Name: Is Your School Ready for What’s Next? How to Know When “Good Enough” Technology is No Longer Enough
Uploaded: 2026-09-29T18:31:23.650Z
Duration: 51 min 24 s
Description: Is Your School Ready for What’s Next? How to Know When “Good Enough” Technology is No Longer Enough

Transcript for "Is Your School Ready for What’s Next? How to Know When “Good Enough” Technology is No Longer Enough": Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us for today's webinar. Is your school ready for what's next? How to know when good enough technology is no longer enough. My name is Elizabeth, and I'm part of the k twelve marketing team here at Blackbaud. 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. Worst case scenario, you can leave and log in again. Please click on q and a on the top right to submit any questions that you might have for the Blackbaud team. If we are unable to get to your question during today's session, we will do our best to follow-up afterwards. You can adjust any settings by using the cog wheel at the bottom of the event space. Sorry, guys. And last but not least, next to q and a, you'll see the docs, and please click on this area to access several links and resources. I've called out two links here that you'll find in the docs area, but really encourage you to give all of them a deeper dive. One of them is the k 12 school software buyers toolkit. This is the ultimate guide to researching, selecting, and implementing new school software systems for k 12 schools. The other is a value on investment planning tool that also links to one of our ebooks, assessing value on investment for school software systems. One call out. We know schools today are balancing ambitious goals with real budget constraints, and timing matters. So that's why we're excited to introduce a limited time offer for our k 12 schools. You can get your first year free on new Blackbaud products. This offer is designed to remove upfront cost barriers, making it easier to explore solutions that can help your school operate more efficiently, engage your community, and deliver stronger outcomes across every office. We'd love to talk to you about what this could look like for your school. And speaking of talking with your school, as we go through today's content, I invite you to schedule a personalized one on one discovery call by clicking on the button on the top right corner at any time during the webinar. One of our specialists will follow-up after the event to schedule time to connect to learn more about your school's specific needs. In case you're just getting to know us here at Blackbaud, we are the leading software provider exclusively dedicated to powering social impact. We're honored to be recognized with the various industry awards shown on this slide, but what's most important is what they mean for our school partners. They reflect Blackbaud's ongoing investment in innovation and are more than forty years of experience serving private and independent schools and the social good community at large. Everything we're working toward is designed to help your school work more efficiently, create better experiences for families, and advance your mission. So how do these awards translate directly to our customers? The central tenet of our work is helping our schools achieve more with Blackbaud, powered by our solutions and supported by our consultative approach that you'll hear a lot more about today. The schools shown above are just a small snapshot of our robust k twelve community. Thematically, you'll see schools increasing connectivity and visibility, decreasing manual workloads and processes, and raising more money to help power and support their missions. In the docs area, you'll see a link to our customer stories where you can find out even more about these schools and all that they've achieved. So here's what's will what Will is going to walk us through today. We're gonna talk about if your technology is supporting the school that you're becoming or want to become. He'll talk through the questions that reveal whether a partner is right for your school, give some suggestions about how a better evaluation creates a better implementation. Can't go anywhere without this conversation, so he'll also touch on how AI is changing what schools should expect from technology. And then he'll show us briefly what a more connected future could look like. And then at the end, we'll wrap up with some few resources and time committing some questions. One quick safe harbor note. You'll hear and see about a mix of capabilities available today and innovations that we're actively developing. Our goal is to share where we're headed, but future functionality, timing, and availability are subject to change as we continue to learn and build alongside our customers. And with that, I'm gonna hand it over to you, Will. Thanks, Elizabeth. Greetings from gorgeous Columbus, Ohio, where I am currently, at BBCon, in my fabulous Hampton Inn. But I'm very much looking forward to, sharing some time with you today and going through a bevy of, sort of, good things for you guys to learn if you're interested in sort of putting a good evaluation together that's based more on outcomes than just sort of feature lists. A little bit about myself, that sort of gets me excited to talk about this topic. Again, my name is Will Redway, and I've been basically working with schools my entire life. I went to Colgate in Upstate New York, absolutely loved the place, left the graduation stage, walked right into the development office, and literally would stop people in the middle of the street saying, what a great institution this is. You should send all your money here. You should send all your kids here. And from there on in, I've basically been selling the idea of what education does for students, teachers, the the entire, for the entire community. And, where this becomes relevant for what I'm talking about today is I worked at a variety of places, Colgate, MIT, Babson College, but eventually became the director of development at Saint Mark's School, a nine through 12 boarding school in Massachusetts, where I was the whiner in chief as the new guy, you know, asking, you know, our our parents