Name: Product Update Briefing - Education Management Solutions for K-12 Schools
Uploaded: 2025-05-06T18:01:06.392Z
Duration: 1 h 20 min 20 s
Description: Product Update Briefing - Education Management Solutions for K-12 Schools

Transcript for "Product Update Briefing - Education Management Solutions for K-12 Schools": Buddy, welcome to our product upgrade briefing. This is one we're gonna cover education management solutions, specifically for k 12 schools. And we're so glad that you could all be here with us today. Let's dive right in. So for those of you not I've not had the opportunity to meet, I am Paul Finch. I'm one of the product managers on the team. Relatively new empty nester. So my wife and I are enjoying that. I am what I would call a Charleston semi native, meaning I don't have any streets named after me, but I've been here a long time. And I must be near water. So we have a bunch of content to cover today. And if you haven't been to one of these before, the way we're gonna tackle it is, we're gonna do some overviews in the housekeeping, and then we're gonna move through each one of the product areas. And as we move through each one of the product and capability areas, we're gonna bring in a new speaker to cover that section. So you will have the subject matter expertise of each section, presenting the material today. Some housekeeping to keep in mind. There's two things that I think are most important here. One, if you have any technical difficulties, we find that just refreshing your browser is gonna solve the issue. And then that's probably the most important thing is questions. We welcome your questions. We want your questions, but we're gonna be moving really fast with lots of different content. So when you provide your question, please give us as much context as possible. You might reference a slide number. You might address the product manager by name. Just give us something to go on so that if we're 10 slides later in the presentation and your and your question was previous on one of the previous slides, help us understand the context. The slides, they're oriented in a way to help you sort of keep track. So the idea is if you get distracted and you need to come back, you're like, oh, wonder what product or area they're talking about. Up in the upper right hand corner, we'll let you know what the product area is. Down at the bottom, you'll see, various badges there. For example, work more efficiently and securely. This is gonna be, changing set of value anchors that really help you understand, like, what outcome we believe you're gonna get out of the feature or capability we're talking about. And then along the bottom right, there is some context of whether something is available in both Canada and US, so keep an eye on that if you are, one of our Canadian friends. And then whether or not something that we're delivering is part of the idea bank. So if you put an idea in the idea bank and it's starting to come to life, we're gonna help you understand which parts that we're delivering are part of the idea bank. And then probably the most important, whether something's a work in progress or it's available now. And each each product manager is gonna go through the available now stuff first and then start talking about things that are, work in progress or coming soon. So we talked a little about the idea tag. So here's where we are. We like to keep track of how we're doing, with our ideas. We always are a little competitive and try to beat last year, so we got some work to do there. But I do wanna highlight the 50,000 milestone. This is the first time we've been over 50,000 votes. So I know we all have a love hate relationship with the idea bank, but we, as product managers, love it and we use it. So please keep the ideas coming. From applicant alumni, Blackbaud's goal is to be a single vendor to solve your problems around the customer's campus and across the student life cycle. The key takeaway here is that our core vision is provide a connected total school from all the way from admissions, enrollment, all the way to fundraising and advancement. And then lastly, we aim to be an open API solution with a partner network that can really help you add value. But don't take our word for it. Here we have the end of our schools using pieces and parts of the Toast school solution, and it's really, you know, the value they're seeing is it's really saved time for all the users in their community. Terry Academy is finding the value in, you know, the feedback that they're getting from their families. So there's a family, as users, the system are providing very positive, feedback, and we think this will help drive overall retention. Because we'll only be talking about the education components of the Toastchool solution, there are some other product update briefings that you wanna make sure you, signed up for. Because the minimum, you always can view those recordings, but we've got, you know, razor's edge on on the sixth today, and then financial edge coming up on the eighth. If you haven't been out to our, training resources recently, have a visit. There's a lot of new content. Some of it is even based on some of the things that you'll be you'll see today. So, again, if you haven't been out there, take a look. It's always constantly being refreshed just like the products constantly being refreshed. If you didn't know, maybe con registration is open, and, obviously, there's some early bird pricing. We'll let you guys, get in on that. So if you're interested in maybe con, it's always good to save a little money by registering early. If you ever been to one of our dev days, this is also on horizon. Look for that to happen in, in early June. This is a great way to learn from your colleagues and learn from some from experts here at Blackbaud. And there's a lot of good content, for you to dig deeper. Like, no matter what your presentation layer is, whether it's Google product, whether it's a Microsoft product, this will be really helping you understand how to get the data out of the system and into those particular tools. Hey. If you haven't heard, an old friend is coming back. So we're bringing the user conference back. This is a school specific user conference that if you don't know, was around right up until COVID, and then it went virtual for a while, and then we combined it with BBCON. But we heard loud and clear from the market that you want this conference back. So details are are coming soon, but the key thing is it's coming back. It's coming back in July 2026, and we will be in Boston. So mark your calendars. These are some of our overall strategic themes that we use to guide our priorities and focus within each product. And they're really geared around a digital transformation for the school. And keep an eye out for each of these icons and the slides that we're gonna present today, because they'll indicate the outcomes that we think you can achieve by using that particular piece of functionality or capability. And then last but not least, it wouldn't be a product update briefing if we didn't remind you that we are showing you things that are coming in the future. So keep in mind that those are the things that are at risk of changing. We try to be very, very thoughtful in what we present and and have a low degree of risk, but things do happen and things do change. So particularly, if you are in this, presentation shopping or looking to purchase, or evaluate us as a vendor, make sure you pay attention to that coming soon versus work in progress versus available now tag, and make sure you make any of your decisions based on what's available now. And with that, I'm gonna bring our first speaker to the stage, and we'll cover some content around the area of core. Thanks, Paul. Hey, everyone. My name is Jessi Walters, and I am the product manager for core. I've been with Blackbaud over six years now. And before coming to Blackbaud, I was actually a Blackbaud customer, working at a school in Oklahoma City where I lived at the time, but now I live in Asheville, North Carolina. Each product manager will start by speaking about things that are available now and recently released in the product, and then we'll move into a section for our portion of the the solution where we talk about things that are coming soon and in development. So first step for core, we have the Blackbaud omnibar. This is available for the admissions manager, admission staff, billing clerk, platform manager, many of those administrative roles in, education management. And by by bringing the omnibar into the solution, it's now easy to navigate among all of your Blackbaud solutions. So if you are able to access Raiser's Edge and or Financial Edge and maybe Blackbaud merchant services, you can easily navigate among all of your Blackbaud solutions, including education seamlessly from a single shared omnibar at the very top of your screen. The core teams have have been hard at work, modernizing the solution. One of those areas where you will see a new modernized accessible experience is in core users, user profile settings. And this is where you're able to set up a lot of settings all centered around the user, of