Name: Just the FACTS: Why Your School Needs Blackbaud’s Total School Solution
Uploaded: 2026-04-16T18:32:47.015Z
Duration: 57 min 40 s
Description: Just the FACTS: Why Your School Needs Blackbaud’s Total School Solution

Transcript for "Just the FACTS: Why Your School Needs Blackbaud’s Total School Solution": Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us for today's session, Just the facts, why your school needs Blackbaud's total school solution. A few callouts as we all get settled. The webinar audio will be broadcast through your computer speakers. So, hopefully, you can all hear me. You will receive the recording to today's session about twenty four hours after the fact. If you need captions, you can hover over the stage and click the CC button on the bottom of the screen to turn your captions on and off. If you encounter any audio or technical issues such as the slides or your screen freezing, usually a quick refresh of your browser is the best way to get it working again. And worst case scenario, you can leave and log in again. Please note that we do have a q and a portion on the top right, and you can submit questions that you have. I will be honest. We have a lot to get through. So if we aren't able to answer your question right now, know that we will do our best to follow-up after the fact. You'll also see the docs area. Please click here to access several links and resources that you might wanna access during today's presentation, share for future reference, or perhaps with your colleagues. And you can adjust the settings at any point in time by using the cog wheel at the bottom of the event space. Just a reminder, things can change. So the majority once we get to the demo portion of today of what we'll show is either live in product and or it's in development and nearing general availability. So please know that some details might change, but our overall vision remains consistent. As shown in the visual here, with more than forty years of experience in private and independent k 12 schools, Blackbaud offers a total school solution that connects every facet of your school. We have the essential software to connect enrollment and academics with your business office and development, all with a robust single sign on family portal. This ensures that everyone has the tools and information they need to drive student success. As you'll hear in today's discussion, we're an open API first total solution with a broad partner network for added value. I do wanna stop and briefly frame what we mean when we talk about the total school solution. Sometimes it's misunderstood. So a total school is not about forcing every office, onto one system or asking a school to replace everything at once. For us, a total school solution means connecting the offices that matter most to a school's mission and sustainability using shared data, role based access, and systems built for the specific work that each team does. Some schools start with advancement, others may be with a business office or enrollment, some move one department, some move several. And what you'll hear today are real examples of how schools identified a need from their previous vendor and chose Blackbaud where it delivered the most value. Before I get to our panelists, as I know that's why you're all here today, I also wanna talk about something that is at the top of mind for absolutely everyone these days. Something that will come up in our conversation and that you'll see briefly in our demo, which, of course, is AI. Intelligence for Good is Blackbaud's AI strategy to combine convenient, powerful, and responsible AI with exclusive sector specific data across our entire portfolio of solutions. Our tools will be convenient. They'll be embedded directly within the software that you, our customers, already use. We will build complete ready made AI solutions that can be confidently used at the push of a button. We'll encourage the availability of AI driven partner solutions in the Blackbaud marketplace. We'll provide education and training to ensure that you have the skills you need to successfully adopt new AI tools. Our tools will be powerful. They'll drive meaningful, measurable outcomes thanks to diff thanks to differentiators, like the world's most robust philanthropic database, which is continuously improved through machine learning to drive real time game changing results, and deep sector experience to understand where and how AI can most effectively enhance your key workflows. And most importantly, our tools will be responsible by prioritizing an approach to AI that is grounded in fairness, inclusiveness, reliability, and trust. So summing it all up, our intelligence for good strategy is about moving your mission forward through the combination of robust data, leading edge AI tools, and the expertise that understands not just your business challenges, but the sensitivity of your data and how it fuels your entire school community. So let's talk about where we're going today. In just a minute, we're gonna start with our customer panel, and then we'll have time for a very brief, product demonstration. But we always like to put our money where our mouth is and show you a little bit of the solutions. And if time permits, I have a couple of exciting announcements of what's to come. So in just a minute, I'm so happy and appreciative to welcome Stephen Compton and doctor Eric Johnson from Franklin Road Academy, Michelle Snyder from Miami Valley Christian Academy, Sheila Weier from Southside Christian School, and Cara Martone, who is our resident expert. She's a former teacher, technology director, communications director, and Blackbaud customer. She is also a current parent, so she gets to wear a lot of hats both in the solutions and in real life. I couldn't help but brag on our panelists. As we were preparing for today's session, one thing that came up across every school was the fact that their community was able to grow both in terms of enrollment as well as their physical footprint. So Franklin Road Academy, recently, as you'll see the slide, unveiled unveiled a new upper school building, that has a slide. So I can't wait to hear a little bit more about that. It was so cool to hear about. Southside Christian School. This was just a really neat image to see where the footprint of their campus started in 2019, which is when they decided to make the move over to Blackbaud, where it is now in 2025, and then the fact that they have a very impressive master campus plan that they're working towards. And last but not least, our friends at Miami Valley Christian Academy started with around 350 students. They're now around eleven forty, and they are in the process of building a beautiful new building as well. So with that, I'm gonna stop sharing my slides, and I'm gonna welcome our panelists to the stage. So if y'all come up and join me, we'll have our conversation. Awesome. The