are are logging into five different places to get to things. Our alums are perceiving us as a school we were thirty years ago. Teachers are having to log into five different places because they wear five different hats. And so how can we go talk about ourselves in a positive way if everybody's doing, you know, all of these different things? So what I wanted to do today is basically, talk about how schools, when they're at those stages and and have those different issues, what they can what the the key things that they need to do, to, you know, basically come up with the questions that will get you, a good evaluation. So this idea is for the instinct for most schools is when they start this evaluation of whether they needed a new total school solution or maybe even just a part of it, there are, there's a tendency to sort of start with the product. Oh, I've heard of this company. I've heard of this company or whatever. And it generally starts something like this, where there's enough, you know, leaders at the Monday executive meeting where they're they're whining about real issues, whether it's, you know, hey. We need to raise more money, or we just started a STEM program and nobody knows about it. We're getting the wrong type of kids. Parents are cranky about, you know, the way we're giving them bills. They're they're confusing. And what we what tends to happen is that, you know, you come up with those issues and a board member says, oh, I've heard of this company. We go try that, and then you go get in a room and tell every office to go come up with their their wish list. And it tends to then become a focus on features, and you need to resist that. Before any software discussion, what you need to do is get the leadership team in the room and ask each team leader, what are we actually trying to solve? You know, what's what's in our way? And what I'm gonna do today is basically take you through this process because our best prospects, and sometimes those are new schools that are are looking to see what Blackbaud does and and and how we could help them. And some are our existing clients who are like, hey. I wanna rethink the way that we do enrollments and attach it to billing management and attach it to these different things because we lose people during the process. All of these things are, you know, important parts, but the the our best prospects basically step back first before they're thinking about, any any, sort of tools, and they basically sit down and have a conversation about their real issues honestly. And whether that's operational excellence or a better parent experience or we got, you know, 25 different systems and our parents are confused, whatever those things are, they start to have a conversation and realize that that dings your reputation and, you know, parents aren't confident about the way you're spending dollars. You know, all of those things are the things that bubble up and we hear about every day. But now what I'm gonna do after, you know, thirty five years of experience either working at schools or helping leadership teams do this is I'm gonna walk you through and I'm gonna hand you the actual directions on the questions you should ask each other before you ever get a vendor in the room. And, and we'll we're gonna go from there. So, basically, the opening question is, you know, where are our families and our faculty and our staff feeling friction, and what does that friction cost? So you want to ask your admission director, your development director what to do, and the the questions that are gonna the answers that are gonna come from that, what's gonna surface there is going to be the evaluation criteria. And later on, we're gonna beat that up a little bit more and sort of get how you're gonna how you're gonna measure that. And the best part about this is this the beginning part of this starts with a forty five minute meeting. This doesn't cost any money. It's you know, you don't need a vendor. It doesn't you know? And it's gonna produce the road map for everything that you're gonna judge things against. And I'm gonna basically hand you this agenda. We're gonna take you this whole thing. You can walk away, say, we'll give you something good today. So we're gonna start with the basics, which aren't always so basic, which is to to have start beginning this conversation about whether you need another system. First, you gotta get the right people in the room. And you might be looking at this and looking at the the, the the people that are on the left hand side be like, duh. Well, of course, I'm gonna have the head of school. I'm gonna have the technology folks and all of all of those things. But you gotta get the right people in the room early before you're even thinking about, you know, talking about other systems. And all of the people that are there, you need to ask each person to sort of name those pain points for the constituencies that their office is responsible for. So, obviously, with admissions, hey. They're they're thinking about a prospective family who's gonna turn into a current family, and now I gotta take that information of our new families, and how does the development office need to know that, and how do you currently get those kids in classes? Like, all of those things, just don't ask them to solve the problems. Just ask them to sort of go through those things. And that single short exercise with everybody, you know, answering those questions, it services problems that no one person can necessarily see alone, and it takes everyone out of their own bubble. And, there's a reason I put a little yellow, light there on the bottom on also bring a parent or trustee to the to the to the room because each office tends to see a different slice of the school's daily experience, and not one of them necessarily sees the whole picture. And when you add a parent or a trustee voice, it keeps the conversation honest about what the families actually experience rather than what we assume they experience, which which a lot of us, speaking as a former development director, what we tend to do in our little boxes. So you're probably saying, hey, Will. This is just a guideline. Great. Help. This is this is not enough. So