course. So your emergency contact intro text, the various tables for ethnicity, religion, race, relationships, and many others. The relationship types is one of my favorite screens because it's just so much easier now to go in and manage any of these areas. Before, you would land on the page. You would have another page load whenever you click edit, and you would have another page load when you click save. Now it's just a simple button. It opens the window so that you can make any of your changes, and when you save it, it's all within the same page without a bunch of page reloads. So it's much easier to manage that way. In a similar vein, username formats have also been updated and modernized under user profile settings. But in username format, we made a few additional enhancements. We heard that schools need the ability to configure the way that names are displayed throughout the solution and that the way that your admission staff need to see a name and speak to your constituents might be different from the way that somebody in the registrar office might need to look up a user and see their name. And so we have added the ability to create as many different name formats as you need and then apply them to each location within the system. And we've added some additional transparency so that whenever you apply that format into core, for example, you can see a list of exactly the areas within core where that name format is going to be applied and displayed, making it easier for you to understand exactly where you will be affecting the way names are displayed. The custom text and labels area also recently got a redesign. The custom labels area is a place that was no longer working because of all of the enhancements that we've made, so that page has been deprecated. And the two remaining areas where you're able to customize and configure text have been updated for this modern experience. Also, there were some custom text slash messages that were no longer functioning in the product. And so the team has also gone through and removed those from the solution, making it easier for you to find, any of the different messages that you would wanna configure. We've updated the description so that you know more clearly what those messages are actually going to where they will be displayed in the product and making it easier again to modernize and customize each of those each of those messages. Next, we'll talk about things that are coming soon in core. You asked, and the BBID team listened. The goal of some of these BBID enhancements is to meet your users where they are. And with this particular update, the BBID team is working to make it possible for your users to sign in with Microsoft and to sign in with Facebook. It doesn't actually connect them to a Facebook account. It just allows Microsoft and Facebook to supply the name and email address for creating that Blackbaud ID account. And then the BBID team is also making it possible for you to configure which of those login methods you prefer to show for your school's login page so that single sign on doesn't have to live at the top. You can move continue with email up to the top. You could move, continue with Google up to the top or whichever method that you prefer to be at the top of your BDID list. Now you will be able to, or in the future. It's not available now. You will be able to configure which of those options you wish to appear at the very top and configure it for your preferences that you recommend for your community. This has to be my favorite feature that I get to talk about today. The core team has been hard at work making it possible for you to have a view only version of Impersonate for the students. With view as student, what the team has been working on is the ability to basically view the system as a student user so that when you go to the record, you can click, if you have access, you can click view as a user, and it will allow you to navigate the system in only the student portal and view anything that the student is able to see. But when you're viewing, you will not be able to make any changes. You won't be able to make any edits, won't be able to make any saves. This is being added to three specific roles with three specific uses. One is the ability for your teachers to view only their students, not any students, but for the students that a teacher has in their classes, making it possible for them to view their students. Similarly, for advisers, we've added it to the adviser role, making it possible for an adviser to view any of their advisees. And then we've also put it on the system admin role, making it possible for a admin to view any student within the system with some view as filters applied so that they can only view students within the school level, which they've been granted access to. So this is in development now. We've actually just entered into our early adopter program. And if you are interested in trying out this feature, providing feedback and shaping the path of development of this feature, please email me at jessi.walters@blackbaud.com. And with this idea, we will be able to close over 1,000 votes in the idea bank. And I have had many parties in this chair over this feature. Another, enhancement that we're bringing to core is the ability to automatically format phone numbers when they are entered on the contact card. With the with this style of entering a phone number, it's going to match the way that you're able to update phone numbers in Raiser's Edge NXT, and it's also going to automatically apply the country, phone number, or the country phone code to the phone number, according to the the default country asset in user profile settings. But what this allows you to do is automatically format the phone number once it's entered so that you don't have to tell your users to use parentheses or to use dashes or to use periods. This takes care of the formatting for you across the board, and it aligns with the format that's used with Raiser's Edge NXT, which ties into, Connectory now and the common records engine moving forward. We are also working hard to bring Blackbaud Copilot into education management. This is currently currently available in the early adopter program with Raiser's Edge NXT. And with Blackbaud Copilot, we will be working to expand, the use of artificial intelligence in core to make it easier and faster to get the data that you need to perform some actions that you need within core and to, really modernize your experience as an administrator. So we are super excited to have some things to show you, later this year. We're also working to update the ability to store world language characters in name fields. Today, if you enter any characters besides English characters in first name, middle name, last name, any of those name fields in general information for a user, those get converted to question marks in many other places in the system. And so with this update, we will be supporting those world language characters in the name fields and for display within any of those areas where the name would be displayed thereafter. And finally, in development at the moment, the core team is also working to redesign the buildings experience so that it's it's more, streamlined to manage your buildings and rooms and to view any of of the information that you need within the buildings and rooms. But we are also going to make it possible for you to export your buildings and rooms to a spreadsheet so that you can see all of the details there and import them as needed as well. That is all we have for core, so I will hand it over to Stephen Boyle. Thank you. I'm Stephen Boyle, as she said, and I'm the product manager in charge of of APIs and integrations. Starting out, with the school website system, this has been updated, and the payments system supporting forms, to require our PCI compliant services has been applied to all school website forms. This includes our BDMS gateways and bb checkout payment services. Moving into our partner integrations and APIs, our integrations teams have focused on improving our integration capabilities with strategic partners, especially among those supporting admissions data and higher ed financial aid. UVic is a strategic partner specializing in next level websites and capturing admissions opportunities. We've built out capabilities to support the creation of admissions inquiries from website visitor data as well as supporting their school communities' use of the website for events, news, and other content. This has the added effect of expanding access for everyone to data like candidate custom fields and interests and sending schools, as well as content like news, announcements, and events. More general API improvements have focused on various partners as well as client needs, such as new attendance access for marking attendance taken for partners, tracking student presence on campus, access to course and class custom fields for partners providing state reporting, new roster endpoints to streamline retrieval of all class, team, and other rosters all at once, and supporting client automation projects, provided new access to, for instance, course request records. And last but not