magic happened. Okay. So just a reminder and to level set, for today. All of these schools, ended up replacing facts previously known as RenWeb, with Blackbaud's total school solution or elements of our total school solution. And so the conversation that we're gonna go through today is touching on maybe what wasn't working before, what drove their decision to change, and most importantly, the outcomes, that they're seeing since moving to a more connected platform. So that being said, we'll start by having our panelists introduce themselves, telling us a little bit about who they are, their role, and a. brief overview of their school community. And as we talked about, this might include, where your previous enrollment is, where it was before, and if you have room to grow and and what the future looks like, and a little bit about your Blackbaud ecosystem. So, Eric, I'll start with you and Steven from Franklin Road Academy. Yeah. Thanks, Elizabeth. Yeah. My name is Eric Johnson. I've been an independent school educator since 2005, and so going on twenty one years. It's my third year at Franklin Road Academy, which is a pre k three through twelfth grade school in Nashville, Tennessee. We have about a little over 1,100 students, and so, we are sort of a total school solution. Before making the full switch, we were using, Raiser's Edge and Financial's Edge, and we didn't wanna make those, you know, changes. And so we switched over, to the complete package, just two years ago. And so this is actually our first year of implementation or real time use, and so it's been great. Awesome. And, Steven, you wanna tell us about your role at Franklin Road? Sure. Hi. I'm also, at Fregard Academy. My name is Steven Compton. I've been at FRA for twenty six years and thirty three years overall in education. Teach, technology related courses, computer science, although this year, I am not teaching. So, just been involved with Blackbaud, really since 2001, and we, already had, as stated before, with Raiser's Edge and Education Edge. And we were connected with Blackbaud for a long time. As things have grown over the years, we recently, as we said, the last really twenty four months, made the decision to go with the total solution because of our growth, both on our physical campus as well as on enrollment. So we're really excited. It's gone really well this year. Awesome. We'll dig in, of course, to all of these, nuggets about growth and what inspired that change and all of that. But, Sheila, I'll hand it over to you to tell us a little bit about yourself and Southside Christian School. Okay. Hello. I'm Sheila Wire. I'm from Southside Christian in Greenville, South Carolina, and I've been here for twenty one years. My role is director of software, systems and implementation. Before that, I spent ten years in consulting and marketing with IBM. So all of the IT background, I really entered the private school market, because I wanted my kids here, and so, they needed some help. And I'm like, oh, I can do that. I never thought that I would be here for twenty one years. When I first started, we were on our old system years ago, SchoolMinder, and I did the, implementation to fax and rim RimWeb in 2008 and 2009. And then 2019, we decided we were piecemealed. We have we were about 1,100 about between a 1,100 students at that time. We've now grown to be four over 1,400 students. And we were really looking, to to make sure we were doing everything excellent from top to bottom, and we were communicating with parents and doing everything the same thing. We started pre k two to twelfth grade. And so we really wanted a reset to put everything together so that we could, design a solution that would keep excellent communication in mind and making sure parents, regardless if it's a two year old, a first grader, a middle schooler, or a high schooler, had continuity and knew where to go they could go to find information, and everything was in one place as much as possible. Awesome. And, Michelle, tell us a little bit about yourself and Miami Valley. Hi, everybody. I'm Michelle Snyder from Miami Valley Christian Academy in Cincinnati, Ohio. I currently am the accounts receivable manager and Blackbaud platform manager. I started here in twenty fifteen, fifteen, and we were around 350 students at that point. And our enrollment this year is around eleven forty, and we're projecting to be well over 1,200 for the 2627 school year. As Elizabeth showed, we are in the process of building a new high school, and that kinda comes on the heels of lots of growth. We were in one building before for preschool through twelfth grade. In about 2019, we started realizing that we were quickly busting out of that building, and we've since had moved preschool to a different building, expanded our current building, and now we're in process of building this new high school. And we could not have sustained that growth without the tools that Blackbaud gives us. We were using fax, RenWeb for SIS, LMS, and tuition, and now we have moved to Blackbaud for EMS enrollment management. Sorry. SIS, LMS, and tuition management, and we started that implementation. in 2020. So, Michelle, you kinda love the witness for me a little bit, but let's unpack a little bit about when your schools, you know, took stock and said, hey. Our previous system either wasn't meeting the needs of our school community, wasn't supporting the, you know, vision that we had for growth, or maybe it just wasn't, you know, representing the experience or your school, to the community at large. So, Michelle, I'll let you kinda keep going a little bit, about, you know, what led you all in terms of your previous process to say, hey. We need a little bit more. Sure. I think one of the biggest things for us, comes with enrollment management, and we had so much paper. And it was really hindering our processes. As we grew, it was not possible to sustain that. And that's one of the things that drew us to Blackbaud at first was the the capabilities in enrollment management and to move from paper to an online process for application and checklist and recommendations, and that's been huge in helping us with that growth. Awesome. I know one of the things that you also mentioned when we were talking was around, like, the parent interface and, you know, what it used to be like and and kind of what you all were looking for. Can you, you know, talk just a little bit Sure. The parent interface in Blackbaud is is so much more user friendly than it ever was in fax Red Web. Parents can quickly see? which classes their students are enrolled in, what their students' grades are, if they're missing assignments, and and not just for parents, but for students also. The student view, teachers can put so much information on a resource board or under topics for their classes, and students have all that information right in the really in the