these are what we recommend highly. And, in fact, if you don't do this yourself, when we come into a room, we ask these questions of leaders, which is you and you might wanna drop, you know, when before they're coming into this meeting, you might wanna drop these these questions to them. But the idea is to to make this a very simple exercise. This is not, like, something needs to prepare for three days. It's like, just give each person a few minutes to name their pain points and how that those pain points affect either employees, parents, students, administrations. Like, you gotta gotta see who the end user is is is getting is not feeling happy. And then the key is to ask for, like, specific moments. Right? Not categories or I need to have less forms or I need to do those things. It's, you know, ask for, you know, those moments like, you know, the rekeyed spreadsheet. Yeah. We have to take care of all our inquiry forms and take them from here and someone has to rekey them into the system. You know, the tuition invoice that you know, you get five phone calls from parents because they just don't understand it. They're they're confused as to whether it's a bill or or or something like that. And when you start to see things like that repeat over different things, you're starting to see, that these are this is where the real friction is. And the key here is do not ask them to solve the problem. This is not the, you know, the whole thing. It's just like just look at the people that you work with and meeting that you're responsible for and see how you are affecting them throughout the process that you're responsible for running. So if I'm the academic person, I'm thinking about how a teacher does their job. I'm thinking about how a parent looks at the information that's going on in the classroom. So just ask them to come and describe it. You know, remind your leaders, don't begin with, we need a new system and here's what I need you to do. That's not the purpose of the meeting. It is where are your families and your faculty and your staff feeling a problem? And then just walk us through the daily experience of what where you think it's working and where you think it's not. And the problems that you're gonna surface are gonna become your requirements. These will be the evaluation criteria that you should ask Blackbaud or any other company that you're looking at to demo, not just show me how it does this, show me how, how how you're going to go about helping us solve this or communicate this. And later, we're gonna come up with some baseline things that those are the things that you're actually going to, you know, look at in year two and year three as to whether, you know, this is actually paid off. So once you ask these questions, the key part is to start with the school's, you know, overall problems. And you can see here, when you've done this exercise well, it shouldn't be platitudes. This should not be, you know, these you know, operational excellence isn't just about, you know, fixing these little manual workarounds that we found in the admissions office, or we made it easier for this person's job to run reports or something like that. It's basically saying, hey. This is causing these people an issue. So if I'm in admissions, does that mean we lose one or two people because it becomes a little sticky when we ask them to attach documents or, you know, whatever those sorts of things? And if you can, you know, if you can lay out issues that relate to them, whether it's cost, or, you know, a loss of a student, those are the things that you should put here. So these things that you see on the screen are ones that we are the types of, you know, outcomes that you might ask someone to come with. So this can be sort of your guide. But ultimately, when they do this well, you are going to deliver something like this to a vendor, which is, hey. This isn't about just the pain points and making my job a little bit easier. These are about the specific outcomes. So, yeah, we have fewer duplicate systems, but this is the the the pain points from the leaders. This is on on your key thing is that we're not they're not saying I need a way to better do an application or do that. You're supposed to be pairing it with the outcome. So the idea is, you know, fewer duplicate systems is not the point. The point is that IT needs to stop babysitting integrations and spend time in the classroom. That's what's gonna come out of that meeting. Less manual data entry is what we hear a lot. We need to do less of that. That's not the point. The point is that admission staff needs to take that time not on manual entry, but working hand on hand with prospective families instead of rekeying records because we need to personify our process more. Clearer tuition payments, not the point. The point is that paying a school should be like everything else they use in their life. You know, working with Amazon or or, you know, going to your bank and and and paying your mortgage. All those things are the are the ones where you need to sort of attach this outcome to it. And I think that's what, these these exercises, if you ask these questions, and now you've you're gonna have this thing and literally ask the vendor, these are our biggest issues, and these are the the stakes that are there, whether it's a cost or a piece. So if you're gonna come and show us what you how you can help us, please, these are our biggest things. Come to the table with, you know, questions that you may have and show us how you would approach this. Right? That's the that's sort of the, the most important part of what we're doing. And since I can't talk to all of you who are on the phone about your particular issues or the ones you might wanna solve or resolve in some cases, if you, see that we're gonna I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about some critical problems that we are seeing schools address today that are expensive. So for example, one is one in eight private school teachers are now leaving the profession. This is not just a worry about someone leaving your school and going to another school because it's a pain to work at your school. They're actually leaving. So it's critical that