least, in the world of common records, our client technical preview is in progress, and our our two clients have it live. And, one is actively, linking records and looking at matches. The CTP currently syncs biographical, email, phone, and address data, for current families, namely current students and their parents. As we look, to our upcoming projects, we remain focused on improving our integration capabilities with with strategic partners while also responding to the client requests. We also look to the future with some innovations that improve our capabilities and support more users for the API, and we continue to work on common records. Support for our strategic partners like Ubit continues. There's more inquiry data, more support for content, and, new support for admissions checklists, coming up. An area of innovation that should see broad application across our API is the ability to upload physical attachments for records that support them. Sorry. I'm off slide. The Google Classroom integration is a project that we are now in EAP for. The Google and Blackbaud have been working together diligently to get all our, connections in a row, all our ducks in a row to work on a direct integration with Google Classroom from Blackbaud, using our our industry standard one roster API. And the target goal here is for this to be available for the school the 2526 school year. Now, an area of innovation, is our ability to upload physical attachments for records that support them. Coming soonest is test score PDFs, for your entrance exams and admissions or for SATs, for instance, in your academics area. Other updates would allow for uploading profile photos automatically, class photos, admissions forms. There are a number of areas where we can apply this, this new innovation, and we we plan to. And, finally, we'll be listening to what's the most important area to tackle next. So please, keep those ideas coming. Another strategic partner is Todl, meant to help with support for international baccalaureate programs. This will start with access to term grades, a long awaited record type in our API journey, and we'll continue with other areas of support for their system. More generally, we're moving forward with our improved API organization. Expect two new API, areas for education management. First of all, is education core API. The very first endpoints to be included in that API will start with user search capability, and then we'll focus on an innovation on our access to advanced lists. This is in support of our consultants and clients as we move toward our goal of deprecating on API in 2026. And, some of the improvements there are limit limiting the need for pagination and, providing a CSV, output version of the data. So I'm looking forward to that work. And not to be, minimized, our work on common records engine, will allow us to provide access to cross product links, via the API as well in our upcoming work. Common records sorry. I skipped a part. I'll back up the slide here. Sorry. Other areas of innovation are that we will be including, access through the API to common records links. I wanted to call that out on in the innovations area as well as a new area of innovation on our webhooks, event subscriptions. So the first one coming there will be a proof of concept to deliver, profile updates as an event that you can subscribe to. Lastly, we continue our journey to replace ConnectRE with the common records engine, focusing on relationships, education data, responding to our client technical preview feedback and our upcoming EAP feedback, and preparing for the larger EAP phase of the project in as q two comes to a close. We want common records to help you in two big ways, to intelligently manage your community of records as well as to automatically sync data for records you have linked. I'll try to tackle all your questions as well, so feel free to post those in the q and a area, and I will pass this along to Kelsey. And, hey, everyone. My name is Kelsey Huijgen. I'm the product manager for our enrollment management system. I've been at Blackbaud for over fourteen years working in a variety of roles in k twelve before taking over this team a couple of years ago. I started with, Blackbaud back in Charleston, South Carolina. I've since moved to the opposite coast and am currently in Portland, Oregon. Now for enrollment management, just like with the other teams, we'll start by going over some of the things that we have available now, and then we'll cover some of the things that we have coming up. And first up, just like with the website team, we have also updated all of our admissions, enrollment, and our school forms to use Blackbaud checkout for the payer experience. If you haven't heard of Blackbaud checkout, it's, the payer side of BPMS that provides a fully responsive, dynamic, and secure payment journey, and it's really designed with your families and with your payers in mind. Like I mentioned, it's the payer side of Blackbaud Merchant Services. So after submitting a form, Blackbaud checkout will prompt a payer to enter their payment details, whether it's credit card or direct debit, depending on your choices. And then the payment is still gonna be processed through BBMS just like it had been before. So the overall workflow on the admin side is exactly the same as it had been. It's really just updating the side that the payer sees to make it more mobile friendly, more modern, and now even more secure. Next up is a change that we made for school forms. We added a filter when you're assigning school form recipients that will allow you to limit the forms to just be sent to responsible signers. So when you're assigning these out to parents, it's gonna narrow down the list of your parents to only those that have the responsible signer flag. So many of you were already doing this manually and hopefully, this is going to save you a little bit of time so you don't have to go through your list one by one to remove those parents that shouldn't receive it. And hopefully it also just gives you a little bit more accuracy based on those flags that you already have on your records. Last fall, we introduced a new title on the candidate record for internal notes. These are very much true to their title in the fact that they are notes that are only available internally, meaning only admissions managers or staff can see them on the candidate record. We received feedback right after releasing these that schools really wanted to include these in committee review. So we added these as an optional tile that you can choose to show to your committee reviewers. So for any, committee where you like to see these, you you just have to go into those settings for the committee, choose to turn on the official notes, and then you'll be able to choose which note types you'd be able to show. So it's not necessarily showing everything. You can still have some that are just available for admissions managers and staff and then choose which ones your reviewers will actually see. And then lastly for what's available now is the ability to generate contracts from a student's profile. Prior to this, if you needed to generate a one off contract, you'd have to add the contract type, on the student record, head over to manage contracts, open the contract template, and generate the contract from there. It's a lot of extra clicks when you just have one contract that you need to assign and generate, so we added a shortcut for those scenarios. When you're on the student's profile after you add that contract type, you'll now see the option to generate right there on that record. Right. Moving over to what's coming. First step, we have been working on a new official notes list. I've gotten a lot of feedback around the official notes inbox, and one of the things that I hear most often is that replies are getting lost in the shuffle. We have limited options for what we can add into the inbox itself to help you filter or sort, so we wanted to think outside the inbox to give you a better way to manage these messages. And that's how we came up with having an official notes list. The main goal with this list is to make sure official note replies aren't getting lost. So we're gonna be adding a notification to the review center on the home page that's going to let you know anytime a reply comes in. You can click on it. It's gonna take you to a filtered list to show you exactly what those replies are so that you can manage them from there. You're also gonna be able to use this list to filter official notes based on note type or author or date. So that way, if you are looking for something more specific and you don't have the filters that you need from the inbox, you can use the list to help narrow down the notes that you're looking at to make sure that you can find what you need. We are just about done with this work and you'll soon be able to opt in to using this feature over the summer with the goal of releasing it to everyone at the start of the school year. Next up is a way to save a few clicks when processing inquiries, applications, and event registration forms. We're giving you the ability to choose which checklist and staff member to assign to