palm of their hand if they're old enough to have a phone. Super easy for them to connect to it, for students to submit assignments, for parents to submit. We use forms for everything from field trips to, I don't know, every we use forms for everything. It allows us to easily collect information from parents and students and to collect money if we need to do that as well. Awesome. Eric, I've seen you, you know, nodding a a bunch, and I know you, of course, come at this from, you know, kind of that even more, like, strategic and and leader vision. And we'll let, you know, Steven talk a little bit about kind of the in the weeds. But, what led FRA to say, hey. We need to, you know, relook at at what we had and and what we're looking for going forward? Yeah. I mean, I think I'd echo a lot of what has been said. You know, our, school experience had grown and improved, and our technology platform had not kept up with the needs and the expectations of our school community, both from families and teachers. And so, when I got to FY three years ago, one of the most common complaints I hear from faculty is is kind of our SIS system just not keeping up. And we did not have a single LMS. Fax does not really have an LMS, and so some schools will will put both one on top of it, but we just didn't have one. So I have a middle school son, and every teacher had a different platform of how to assign homework and how to, you know, have notes and expectations. And so as a parent who trying to help his son, get his homework done was a nightmare. And then just from, from a faculty and also a teacher, it just it was really hard to get information to my students. And so I think we just reached a point, as a school that we just needed something better and bigger and and more connected. I'll echo the admissions piece that we are all either on paper or in OneNotes or on spreadsheets, and the the syncing and the data entry was just a nightmare for those offices. It's just the hours and hours of time that has been saved. Just this year alone. Again, it's our first year, and it's gone smoother than I would have ever guessed. And it was a lot of work last year to get it all in place, but it's been totally worth, the work last year to have this year go so smoothly. Awesome. Steven, I know one of the things that we talked about, and I'm sure given your role, was, you know, turning what Eric had described as, you know, the wild, wild west and fragmented, you know, platforms and all of that. One of the things that you, you know, mentioned when we were talking too was around the partner network. So I don't know if you wanna speak to kind of what you've seen on your side, in terms of what, you know, helped you take on this project. Sure. I was pleasantly, surprised the, in the past, when we had Blackbaud before, the sharing of data and the APIs, the ability to connect to the database was a little bit lacking. Mind you, that was in early two thousands. And so when we were evaluating the program, one of the exciting pieces that we're able to do is a lot of not only single sign on for the parents, but then also partnerships with other programs. And so we started looking at various programs. For example, August Schools, allowed us to, connect to the Blackbaud database so our parents can experience a single sign on as well as pull the data from our Blackbaud database. From a security perspective, we have the same experience with Raptor, another partner of yours, and allowed us to, again, pull things like in an emergency situation. We use these emergency badges. And because Blackbaud has an open API, we're allowed to pull, for example, rosters in emergency so that, parent or teachers can pull up their students in their class in the event of an emergency. So it's just the ability to pull data from the system. We even, in ourselves, one of the things that we do, we like to program custom things in my office. And so, for example, because Blackbaud is so friendly with their APIs, we were able to pull, for example, into our Outlook database all the parents' email addresses. So if the parents, for example, change their their email address in the system, it automatically updates into our Outlook system. And so that's that's the flexibility that we were hoping for and and expect, and so that's something we couldn't get with Renweb. Fantastic. Sheila, as you and I talk, there's always, like, a handful of things that stick out that I'll let you, you know, add some color to and expand on, but I love that you always use the word excellence. So if you wanna talk, you know, a little bit about that, and just, you know, the, the impact on your admissions team. Of course, we know that, you know, revenue is such an important part, for a school, whether we're talking about, you know, your students, the tuition, aid, how that money is raised and managed. But tell us a little bit about Southside and what kind of helped you all see that a change needed to happen. Well, we were really, we were we weren't totally dissatisfied. We we were using all the pieces of RenWeb, and they were okay. But, again, we just felt like we kinda hit a ceiling. We also didn't have, the financial packages, the the, finance the the general ledger and payables, and we or we didn't have, like, the donor module. So we really wanted all of that to kinda we were, like, looking for the whole solution where it could all fit together and all the data, is kinda transparent between the systems. And kinda just a reset because we knew knew that to get bigger, we needed more more, capabilities. And, also, like Eric said, and when I talk about excellent from a parent perspective, you know, when you have all these, different grades and teachers using different LMSs and communicating differently, you know, parents like, well, for my fifth grader, I have to go five places to get something, and for my senior, I have to go here. So like I said, we we basically set set up a strategy so that all the teachers are communicating and setting things up from top to bottom in the same way, and that helped huge. And the whole enrollment system, from top to bottom, we we have loved that. We were using the fax enrollment. We were not on paper, so we were using some of their stuff. My admissions director actually was probably the least excited about coming over to, Blackbaud because she had spent so much time kinda getting her processes down. And once we we went we said, okay. She said, I'm just gonna be a team player and I'm gonna come on board. And once we started using that system and honing it and getting our processes going, she loves it loves it even more. And we got we got a really quick a big surprise with it because one of the things we didn't really realize is during, your enrollment season that, the EMS, the enrollment management system has these contracts. And when when if you once everything's set up, when your users fill a