Time To Sound Off!

Derek Nichols

With a focus on guides and timely content, we want to hear from you! Come on in and give us your thoughts of what you’d like to see!Hopefully you’ve noticed, but over the past year or so, we’ve been enhancing the blog. Not only to showcase new features, detail product changes, and recap our monthly releases, we’ve added how-to guides as well as more timely content for events that tend to happen at certain times of the year.

Not sure what I mean? Alright, a few examples then.


Last November we kicked off a three part Contract season series, detailing the process and the specific parts to be considering at that time. We detailed how to create an Online Mid-term towards the end of 2021, offered some troubleshooting tips for common Report Cards and Transcript issues, and even discussed associating awards with groups.

And that’s not even all of it!

We hope you’ve found these posts not only educational, but helpful in your own situations. However, we know we can do more. That’s where you come in.

Blackbaud’s Education management products certainly have plenty of features to cover so there’s tons of places to start. What I want to know from you is: What area of the product would YOU like to see covered in a guide or tips and tricks post? Let me know down below in the comments and while I won’t guarantee your idea will show up as a blog post, at the very least, it’ll give the team an idea of where to focus their help effort. And hey, it’ll likely help us create more content for you in other places, such as our online help, YouTube channel, and more. So keep an eye out!

As always, thanks for taking the time to read the blog here and I hope you’ll leave a comment below. We’ve got plenty more on the horizon, so make sure to subscribe to stay up to date on all the latest!

Grant Harrison

Our school has an admissions process. We ran into quite the obstacle with PDFs of Applications only bulk uploading to the Core profiles, which meant Committee Review Groups couldn't see those PDFs. What is the Blackbaud suggestion for best way to handle thousands of PDFs getting uploaded to the Enrollment Management section of Blackbaud so Committee Reviewers can access that with other Files and Forms?

Candi Roberts

I would like to see more how-to's for creating reports from lists. Along with that, I would really like to see more options to merge lists. For example, I would like a list that shows candidate status as well as enrollment status. I would also like to see more step -by-step help to share with parents and students, as well as applicants.

Phyllis Snyder

I would like to see when we will be able to create more detailed queries, similar to Raiser's Edge. There is so much functionality missing in EMS that would be helpful and make our process more efficient.

Olivia Riddiford

I would love to learn how best to communicate with current families during re-enrollment since there is not a way to send official notes to current families through Enrollment Management.

Brian LeBlanc

Yes, to Olivia's point, a primer about communication with parents would be very helpful. What does each function do (pushpage, official note, etc.), what audience each is designed for, best strategies for communication, etc.

I would also like to see a series on best practices for handling things like continuous enrollment, rolling admissions, and other non-standard admissions practices. EMS in general is very tied to due dates, which makes it very difficult to adapt to a school's processes. You can make it do what you want it to do, for the most part, but it involves a lot of square pegs into round holes.

We would also like to see a session on how to make use of the Analysis feature that's relatively new to EMS: best practices, common reports, what you need to know to search for to obtain the information that you're trying to assemble.

Also, this isn't specific to EMS, but it would be helpful to know what goes into considering submissions to the Ideas portal. Many of those ideas have been sitting there for years with no action, and it would be nice to know what sorts of things Blackbaud staff is looking for when they decide what to pursue and what to just leave alone.

edit: one other thing that would be really timely: basics of BBID. What staff needs to know, what we need to tell parents, what makes BBID different from a legacy ID and why the change is being made, how to answer FAQs, any of that stuff would be great. I feel like we're kind of jumping into the deep end blindfolded, and any information would be beneficial.

Derek Nichols

Thank you to all those who have stopped by already today and left their thoughts! This is very helpful!

Scott Albright

I want to piggy back on Olivia and Brian as it relates to communication and non-standard admissions practices. We, too, have rolling admissions, and I would like to use more of BBs communication elements.

For me specifically, I would love to see a How To or two on development and the use of APIs.

Rochelle Karakey

We also would love a communication primer and specifically what communication tools we can use with rolling admissions.

Keith Wilson

I would like to see when we will be able to create more detailed queries, similar to Raiser's Edge. There is so much functionality missing in EMS that would be helpful and make our process more efficient.

Yes! 100% agree! NXT needs more fields to query off of and/or filters to lists.

Unrelated, can we get Blackbaud Champions, Blackbaud Community, and Blackbaud Ideas all on the same Login?