a candidate based on a variety of factors such as grade level or board type or any combination of those. So you'll be able to define your default criteria in the checklist area of admission setup, and that criteria will determine which checklist or staff member will be assigned whenever you go to process any of those forms. After you've defined your criteria, those pieces will be preselected when you go to process the inquiry application or event form, saving you the extra clicks of needing to select those manually each time. And since these are preselected but not locked down, you'll be able to make changes to either of those selections if needed before you actually process the form. One big note here is that you still will need to process the form manually. It's not auto processing these for you. But the goal of preselecting these is to save you those extra clicks, give you some more consistency, and hopefully make the process of getting those forms into the system a little bit faster for you. We are also almost done with this work and hope to have this available for everyone starting in early June. Moving over to student checklist, we're planning on bringing more student information into the filters for you to use when selecting which group of students to assign a checklist to. Student or schools will be able to use, student groups as filters. So classes, athletics, activities, and so on, those will now show up for you to be able to choose from. So if the football team needs to sign a waiver and upload some documentation, you can assign a checklist with those items to the students on that team specifically, or if the drama club is going on a field trip and needs to sign a permission slip and provide emergency contact info, you can create a checklist with those steps and assign it to that group. This is a great way to expand how you might be using student checklist since we're making it easier to tap into what you're doing on the academics and extracurricular side when it comes to getting students that right checklist. Next up is our revamp for visit and interview settings. We are remodeling the settings to give you more control over self scheduling rules and notifications. Right now you can define one set of rules for visits, one set of rules for interviews, same with notifications. It's a great way to save some time when setting things up, but in practice, we found that typically schools need more flexibility to define self scheduling rules or notifications by type instead of just having one overall setting. So in order to accommodate that, we're moving visit and interview settings out of the calendar and into admission setup. And from there, you will now have the ability to define each of those things by type, giving you much more control over the messaging the families are receiving as well as what you're allowing them to self schedule for from within the portal. We're also giving you a couple of additional options if you're allowing for self scheduling. So on top of choosing whether or not they can self schedule initially, you can now also decide if they're able to self reschedule or self cancel. So each of those things will have their own control so that you can truly define what you want your process to look like. We are wrapping up the work on this right now and expect to have it available in the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for that release alert. And the last on our list for today is our candidate portal refresh. This is something that we've been working on for a while, but we are finally in the official final phase for updating this. This update is gonna give the checklist a little face lift for your families and candidates, and it's also gonna make it much more mobile friendly. We're gonna be adding in some conveniences like allowing candidates to hide completed steps so they can focus on what needs to be done next and also giving them more visual cues for what's been done, what hasn't been done, and what's overdue. And since this portal is where you're starting your relationship with your prospective students, we wanna give you the option to add a cover photo that's gonna show specifically for those candidate pages, and it allows you to bring a little bit of your branding from the website into the admissions portal to ease that transition of your families going from the website into the portal to complete their application. We are going to start giving schools the ability to opt into this, starting in the next month or so. So keep an eye out for that alert and then we should be releasing this to everybody near the start of school. Alright. And that is all we have for enrollment management. So I will go ahead and pass it over to Jacqueline and Mike to talk about the next part. Thanks, Kelsey. Hi, everyone. I'm Jacqueline Koca. I'm the product manager for the student information system. I've been with Blackbaud for over ten years and working on our education products that whole time. And joining me today to walk through both our student information and learning management system updates is Mike. Yeah. Hi, everyone. Like Jacqueline mentioned, my name is Mike, one of the product managers here looking after the learning management system. Been with the company for going on ten years, always in the k 12 and higher education space. And we're excited to share with you some of the updates for our student information system. So I'll pass the baton back over to Jacqueline to talk through what's available now. Great. So our teams have been really focused on making your work more efficient and securing the student information system. And, of course, we always spend a little bit of time, if not more time, on the student progress and ensuring that that is communicated well to users. So let's take a look. So in December, we rolled out a new experience for departments and courses. One of our initial goals here was to provide greater visibility into all aspects of the course setup without having to dig through multiple areas of the product. A key sample of this is on the grading tab of the course where you can now view detailed information that was previously only available by going into the grading setup and viewing the setup for the related grade plan group for the year. We also added the ability to copy a course, reducing the overhead required when creating a new course or when making certain updates to existing courses. These changes have also laid the groundwork for some future improvements of what information will be able to be controlled at the course level rather through a broad setup. From there, this winter, we also completed our refresh of the attendance setup screens. This was primarily a UI update to bring all the pages in line with our modern experience. But, of course, if we're in there, we had to add a few brand new improvements as well. So we added the ability to assign attendance codes to specific school levels, which will reduce the noise of codes that show as faculty enter attendance for their classes. School level controls were also added for our attendance display options, options, which is where you can allow attendance to display for parents, students, or faculty on a student profile. So now you could do that for one school level, but not another. Activity and advisory scheduling setups also completed a refresh, releasing, the last few screens just a few weeks ago. This project is really focused on moving all the scheduling setup screens for both activities and advisories to that same modern UI, making it quicker and easier to manage enrollments and add or edit activities and advisories. Along the way, we included some quality of life improvements as well, really focusing on reducing the number of clicks and screens that you have to access to complete setup. And over to you, Mike, for our final available now feature. Perfect. Yes. Recently, we also were able to release what we're calling the learning center. The learning center is a foundation of how we wanna build on top of our existing learning profile module. The learning center is really designed for learning specialists at your schools to go and access anything and everything related to learning profiles. With this particular update, we were also able to implement a couple of enhancements that you all have requested over the years. For example, learning profile managers and staff can now edit, learning profiles that have been both assigned to students and the templates themselves. Additionally, you can also upload files onto an individual learning profile. Soon, we will be allowing you the ability to share those files with faculty and staff. That way, they can also see those files in addition to the learning profile managers and staff that already have that capability. We also wanted to give you all some additional reporting options. As we were talking to schools and learning about learning profiles and how you all are utilizing them, two things became very, very apparent. The first of which is the learning profile landscape at schools tends to be increasing. More schools are not more schools. Sorry. More students, are needing accommodations for various reasons. Additionally, you