contract out, all the goes through the system. So all that integration is the seamless integration of all of that happening basically from an inquiry through their whole life cycle of the school graduation, through the alumni and the razor's edge and the donations, it's really kinda neat. Fantastic. I know that is something, you know, that we hear a lot, especially around that integration between financial aid, enrollment, like the process, the contracts, tuition, and billing, and then potentially, you know, even all the way to financial edge NXT and raisersEdge NXT. You can kinda follow that that money trail, so to speak. You touched on change management, which I love. So I also wanna encourage everyone to check out the, docs area. We do have a change management toolkit, that we published, in partnership with the team at Atlas. That's a great resource. I know that when we're talking about kind of implementation, Steven and Eric touched on the fact that they had a team. I know that Michelle and Sheila both kinda tackled this as a a one woman show at the start of the pandemic. So that's always a part of our conversation, with our schools as well to talk about how we best support your teams and what you, you know, are looking to do. And I love just the idea of, you know, maybe things felt okay, without really realizing how much better they could be. So we love to hear that. And with that, let's talk about, you know, a little bit more about some of the outcomes. And I know that whenever we talk about that, you know, you have your different constituencies. So what sort of outcomes are you seeing from a leadership perspective? What about, you know, for your faculty and staff and, of course, your families? So, Eric, I'll let you kick it off with the leadership, element for us if you don't mind. Yeah. I mean, change is always hard, you know, for faculty, and, we'd use fax for, maybe eight or ten years. And so, but at the same time, I think everyone had become frustrated with the limitations. And so in some ways, we weren't leaving a product that everyone loved. It was just kind of the devil you know. And so we obviously, you know, had a lot of professional development and trainings in August, and we tried to you know, based on how our implementation timed up, we had a a pretty strong cohort of teachers using it last year kind of behind the scenes, kind of in, parallel with facts. And so the the early adopters, the people who really want to dig in and start building out their class pages in March were doing that, and they become they became the area experts so that classroom teachers could pop over to their neighbor and see what was going on. But, you know, kids picked up on it really quick. We did some parent trainings and coffees. You know, we have a lot of kids who come from other schools in the area. We're either from middle or high school, and a lot of our, you know, feeder and peer schools are using Blackbaud as well. And so, that was another kind of easy transition for them. But, you know, I think you just know that that the first year is gonna be kind of the heaviest lift. But as we told the teachers of the ability to import assignments, import resources, I mean, once you build it out, the next year, you can really just import everything over very easily. And so I know next year is gonna be so much fun for teachers to just be able to kinda bring over what they've worked on this year and then obviously update it and make tweaks. But, no. It's been a huge success for our faculty and for our students and families, just the ease. The phrase we kept coming back to is one stop shop. We don't want, like what's being said, you know, about having to navigate five or six different websites. Everything is in one place, you know, from attendance to health records to grades to sports, and it's been really great just all around. Fantastic. Michelle, tell us a little bit about some of the outcomes that y'all have seen. Well, I think the biggest one we've already talked about is growth here. It's been really exciting to be a part of that and just to see how that move from Blackbaud from RenWeb to Blackbaud supported that growth. I think talking about change management with those outcomes, I think you'll be surprised. Some some of the people here that I would have expected to not at all be on board and to be slow to adopt have been the biggest champions because the product is it's easy to use and it's user friendly, and it just was really easy for people to jump on board and get to know it. Fantastic. I know that that's you know, in addition to kind of talking our schools through what sort of, you know, rollout or implementation plan makes the most sense for them, I know all of you have active training subscriptions, for, you know, our courses within Blackbaud University. I know Franklin Road Academy is using some of our advisory plus services to kinda take that adoption to the next level. We have conferences. We have webinars. I've, you know, scouted off all sorts of, you know, hopefully, resources that we have to help make that change management and adoption even more successful. If we're thinking, you know, about, kind of the future, and, Sheila, I know one of the things that you mentioned when we first, you know, spoke is you're like, you know, Blackbaud is a true software company. We also, of course, see ourselves, you know, as a long term partner in your school's future. So tell us, you know, or tell me a little bit about, you know, how you look at at the future growth, with Blackbaud in terms of how we're supporting solutions. Well, I mean, that's an easy one for me since I'm on kind of the blackboard advisory board, and I've gotten to meet all the product managers. But they are consistently putting out new features and updates. And, actually, I spent, I did a conference call, with, one of them the other day because they were doing some some investigation on capacity planning for emissions and how they can make that better. So they're they're definitely they're always looking to continually make their product better and get to the next level. So nothing's stagnant. It's not like, okay. We bought this and we're gonna they're gonna make a couple changes a year. I mean, they're constantly they're they have their road map for where they're going is five, ten years from now, all the things that they wanna do and put into to place. So they're they're growing. You mentioned AI. They're using they wanna they're doing a lot of research into how AI can be involved in the solution. So it's really neat. And that is one of the things when we were looking at making a change. Like, the thing about Blackbaud that really hit us is Blackbaud is a true software company. They know how to develop software. They're gonna their life cycle development, they're they're involved in it. Their product's just not gonna dry up and then move on to another