The Breakdown: Online Help

Derek Nichols

Online help center? What's that? I'm glad you asked, because we're about to break down the online help center as well as all the other places you can get the information you need, when you need it.With a new school year in full swing (okay, it’s mid-October, but just go with me on this one), I figured now would be a great time to talk about our online help and where to find it. Sure, most of you may be very experienced, but it’s been a while since we talked about it and I’m sure we have some new readers/users who could benefit from the discussion.

So, let’s talk about Online Help and all the places where you can find it.

Online Help Center

The biggest and best place to start your search is our online help center. From here, you can get access to our full documentation, view the latest release notes, the latest community blog posts (Hi!), seasonally relevant information, as well as our latest videos and playlists. Of course, if you don’t see what you need, the search bar is always available. Visit the How-To Center to get started.

Before you go though, let’s break things down a little bit, shall we?

When you first get to the site, you’ll be greeted with this:




As you can see, the top offers a dropdown of all the mainline topics for each product available in Blackbaud’s Education management products. Selecting anything from the drop down will bring you to the full documentation area where you’ll have the full topic selection on the left side of the screen.

If you know exactly what you’re looking for, you can use the Search bar. Alternatively, you have 5 tiles each with different resources including videos, tutorials, eLearning, What’s New Release notes, and more.

Under that we showcase seasonally relevant resources, as well as the latest news, which is a fancy way of saying the three newest blog posts from the community.



Okay, under all of that you’ll find the four latest videos from our Education management playlist on YouTube. Click on any of the tiles to pull up the video.

Finally, the bottom has a ton of great links to important places like BB university, the Knowledgebase (more on that below), SKY API website, Support, and more.

Other Resources!

The Online Help may be the best place to find information and acts as a central hub but isn’t the only place. As hinted at above, we also have a YouTube Channel called Blackbaud Support that offers information in visual form. While it may house all of Blackbaud’s products, we have a dedicated playlist for Education related products like Enrollment management, Academics, and everything else.

Whether you’re interested in learning about how a something works, newly added features, or anything Education management related, make sure to visit our channel here.

Want more? Okay then.

You clearly already know about the Community, so no need to spend too much time covering that. Our Knowledgebase features our help documentation while also including customer support details for extra troubleshooting. Interested in more best practices, podcasts, events, and the latest industry trends? Check out the k12Hub. Finally, if you’re looking for a bit more in-depth details, you can join instructor-led classes online for a variety of topics with Blackbaud University.

And that’s all from me today, but I’m curious, are there any tips and tricks you know of or utilize to help when your stuck or need more information! Feel free to share your strategies below.