all needed the ability to report on those accommodations and report on the learning profiles that are already within your system. So we introduced some graphs onto this learning hub, giving you the ability to not only see this data represented within the graph form, but you can also click onto the graph to drill in to actually see the students that are making up that particular line segment. One thing that we also wanted to keep in mind while we were making all of these updates is security. So if you are impersonating somebody who is a learning profile manager or staff, you will not be able to click into these graphs. We wanted to make sure that that student information was still held private and was as secure as humanly possible. So you must be logged in as a learning profile manager or staff to be able to drill into those graphs or currently see, attachments that have been uploaded to learning profiles, for students. So, again, really excited with this particular feature. More to come in the future, but did wanna let you all know about that, as it is available now. Additionally, we have some, items that are coming soon to our student information system. We're gonna talk a little bit about grading, and more specifically setting up grading. We also have a manage official notes refresh coming down the pipeline, an enrolled groups refresh coming down the pipeline, and the at risk or student success project. So very excited to talk through this in a little bit more detail with all of you. First, we wanna talk through grading setup and managing grading settings. We know that our grading module has a lot of options within it. Being able to understand how all of these different options correlate with one another, what order you need to create certain grading items in can be confusing. So our goal with this particular, setup and, update is to streamline that process, make grading a little bit more, digestible. That way, you all can go through and make the changes that you need in order to best facilitate the grading setup that your school desires. Additionally, we're looking at implementing some highly requested features, like the ability to edit grade plan dates in bulk. That way, if you need to extend your grading period for whatever reason, you don't have to go into each individual grade plan to make that change. I know especially for some of you that have lower schools where you have a hundred plus grade plan groups, that is a lot of clicks that you might need to do just to elongate that grading period. So we're looking at ways that we can definitely make that a more efficient and ergonomic experience for you. We are currently in discovery for this particular, feature. So if you're interested in participating in discovery and learning more about the grading hub that we have planned for the second half of twenty twenty five, feel free to reach out to me, at michael.morzad@blacklight.com. I'll link my email in the chat. Additionally, there will be a, post in the community where you can go and schedule a discovery session if that's something that you're interested in. Again, really excited for this update, and we hope that you are too. So with that, I'm gonna pass the baton back over to Jacqueline to talk through some of the more updates that we have for the student information system. Great. Thanks, Mike. So first up, for me, we have our manage official notes refresh. So while this is live for some schools, we are still in the process of rolling up this update to all schools. This project was a UI refresh of the manage official notes experience, which is was previously called approve official notes. So in an effort to provide additional ease in reporting and review, the main page of the approve official notes, now called manage official notes, has been updated to a list. So it allows easier review of all official notes. And as a bonus here, we added the ability to view and manage draft notes, whereas previously, there was not a simple way to clean those up when needed. Additionally, the approval process approval process for official notes received a facelift with a focus on reducing clicks and time spent on those approvals. We expect to release this to the remaining schools in the next few weeks. A final refresh, for the team is working on our scheduling area. So we're modernizing and simplifying the enroll group process. Existing functionality for enrolling groups will be retained and moved into the new wizard. And, of course, we're adding some new functionality as well to make enrolling groups even easier. With this update, you will now be able to paste a list of students in to be enrolled into the classes, making it easier to enroll unrelated groups of students or work with data from outside the system. We're currently aiming for this feature to be available in early summer. And then finally, I am thrilled to share about our student informations project, the at risk students or student outcomes, with our final name to be determined. This feature will allow schools to define calculations to locate students who are at risk, whether failing a class, completing the year, or graduating. Data points from across the SIS and the LMS will initially be available to choose from when creating the calculations. Once calculated, you will be able to locate and focus on the students who need the most support. This feature will provide transparency and clarity into the data that has factored into the student status, ensuring that you're able to make educated decisions about next steps for a student. We've begun our client technical preview with plans to go to an early adopter program later this year. We're learning lots still and expect great improvements and changes as we continue to develop this throughout the year. Not to be outdone, learning management style house also has many great updates. From new features, improved integrations, and UI updates, there's a lot to be excited about. Our first upcoming feature is with parent initiated attendance. Parents with appropriate rights will be able to submit attendance for their students directly through the portal. You will be able to control which attendance reasons parents have access to and be able to review and adjust all parents submitted attendance. This will greatly reduce your admin time having to transfer information from calls or emails into the system. This feature will go to an early adopt a program for the start of the 2526 school year with the expectation of being generally available by the end of 2025. Over to you, Mike Morissette. Perfect. Thank you so much. Now a couple of other items for the learning management system. The first of which that I wanna talk through is a lockdown browser experience. Now I know that this is a feature that a lot of you have been really excited for. We're excited for it too. We are partnering with Respondus, to allow for online assessments to be locked down while students are taking those online tests. This ensures that the test, is authentic. We wanna ensure that the student can't access outside resources like generative AI or other, tools or websites while they're actively within the test taking experience. Now this particular, feature will be going through an early adopter program. We're not quite ready to announce when that early adopter program will be starting. We're still working through building out the integration, so more to come. But if you are interested, be on the lookout in the community as we will be recruiting for additional EAP participants, in the near future. Now keeping along with the trend of additional partner integrations, we're really excited to be partnering with folks like Microsoft, Turnitin, and Storyboard That to bring enhanced LTI 1.3 partnerships to you all. In particular, we are working very, very closely with Microsoft Teams assignments. That way, you folks that are leveraging Microsoft Teams as part of your LMS can create assignments within Teams and have those grades and assignments flow back into our learning management system. Additionally, if you are utilizing Microsoft OneDrive, we wanna give teachers the ability to pull from their OneDrive while they're creating things like assignments, assessments, discussions, or manage their OneDrive holistically from their individual class page. For Turnitin, we're really excited to be partnering with them to bring you the 1.3 enhancements that, the 1.1 connection currently does not, facilitate. So more to come on that particular integration. And Storyboard That is another partner that we are working very closely with, to bring an LTI connection to for all of you through our assignment module. So no, announcement on early adopter programs as of yet. We are targeting beginning of next school year, but more to come on each of these separate integrations as more information is available. Now two last bits for the learning management system that we're very excited about all have to do with our assignment module. Assignments are used extremely heavily throughout our system. Within the last twelve months, roughly, we've had over 7,000,000 assignments created by all of our schools. So this is a particular area that gets used heavily and