business or another business is not their focus. Fantastic. Steven, anything else to add? Just thinking about, you know, the future and, growth and innovation. Well, one of the things I I wanna follow-up a minute one of the things you said earlier. I I think during this whole process, the fact that we had a great consultant, through the advisory plus program really made a difference for us and kinda helped us with the pain. But then also, we were able to participate in not only upgrades. I I know I've been playing around in the razor's edge, the AI mode. Sometimes when you're, like, looking up constituents and you gotta look at the data and you have to do, you know, a couple clicks to find everything you want, you could just go to the AI now and say, hey. Tell me about Stephen Compton and his family, and you can get a couple paragraphs of just pretty much everything you need to know. So that add on is is, exciting because it takes the data that's already there and allows us in our own little our own little window for Frank and Road, to see kind of what's going on. And so, that ability to get that is just another add on that we're just pretty excited about. Fantastic. Eric, anything, you know, else to add in terms of the partnership, growth, innovation? What you're thinking for the future? Yeah. I mean, I think just, the the one stop shop, the single source of truth, I mean, the ability to have all of our databases in one place. I saw one of the questions that came through about, you know, when people update their information. It it it instantly translates to all the different databases. And so you we before had an email group, and every time a parent would call a front office and change their home address, we had to email all the database people and change it five or six different places. And now we change it once in Blackbaud, and it immediately, you know, changes everywhere. And so and, again, the ability to not only have AI embedded in the software, which I know is upcoming, but also to export the spreadsheet and then use, you know, Copilot or ChatGPT or whatever you're using, to leverage the power of AI with an up to date database is just gonna become more and more important. I don't think we realized that two years ago when we started the conversation, but it's definitely, like, it's gonna be a game changer just how things are moving. Fantastic. Michelle, any thoughts from you? Sure. I think one thing that Blackbaud, among many, does really well is that they listen well to their users. There's a there's a user forum where you can propose ideas and vote for ideas. And many times in their product update briefings, the things that they are rolling out came from that board. And so I think that they are very future minded and want their organizations that they partnership to succeed. So they're watching they're watching and listening to what you're saying. Absolutely. And I will update the docs area. So the the link for the upcoming product update briefings, those are being held in May. We hope everyone will join us. It's a fantastic session with our product managers to hear where we've been and where we're going. And not to steal my thunder for the announcements, but another way in which we, are listening to our customers and and getting folks together like this is the return of our user conference. This summer in Boston, we will be gathering, all of your peers. It'll be the place to be, and we are so excited about bringing, our school community, back together with one another with, leaders from Blackbaud and, of course, with, industry experts. So I'll tease a little bit more of that. I am keeping an eye on the clock. I know y'all have students and computers and all sorts of things to get to. So Michelle, Steven, Eric, Sheila, thank you so much, for your time today. I'm gonna let, Kara come to the stage, and we're gonna give her, you know, mission impossible, but she always makes it possible, to show us just a little bit of of what we mean in terms of the total school solution, in just about fifteen, to twenty ish minutes. Well, great. Thanks, Elizabeth. I will do my best to cover as much as we can, during the time that we have together here. I also know that we have, you know, a lot of different personas on the line. So I wanna make sure we're trying to hit, as many of those different offices and personas as we can. And, let's see what we can cover here. So I'm gonna share my screen. Okay. And we're gonna start here kind of with the end in mind. We're gonna look at different facets of the system and the, you know, functionality and the outcomes that you can drive with that. What's kind of so what is really where I wanna start. So, looking at a dashboard, this is one of our our many dashboard areas that we have within the system where all of the data from that just that day to day working in the system can bubble up to you to create meaningful reports, meaningful dashboards, actionable insights for you to then make those data driven decisions, to really drive growth, to drive, your work towards your vision, towards your mission, to grow and develop your school. So just kinda keep this visualization in mind as we go, as we look at the various different parts of the system. So I want to emphasize as we start, if you're not familiar with the back end of the Blacklog system, that it is one system that relies on one set of credentials for users as they navigate the system. So as a parent, as a faculty member, as someone who works in a back office, I would need one Blackbaud ID, and then what I see and what where I can go will be configured by the various personas or the hats that I wear. If I'm a parent and a faculty member, I don't need two separate sets of credentials. I can simply toggle between those personas, as I'm working in the system. And if I'm grading papers, I'm over in the faculty area. If I'm checking my own kids' grades, I can toggle over to the parent view. Let's start with the beginning. Parents are coming in to your system, through the admissions and inquiry, phase of things. So you're able to assign them an admissions checklist for parents to work through. The checklist, we're gonna use the word configurable a lot today, it's going to be configured to your process and what you would like parents, to submit to you and it can even be different based on lower school, middle school, upper school. You can have different versions of the checklist. Your parents can also work through this and any, of the their areas of the Blackbaud solution right from their mobile device. So we are responsive by design. There's no need for a separate app. Parents can navigate to a browser or even save it as a favicon on their phone to be able to reach and manage and experience all of the areas of the Blackbaud solution. So as they complete this admissions checklist, they're signing up for their tours, they're filling out their