourself, and how long you've been using Higher Education Solutions.

Dawn Alonso

@Crystal Bruce

I am the Bookkeeper at Williamson College of the Trades, a small trade school in Southeastern Pennsylvania that teaches 6 trades to deserving young men who might not have had the opportunity to go to college. Each young man received a full Tuition and Room & Board scholarship for their entire three years here, their 1,000 day journey. I work with our students and their student accounts, a job that has grown exponentially in the last few years.

I enjoy spending time with my family; my son, my boyfriend, and our Charlie Girl. We like to spend time on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and hope to build a vacation/retirement home on our property there in the next few years. We like the beach, museums, and architecture peeping in older towns.

I have been working with Higher Education Solutions for roughly 4 years. We made the switch to it when it was discovered that I could not print 1098Ts, once we started preparing to take Title IV aid. At that point we discovered that the school had been operating on a K-12 version of Student Billing for decades. A very quick switch to Higher Education Solutions just before COVID hit turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Every process we had was based on paper, and that just wasn't going to work in the pandemic. Several years later, many people are glad we made the switch and now see the advantages in basing ourselves in the technology that is almost intuitive for our students. We are still trying to “clean things up” and eliminate the duplication across departments and tweaking things, but over all a 1,000% improvement.

Brooke Herszage

@Dawn Alonso hello! We are looking to build community and support as we are a small sized Higher Ed Institution and have just moved to Blackbaud Higher Ed. We are looking for training to weave it all together now for our registrar, our billing management and our admissions management systems. Would you be able to connect with us (or perhaps someone else from your institution) to talk through some questions we have! Thanks, Brooke Herszage, Director of Academic Administration - Spertus Institute Chicago

Brooke Herszage

@Crystal Bruce and all! Hello! I am the Director of Academic Administration at a Higher Ed Institution in Chicago! We have migrated all of our systems to Blackbaud recently and all of our team - from billing management, to enrollment (recruitment), to our registrar are trying to understand the ins and outs of Blackbaud and how to make it work for our needs! I would love to connect with other institutions who are using Blackbaud in the same way! Thanks already to @Dawn Alonso for immediately reaching out and answering my questions/offering support! Thanks! Brooke