daily. And it's something that teachers are doing pretty regularly, and we really wanna save them time. Our goal here is to help save them clicks and scrolling. That way, when they need to come in and create assignments, it's taking as little effort as humanly possible. We really wanna make sure that this is completely streamlined so they're, not having to spend a lot of time actually building up the assignment itself. So a couple of things that we're doing to help facilitate this. For example, we are increasing the number of default values that teachers can assign. So, for example, if a teacher always has the submission type set to in product submission, we wanna give them the ability to set that themselves. That way, every time that they load this assignment creation screen, that setting is automatically marked for them, thus saving a click. Additionally, we wanna take the schedule that is housed in our student information system and combine that with our assignment creation process, giving teachers the ability to set due dates and due times based on the schedule of their classes. So more to come with this particular experience. We're hoping to have this ready by the beginning of the next school year. So more to come on this in the near future. And not only are we looking at the assignment creation process, but we're also taking a look at the assignment grading process. So after a student has submitted work and the teacher is going in to evaluate that work that the student has submitted, we wanna make that process more ergonomic and also better, facilitated for smaller screens. We know that a lot of teachers typically are accessing our portal on something like a laptop screen, and the current experience involves a lot of clicking, a lot of scrolling, and we wanna help minimize that as much as humanly possible. So we're doing things like automatically loading student documents in the UI. That way, teachers don't have to click on the link to load the document. It's just automatically there for them. We also were showing our evaluation metrics, so being able to assign points, comments, evaluate via rubric, side by side with the content that the student has submitted. That way, the teacher can grade while simultaneously looking at the student work. So there's more to come with this particular project. We hope that you all are excited. We're very excited for this. So more to come, in the future as it relates to EAPs and when potential general availability releases will be taking place. And with that, I'm gonna pass the baton back over to Corey to talk through some updates that we have regarding tuition management system. And I'm standing in for Jamie today. Jamie, unfortunately, is not feeling well. So I'm gonna try to do my best to speak to her slides. And let me get my camera working. Okay. So we'll start with what's available now just like everyone else. Jump right into that. So one of the first things that I wanna talk about is, Blackbaud checkout. So Blackbaud checkout has been brought to all of your payers on tuition management. We've updated all those pages and and that's, you know, modernizing that payment experience for for all your payers and offering all the security measures and that uniform, parent, paying payment experience across all of all of our Blackbaud products. And we've also offered now a seamless integration with our partner Flywire for our international payers. And so we've had an existing partnership with with Flywire, and I know a lot of schools do as well. But that was harder to use. You had to accept the payment through flywire and then manually input that into, the system. And now that is directly integrated, and will automatically show up on the payer account and remit it to the school following the standard remittance cycle and just eliminating that business office that you have to really do anything. Next, we've offered the, we're offering now the additional parent user invitation. So gone are the days when, payers have to share their IDs, to access the account. Now once a a payer is set up to access tuition management, they have the ability to invite, anyone additional that they'd like, and all they have to do is enter that email address and invite that user, and they'll get steps to create a new account to connect with the Blackbaud ID. And you can you can, remove that user at any time, just with a click of button. This next one is an enhancement that's had some of, the most votes, in our idea portal for tuition management, and we're pretty excited, to have brought this to you. So as a school, now you'll be able to add in descriptions, on an individual basis, for billing items. And so by adding these specific details for the payers, it's more clear, clearer than ever than what, a payer is being charged for. And, you know, that was an issue before because payers would call in frequently to the business office and ask, hey. What are the details here? Why am I being charged for this? And this should really help to alleviate some of those calls, and it'll also be listed on the invoice, on the on the prior to debit and invoice emails. And so we've got a few things coming soon as well. First, I wanna talk about these parent communications. The first of those updates are the welcome email, the e invoice, and the prior to debit emails. These emails have received a pretty big makeover, ensuring that we have, again, a uniform experience for those payers. And we've updated all the messaging and all of the emails, making sure that we're sharing any important tips and tricks in utilizing tuition management and details in managing their accounts. And, we'll now be displaying the billing amount due with a line by line breakdown of the total as well as any custom fee descriptions right within the email to save that payer, you know, extra clicks to log in to the parent site to review those details. We've also made a change to our, for our schools who use the resource tile to reference logging in from there rather than the parent site directly, which will save some confusion and Blackbaud ID problems that we've seen in the past. You've probably seen this one before. We had this one hold, but, we are doing this work. It's coming. It's the automatic updates, from core. So this work will allow updates made in core, to pay your name, email address, physical address, phone number to automatically update intuition management. So no more mismatched accounts, duplicate data entry, that you've got to manually update. And next, our school landing page is getting a complete makeover, and that new landing page will be done, utilizing Sky UX. Again, unifying that experience the with the rest of our k 12 products. And we'll we're gonna be adding all sorts of improved reporting on enrollment, remittance, delinquency, as well as some shortcuts, to your favorite reports, links to your most recently accessed payer accounts and a watch list you can toggle on for payer accounts you'd like to keep a close eye on. Next is the pay what we're calling the payment scheduler. So currently, if a payer wants to make a payment for a date in the future, they'd have to remember to log in on that date to process their payment. And with this, this new tool, that will no longer be the case. So payers will be able to log in, preschedule payments on whatever schedule works best for them, and they can set their account up to debit certain amounts from a from a combination of credit card or bank accounts, whatever really best fits their need. And this just allows flexible payments for payers who who may wanna make multiple monthly installments based on their pay period or just need to use a different trust, accounts to pay tuition for, multiple different students in a single account. And then lastly, our in product refunds. This is work, where, you know, we've recognized that the current process, for refunds, for issuing refunds for the schools is is really less than ideal. There's manual steps involved, that need to be tracked. And so we're we're starting the beginning stages of developing the ability for a school user to issue a refund back to the payer in the form of the original payment with a quick, click of a button. This will save you time in the business office and and and from having to manually add offsetting fees into tuition management for refunded payments and really eliminate the need to mail out physical refund checks, to your payers and just saving everyone quite a bit of time there. So lots of lots of good stuff coming for tuition management. And with that, I will hand it to Julia. Thanks, Corey. Hi, everyone. My name is Julia Messick, and I'm the product manager for Blackbaud Billing Management. I've been at Blackbaud for twenty one years, and I'm based in Charleston, South Carolina. So for billing management, we have been working on a lot of fun things. So I'm just gonna dive right in. The first is, the team made some changes recently to how billing clerks are able to generate, late fees, for parents who fall behind on their payments. So before, it would be that the billing clerk would go to the past due balances list, click the button to generate the late charges, and there would be a