application, they've completed everything, we're able to move them on to the contract phase. So the contract is integrated here in the Blackbaud system, with the billing solution. I know that we have different personas on the phone. We might have some schools that are, using our tuition management solution, some schools that are exploring the billing management solution. We have, you know, two billing solutions that we can speak about. Today, we're gonna focus on the billing management solution. So we're looking at an integrated contract that's going to pull in tuition and fees and optional fees, and even financial aid from the billing management solution. So as a parent, I know what I owe in terms of total expenses as well as what credits I'm going to receive for that total amount due. And then I'm able to choose my payment plan. I'm able to sign my contract, even enroll in things like autopay right here on the contract. When I complete, you know, maybe I give a deposit or an enrollment fee. But once I sign this contract, it's going to do several different things for the, the various hats that people wear at the school. For your parents, it's going to fully provision that billing account for them. For your admissions office, you're going to have an enrolled student in your account. For your student information system, now you have, an incoming, fourth grader that can be, start you could start communicating with and building their schedule. And for the business office, you have that, you know, projected revenue, for this family based on their tuition, their fees, etcetera. Now, the billing solution, as you'll see here, is fully integrated into the rest of the education management solution. So as a parent, I'm able to go and see my billing information with, again, not having to sign up for another account, remember another username or password. All of it's going to be in one place. I can see my current bill, my upcoming due dates, any recent activity on my account. I'm able to review my autopay for my payment plan, as well as I can even enroll in an incidental based autopay for those, ancillary charges. Once I'm enrolled in autopay, I will simply have a payment method on file that can take care of those incidentals. Heading back to this parent view for that billing area, I'm also able to view things like my statements, take a look at my payment plan, and even pull those end of year tax statements right from the parent view here. And that's all going to be, as Elizabeth mentioned before, those revenue generating, areas of the school. We're starting right here with that tuition, experience. Now for the back office, that billing management area, we're, again, managing it all here in the billing solution. I wear lots of hats in our demo environment, so I'm able to toggle easily from that parent view and then go over to the billing management solution. The billing solution, as we see here, we have a lot of capacity within the system. We're able to set up and get really granular with flexibility and control, our tuition table. You know, setting up that tuition table to, create your various tuition rates based on the grade level of the student, or are they boarding, or are they day, or are they in a three day a week, or a five day a week, and create these various tuition amounts, and also have a lot of control over how is this going to be posted and then recognized in our general ledger. Are we using that deferred revenue account initially? You know, how do we wanna rec recognize revenue as we go, and which general ledger account should it be, mapped to. Here in our demo site, we are actually integrated with our billing solution into Financial Edge NXT. So I've got my chart of accounts that I'm able to search and and tie this right back to, financial edge NXT for when, I'm going to reconcile, you know, later on in the process here. In the billing management account, the benefits to the integration with the, the rest of the Blackbaud solution is that the billing management system knows who your students are. So if I'm going to add charges to a group of students, I can simply say I want all of the ninth grade students for this school year because we're all taking a field trip, and I can charge them all a fee all at once, and I've got to pull in all my ninth graders and I can go quickly apply that field trip fee to their account. So it's going to know who your students are as you go. Now, again, I mentioned earlier the flexibility and control of billing management. I can post to my general ledger as frequently as I would like. If I hit this post to GL button here, I can filter my batch so that maybe it only includes charges or maybe just only includes payments or only charges or payments from a certain time period or that map to a certain GL account. I have a lot of control over that, and then I can create that batch, either as, in detail or in summary and send that on over to Financial Edge NXT. So you'll see here my batches. So I have some open batches. I have some posted batches here. When I click on my batch ID, I don't need to if I have these permissions, I don't need to remember another username and password. It's simply going to bring me on over into Financial Edge NXT, the accounting software, to then work with my batch and get that posted. As mentioned earlier, by some of our panelists, FinancialGen XT is our fund accounting solution, that, you know, our business offices can use, and it does connect to the other areas of the Blackbaud solution. While we don't have a ton of time to go into depth in FENXT, you know, we if we keep that end in mind as we were looking at dashboards earlier, you know, we're able to do all of those work that work that we need to do in our accounting solution, whether it's expense management or budgeting, you know, reconciling to our bank. And then we've got our dashboards at the end to kind of help us make those data driven decisions. The next area of the solution that I wanna take a peek at would be our development software here, Raiser's Edge NXT. This is another connected solution. If you look up here, you'll see that I can easily toggle between Raiser's Edge and Financial Edge and the education, management solution based on my roles and permission, again, not needing another set of credentials. Data is connected between the education management solution and Raiser's Edge, using our, common record engine, which will be going you know, generally available to all of our schools this summer. It's also connected to Financial Edge NXT and allows you to, post your batches of gifts, over into the accounting solution. So Razer's Edge NXT, it's a one stop shop for your development and advancement teams. Things like constituent management, your dashboards, your reporting, your event management, all of that can happen here in the solution. Our schools and our nonprofits also take advantage of online giving through the Razer's Edge NXT platform, where they can create various forms, use their branding, put it on their website. And then, the one of the benefits of Blackbaud's online giving platform is its complete cover option, where Blackbaud will cover the credit card and debit card processing fees up to, dollars 3,000 per transaction, to really save our schools a lot of money, in that area. Constituent management is a big piece of the Razer's Digestion XT platform. So I'm looking at a constituent record here. I can see, really at a glance, Robert's giving history, his latest gift, his greatest gift, how many years in a row he's given, all of that information has bubbled right up to me. And, you know, one of the, stories that we're, you know, have going on within Razor's end Razor's Edge NXT is innovation, and innovation in particular around the area of, AI. And there's a lot of great stuff built in to the Razer's Edge NXT platform. You may have seen it on the home screen before, our Blackbaud AI chat, that can help me with all sorts of things like event management, reaching out, reporting and analytics. You know, I asked it to create me a list of my live ones that have given over a thousand dollars in the past, and it quickly pulled up that list for me. And now I can make an email off of it or I can do an appeal off of that. So I have, my information here at the click of a button. Some premium AI features also going on in the Razer's Edge NXT, solution, where Robert Fernandez here. You know, AI can help us create an action plan for various opportunities. So we wanna help him, you know, cultivate him towards giving to the annual fund or the capital campaign. Some AI built into Razer's Edge NXT will help you develop it develop that plan to to nurture Robert towards that decision. Also, you know, the, agents for good is another area of development in Raiser's Edge NXT, and the development agent has been helping schools and nonprofits reach out to mid level donors, as, an extension of the development office. And, really, again, we're kind of landing on the end in mind here, like, so what? Right? We have, we're working in our system and we're able to get those actionable next steps, actionable dashboards, actionable reporting, drill down into these hyperlinks to see things like year over year or how our campaigns are performing. Development offices love this because they didn't have to put this dashboard together simply by working in the system, collecting donations, managing constituents. These dashboards and these data visualizations are created to help support our teams. I'm keeping an eye on the time here, we do just have a couple more minutes, so I'm going to wrap up our time, back over in the education management side of the house here. Let's take a peek back over on the parent view. So one thing that schools, and parents, and I am a Blackbaud parent, really love about the Blackbaud solution is everything they need is in one place. So if we're looking at this with the parent hat on here, I can find any resources that I need from the school all here on my resource board, whether it's my document library or it's a single sign on to one of those other, partners that, were mentioned earlier by our panel. Maybe a lunch option or, you're signing up for parent teacher conferences, right, we can easily connect to those other solutions via the resource board. So this is one way, schools are kind of, you know, directing their parents to find everything they need. School forms was also mentioned by our panel as a really, quick, easy, and just, it really just makes sense to use this as part of your strategy to make sure you have the most up to date information on your families. So whether you're offering forms over the summer, like update your profile information, update your emergency contacts, update your medical information, all of that can be done here in the system, using Blackbaud School forms. Any updates to these forms will just, update the student's record automatically, so there's actually no need for data entry or, data manipulation by your team. The parents are really doing all the work for you. Forms can also be, set up for things like signing up for a field trip or even making a payment. The forms can collect payment as well. So this is a really great way to kind of nurture your families to make sure you're getting all of the, responses that you need for the various forms that, you know, schools need from their families throughout the year. The calendar is another great communication tool between the school and the family. So in my with my parent hat on here, I can see Luke, I can see Ollie, I can see the school calendars, and then I can determine what I wanna see on this calendar when I wanna see it. So maybe one of my kids is struggling in school and I wanna make sure that I'm keeping a really quick eye on all of his assignments here. I can pull them up into this calendar and see what the assignments are and when they're due. If I don't want that on here, maybe I'm just using this calendar to make sure I'm not missing any school events. I can change that view to what I am most interested in aggregating it all and putting it all in one place right in front of me, as well as the ability to feed that calendar out to my work calendar or my personal calendar as needed. Speaking of aggregating information, this recent activity area is another great place for parents to go to see what's new and what's going on in my kids' classes. Any updates that parent, teachers share, whether it's, in their class, in a group, on a team, it's all aggregated here into one place in this recent activity, tab. Parents can also easily keep track of how their kids are doing in the classroom and their academic life as well. So I can pull any report cards that are shared. I can look at conduct infractions or attendance information. I can even see grade details. How is he doing in class? What is the breakdown even percentage wise? So exams are 30%. How is he doing on exams? This is 10%. How is he doing on classwork? Etc. So really a nice communication tool by typically by virtue of teachers working and setting up those grades and assignments. This is not just an academic platform, it's also a place to share and group students in other ways as well. Perhaps they're rostered on an athletics team and we've got team pages, and we've got team information. Same thing with, co curricular activities and after school clubs or community groups. All of these are different ways that we can group, our students together here in the system. Taking a quick peek at what this would look like for a teacher, I quickly toggled over to my faculty persona where I can easily take my attendance for the day, pop into my grade books and, you know, grade that exam that I just gave, or even do that end of term grading, like, report cards are coming due or progress