process that ran. But it didn't tell you a lot about what was going on. So with the new update, you can see here that the billing clerk is able to run the generate process as of a specific date, and then we're also giving you a preview of of the charges that are gonna be generated, but then also, almost more importantly, a a preview of the exceptions where we're not able to generate, the late charges. So you're able to see why and make any corrections if needed. We recently added the ability for the billing clerk to view Blackbaud disbursements within billing management. So on the recent disbursements tab, you've probably noticed that you're seeing your disbursements, from BBMS. So rather than having to go into Blackbaud to run the, to run the reports, you get to your disbursement, you can do all of that within billing management, making it easier to reconcile Blackbaud, to your billing management payments and then, of course, posting over to Financial Edge NXT. We did some work not too long ago, and we have some more coming up soon to be able to reverse posted transactions. So transactions that you've posted to the general ledger, so maybe you have a charge or a failed payment that you posted and you need to get that out of your general ledger rather than creating an offsetting distribution to flush that out. You're now able to create, a reversing entry from those posted transactions. We did some work with the enrollment management team, to add the ability for parents to enroll in autopay on contracts. This is a feature that is available available to our US customers to start. So our Canadian friends that are using contracts and billing management, we will have this change coming to you all soon too. But for now, for our US customers, you are now able to have parents enroll in autopay as part of the contract process. There's now a checkbox on the, payment plan within billing management to either require or make optional the enrollment in autopay. And then from there, the parents, as they're filling out the contract, they will be prompted based on that setting to either, enroll required enroll or have the option to enroll if it's not required but optional. On a payment plan for billing clerk, you are now able to edit the due date of an installment. So sometimes we know that parents maybe need a little more time to make a payment. Before, you would have either just had to know that they're gonna make a payment later, or delete and re add the payment plan with the correct date. But now you're able to edit the individual due dates if they do need a little more time making a payment. Then we've got some exciting news on the API front. We have some endpoints available in Sky API for our partners to write integrations to billing management. The the endpoints that are available are around adding charges to a group of records. So if you have a point of sale vendor or that's doing your cafeteria management or school store, they are now able to write integrations to push all those charges into billing management rather than you having to import them. Not that that's terrible, but going through the API, that makes it a lot easier and less work for the billing clerk. So that's in tech preview right now. We have one partner that's been able to write an integration, but that's available to any any partner, any Sky developer using Sky API. And then just a few weeks ago, we introduced a new wizard to be able to roll over payment plans. This is really helpful for schools who do continuous enrollment. Before the billing clerk would have exported and then used add payments to group to get those payment plans onto student records for the upcoming year. But now with this wizard, it's just a few button clicks. We are able to roll those over just like we saw with the late fee generation. We're providing a preview of what will happen and then any exceptions that, the system isn't able to roll over. Alright. Let's take a look at what we are cooking up coming soon. This one is really exciting. We are working on incidental autopay. So we have autopay for payment plans. The team is working on autopay for incidentals. This will allow parents to sign up for an autopay auto pay plan for any charges that fall outside of the payment plan. I actually have an EAP interest form that I'm gonna send in the chat for those of you who are interested. Just posted that. We are looking to have an early adopter program later this summer, but the idea is that, autopay itself for incidentals will be available, as we head back to school for the 2526 school year. So if that's something your school is interested in, you're using billing management today, fill that out, and we will be in touch when we're ready to have our early adopter program. You might have noticed that we have been slowly making some changes out in the payer portal. We have some more that we're working on. We recently updated the payer portal to use the new modern theme for our Sky user experience. So that gave it a more modern look and feel, but we're gonna be introducing some more tiles shortly. We will have an accounts tile where if you have multiple students in a family, like you can see here at the screenshot, we'll be breaking out the the balances for each student, just making a little bit easier for parents to see the breakdown when they have multiple students in a family. But then, also, we're gonna start categorizing the amounts so, we can see the payment plan amount versus their incidentals and then making it easier to understand how autopay is gonna impact their balance. If they have their payment plan on autopay but not incidentals, we're making it more clear if they need to make a manual payment or if autopay is gonna clear the account. I mentioned earlier that we added the ability to reverse posted charges and posted payments. We're gonna be adding that same functionality for credits and enrollment deposits. So once those have been posted today, you have to add an offsetting transaction so that it it can clear your general ledger. But coming soon, you'll be able to just click on the reverse option, and it will create the reversing entries. So when you go to post a general ledger, it'll post those distributions to clear out, the accounts. And then, because we let you roll over payment plans and import payment plans, we also wanted to give you a way to delete payment plans in bulk if you happen to make a mistake. So coming soon from the payment plans list, we're gonna be adding that bulk action pattern to the list so that if you need to, you're able to delete payment plans in bulk if you make a mistake and need to start over. We have a small but mighty change coming to add payments to group and add credits to group, and that is being able to force the application of those payments and credits to specific billing items or to, payment plan installments. So today, when you add payments and credits using the add to group, it's going to add to or apply to, the oldest transaction first. But with this new option, you'll be able to force the application to, say, tuition or to a payment plan installment if you need that to happen. Our statement recipients tile is gonna get remodeled slightly. The functionality will stay the same. It's just gonna get a more updated look and feel and making a little more clear when we have split families today that's, kind of inferred based on how the record is set up if it's, shared responsibility or a together family. So we're adding that first class, split payment responsibility to make it easier to see in the system, and throughout our lists. We did some work or will be doing some work, that the core team started off for us, which will allow us to have a new role that we can put users in, that solve for the issue where you have perhaps a grandparent who wants to make an occasional payment, but you don't wanna give them full access to the payer portal. Today, you would either have to put them in the current parent role, which which grants them access to the entire payer portal or the entire portal that your school uses, versus just the billing area, or you could make them a third party payer and then they don't get access to the payer portal at all. So with this change, our statement recipients would go into the payer role, and they would just have access to the billing area where they would be able to see their activity, make payments, get a statement, and all of that. And then last but not least, our team has been working on a first class refund record for a very long time, and we're getting really close to being able to release that. Our refund record will be, a way for the billing clerk to record that they are issuing a refund back to the family. It'd be available for any unapplied payment or credit. So say at the beginning of the year or sorry, the end of the year, a student has a credit balance. Maybe their parent the parents have been overpaying slightly throughout the year, and you wanted to issue a refund back, you will be able to do that with a first class refund record. Today, you would add a charge to offset the balance, But in the future, you'll be able to issue a first class refund. And then later down the road, our plan is that these refunds would integrate with accounts payable, so that you'll be able to cut the check from accounts payable. But to start, this will be a refund record so you can track those in a first class way. And that is all she wrote for billing and movement. I'm gonna hand it over to Aaron to talk about financial aid. Thank you, Julia. Hi, everyone. My name is Aaron Wachholz, and I'm the product manager for Blackbaud Financial Aid Management. I have been, in the world of education for a number of years now, but most recently here at Blackbaud for the past eight. So and I've been in this product manager role for a little over three this time. So glad to be here, and thank you all for sticking with us here to to the end of the line. So we'll close it out here with a little bit of information about financial aid management, and we'll get it going. So a few things, four specific items we're gonna walk through in the available now section, of financial aid management. The first one is custom calculation settings. So, schools had always had the ability to customize how we calculate what a family can afford to pay for tuition as part of the process of financial aid, management. However, it was a a kind of a convoluted process and not easy to do. So our goal was to make it simple and allow schools to do it on their own, in a much easier way and that's that's, what we've done here. So in the settings area, you can see in the top screenshot there, you have the ability to customize the calculation using four of the most commonly customized, calculation settings. We did, discovery and research on that and picked these four specifically because they are by far the most common. Housing costs, asset adjustments, things of that nature are are here for you to do on your own. So, really wanted to make this simple for schools and school facing, to simplify the whole process and allow you to do this on your own. So we're excited to have that out for you to be using at this time. Another feature that we have out for your usage now is the ability to import students. This was another request that we had been getting for actually several years from schools, and it began to become more magnified as the, what I'll just kind of use broadly the term voucher programs, have become more and more popular throughout The United States. And so what schools are now encountering are, different, ways that they're tracking all the different types of discounts or types of aid, depending on how you want it, what term you wanna use to give that, ways that they're adjusting the tuition, for a particular student, whether that be based on need, based on merit, based on state funding. And schools were saying, hey, we'd really like to be able to do this all in one place. And so this is a way to help you with that. So you have the ability now to import list of students into the financial aid management system who are not applying for need based aid, who are receiving some other type of aid or discount. You can create a budget for those students and then award those students in financial aid. And then, of course, from there, you can connect it to the enrollment management system. You can connect it to the tuition management system. All of the same functionality in that regard exists as if the family would have applied for need based aid. So we're excited to have this out. Please do check it out and feel free to use it as much as you are able to. Alright. So we are also pursuing a lot of different types of connections, as is the Blackbaud theme. It's a theme in our, pillar here to have connected systems. I just was mentioning a few of those, as we've connected to enrollment management and tuition management. This is another theme here of implementing the omnibar into the financial aid product to make the user experience more consistent across the applications. You also have the product picker as well now, so you can move throughout the applications that you have the ability to access, within the Blackbaud, sphere, right from the omnibar. So this is live now in the financial aid product. We are continuing to work on it. It is live and we're, you'll notice in the gray navigation bar on the top of that screenshot, there are different navigation menu items. We're picking off different pieces of that and moving that up into the omnibar as well. As an example, right now, we are working on moving the search feature up into the omnibar. So that will allow you to search for specific applications. That feature is most commonly used by schools to search by application ID number, based on our research. So we're moving that into the omnibar as well. So that's an ongoing project, but the omnibar is there. It is live, and we're excited to have it. Circling back again now to the connections with enrollment management. We have now released the resource board tile that is a single sign on experience into the financial aid management system. So many of you may be using the resource board for multiple different things. Tuition management has a single sign on tile out here already option for you to use. You now have the same ability with financial aid. So if that's something that would help your families get to the financial aid application more easily and more quickly, this is there for you to use, and set that up, and it's, it's there for you to use at this time. So that is another connection that we've built with the enrollment management system. Alright. So we had four things that are in the system today, and we have four things that are coming in the future. So let's go through those next year. So we are actively working on building connections with the IRS. This will allow families to give us permission to obtain their information from the IRS directly, reducing the number of documents they need to upload and speeding up our review time. So this is something that we are actively working on today and, are looking forward to getting this built into our system. Alright. You might be sensing a theme here. Connections with enrollment management appears again. So, the resource board tile is the first thing we did that is now well, it's actually the second. The first thing we did last year was allow you to, from within the budgets, send that award amount from financial aid directly to enrollment management. The second thing we did was built the single sign on resource board tile. The third thing we're working on right now is including financial aid in more of the parent flow in the enrollment process through EMS. Kelsey earlier showed a screenshot of this new checklist. We're using that here as well. So we are going to be including, the ability for a family to select on either the inquiry or the application that they're interested in applying for financial aid. If they say yes, they will have a financial aid option here on the checklist, and we'll be connecting that directly to the financial aid system, of course, and managing that. The parent can come here to the checklist. They can see what status their application is in, and will hopefully help again make this process more connected for the parent and increase that, simplicity for them and for you at the school level. So this is, also work in progress. We are also working on ways to enhance the parent application. So we also know the parent experience, is a key piece of the financial aid process, and we want to continue to modernize our application. So we have various things that we have in the hopper that we're looking at doing in that regard and how we can better, create an application that is the easiest and simplest for parents to complete while at the same time not compromising the amount of information that we're gathering for you, which is a, an an important line that that we wanna walk down. So simplifying it, making it as easy as possible, yet at the same time, being comprehensive enough to get a good amount of information for our calculation purposes and for your decision making purposes at the school. Finally, we have worked with one of our UX designers to revitalize our home page. So if you're familiar with the financial aid application, when you log in, you come to what we call the home page. Not a lot going on there today. We wanna make it so that there is a lot going on, and we wanna make it an actionable type of dashboard for you, and allow you to have different ways that you can access, again, actionable items within the system to be able to quickly jump from one place to the other, see quick, charts and graphs of data that will make, help you make more informed decisions and and make those decisions more quickly and more efficiently. So that's also a project that we have going on, behind the scenes at this time as well. And that is it. So I have the pleasure of, closing this out for us today. And on behalf of the k twelve pillar and all of the product team here, I wanna thank you for being with us. Thank you for taking the time to go through this. Thank you for being our customers. And if you have any questions, we are all here to answer them, and we are more than happy to talk with you at any time. So, again, thank you for your time. Take care, and we'll see you soon.