reports. I can jump right in and calculate that. I can also even, report infractions. So I see some conduct going on in the hallway, I can easily go in and report that infraction. Blackbaud does come with a nurse's office. You would need to have the nurse role to be able to enter into the nurse's office, so kind of that HIPAA compliant piece of, you know, blocking down that information to only those that that need to see it. But then you'd be able to track visits, find students, see their their medical profile, all based on that information that parents are filling out on that form that I showed you earlier. Looking at a class here, the class pages, one of the differentiators of Blackbaud is that we have a built in learning management system as part of the student information system. So, teachers can manage all class activities right here in Blackbaud, whether it's sharing a bulletin board with some news or announcements which happen to trigger notifications to parents and students so parents are never missing an important announcement or news item from their class or sharing curriculum information based on these topics, right? So, we're studying intermolecular forces. The teacher can share that video that they they played in class that really explains everything or any of those worksheets that they want students to use for review or even the assignments that are associated with this particular topic. Teachers can also use this as the place where they can create assignments, and they're able to, you know, share those with the students. Assignments are also can also be, tests as well, and you can do testing and quizzing even with using a lockdown browser, here within the system. And, let me just put some basic information in here, and then we're able to, one of my favorite new features here, I would have loved it when I was a teacher, is, create a question generator that uses AI. And the teacher can put in the grade level of the students, the topics, the Bloom's taxonomy learning level. So where are we at? We want to just understand or really at that those, upper levels of Bloom's here, how difficult they want it to be, and then create some questions that they could use in system on quizzes or as review for students as they're preparing for the test. So a big time saver, something that our teachers have been asking for, and this AI question generator is a real benefit to teachers. A couple more minutes here. I just wanna pop into a couple other things like our grade book. So this is where you can manage grades for the students. As you could see, you can give narrative feedback, use grade book indicators like missing and late. Even this ties back to attendance, so this will let me know that Luke was absent when this one was assigned. And as you might notice over here, Zoe has an LP next to hers that's indicating that she has some accommodations that we're tracking in the system. An IEP, a five zero four, something that we've kind of put in place to help her be successful, and the teacher can always pop those open and make sure that they're meeting those accommodations for the student. The accommodations will also, show up in other areas of the system. You know, we've got Zoe here. We're doing her, report card grading. Here's her accommodations that we, again, can make sure that we're meeting. Report cards can pull in those grades from the gradebook. We can calculate, we can add comments, we can even look at previous grades so that we can see trends for the students and see how they're progressing. The roster tab as a teacher, this is really kind of where it all comes together. Everything I need to know about my my students and my class are all it's all listed here in the roster. So some medical alerts from the students that have allergies or just really important information that I need to know. Again, that that learning profile pops up for me for Zoe. I can drill down into his record and see who's mom, who's dad, if I'm going to call home or I need to reach out to the parents. I can run my own reports here. So maybe I wanna take the kids on a field trip and I wanna grab their medical contact cards or see all the learning profiles or emergency contacts, as well as send bulk communication to the students, the parents, both the students and parents, using our in system messaging tool. Teachers also have the ability to do course recommendations in the system, so a lot of great tools available to the teachers. And we're gonna just wrap things up on the admin view. So for our registrars, our principals, our deans that are on the call here this academic area gives you access to all the different tools that you would need for your students whether it's tracking attendance, approving and, infractions and assessing consequences to students as needed really delving into those learning profiles in our learning center, to see those various accommodations. Like, I really think there's a lot of benefit to seeing, like, how many students in the school need extra time on tests? We've got one ninth grader and two tenth graders, right? So that maybe that helps us with our capacity planning as well. We're able to, you know, build out our report cards, our transcripts. You don't need to come to Blackbaud for that. You don't need to pay extra for a new report card. We're gonna set, give you the the training and the tools that you need to be able to make those changes as needed. Master scheduling can happen here. Reporting can happen here. All of these, areas within the system here will allow you to pull out the data that you already have here in the system, report on it, and make those data driven decisions. This our list builders are built on a framework of columns as well as filters for you to really gather and pull out the data that is most important to you. So with two minutes to spare, I'm gonna stop sharing my screen and give it back to Elizabeth to wrap us up. Thank you, Kara. I know I gave you the impossible task, and per usual, you rose to the occasion. One thing that I did wanna share out, we're gonna see if I can work some there we go. If you see the ticker down below and you click on it, I also put it in the docs area, but one of the things that our panelists spoke about was the integrated contracts. So that flow of data from financial aid, enrollment, including the enrollment contract over to our tuition and billing solutions. We've got a tour coming up, later this month, so we would love to have you, join for that. I'm gonna, end this up with, just one last slide because I can't help myself. We would love for you all to join us, at the k twelve UC. It is July in Boston. You can find out more. There's informations in the docs area. I wanna say a huge thank you, to our panelists and to Cara. We hope that y'all, found today's session informational, insightful, and we hope you have a great rest of your day. Thanks, everybody.