you make, you know, the tech stack and how teachers work. You gotta reduce that that staff burden. The next one is that 50% of people's time is spent on administrative, work. And this is where at Blackbaud, we are asking how can technology, especially with a lot of new information with with AI, reduce that burden so you can spend the time, you know, doing more of the things that, will be you know, become a part of of a of a person's day. And we wanna make, you know, that data much easier to just, you know, be a part of. And we'll be talking about that a little bit as I sort of, you know, show you what's what's going on. And speaking as a shameless former development director, I can't not bring up this number, which is this is the average amount of untouched giving opportunity sits inside Razor's Edge NXT right now for most schools. It's not gone. It's not lost. It's just unreached. And it's not because, you know, the the development team isn't working hard. It's because every development office you basically have more opportunities than you have capacity. And that's the gap. We're talking about closing with agents for good. We have another sort of, like, similar thing, you know, in admissions for, you know, helping people through the process. So what I wanted to sort of get at is here is the one cap thing. You can grab a screenshot of this, but this document will also be in your attached pieces where, you know, ultimately, you just wanna get the right people in the room, ask them the right questions about what they think is working and not working, and sort of attaching a number to it, and basically coming to that with a particular outcome that you're looking to improve. That is coming up with that list of outcomes that you're looking to have improve is what you should be asking vendors to say, come and show me this. Don't show me just a list of of, you know, different pieces of, you know, software and and how I can, you know, make it easier for an application or do this sort of thing, attach them to the particular outcomes that are there. So what I'd like to do now is I'm going to sort of change gears, and I'm gonna go into ultimately the k 12 vision, and then I'm gonna do a little show and tell for you, to sort of show you how Blackbaud goes about approaching, how to, you know, touch some of these bigger issues that we would have, you know, gone into your school and said, hey. We're gonna show you how to do these things. So since I can't, you know, do that with you today, I'm just gonna I'm gonna show you some some basic examples. And for all of you, you know, you sort of know, there we go, that we have lots of, the products that basically take you from the end. We've been doing this for a long time, and we're incredibly proud to say that we're sort of the ones that brought this concept of a total school solution to market for independent schools, you know, a single connected spot experience for all your families and teachers and everyone that supports your school, initial application to enrollment, to classroom, to financial management, all the way to alumni engagement and giving. And that vision hasn't changed. But for, honestly, the last, you know, twenty years as we've as we've gone through, you know, this experience. However, the vision for the modern platform is completely has completely changed. And now our vision is an enriched end to end experience that is using Blackbaud AI to make a lot of these things easier. And what enables something fundamentally different, which is that when you do all those things together at the same time, we're, you know, with industry standards like one roster and LTI, it's making connectivity easier so that your teachers have access to the tools they need in one classroom. And the overall goal is is simple. We just wanna give you the flexibility to connect the tools that you already trust. So you might have, you you know, final site on the front. You might have, oh my gosh, a gazillion systems that I'm blanking on right now. But you might already be working with with perfectly good systems that happen to be part of our partners. But the idea is that you should be able to use them and not have to worry about complex integrations. Because at the end of the day, it's basically about taking the systems you have and getting more value so that when a parent logs in, they can see what the five awesome adults in their kid's life are sharing with your students, with your child. For a teacher, I just need to do all the things that I need to do. And for administrators, I now need data in a way rolled up for me so that I can make much, much better decisions. And that's essentially what we're what we're all about. So AI is changing a lot of what we expect. And as you might, you know, figure out, 85% of nonprofit professionals are already using AI in their work, and that sounds like a great big number. The sad number is that only about 10% feel confident that it's actually delivering transformational value. And this is where, you know, Blackbaud's been in this game for a long time, and we are really, you know, literally for the last almost, you know, twenty years, we have been working AI in the system. And we've basically been using data and machine learning, you know, to help the customers understand where we can be more efficient and drive better outcomes long, you know, before AI became this this this buzzword. And for the purposes of today, I'm not gonna go too deep into all of these things because we have so many webinars, and you can see them on the side, and Elizabeth can tell you more about them. We have, you know, so many good things talking about agents for good. We've got, you know, all sorts of tools that were here at bbcon today, we're gonna be standing on a big stage talking about a lot of the the ways that that we can help. But overall, we're thinking about it as a spectrum, right, where you start with AI that helps you uncover basic insights, and then you move into tools that assist with tasks and workflows. And ultimately, they evolve into agents that can actually help you execute the work on your behalf. So whether it's, you know, agents for good on, you know, the fundraising side, taking a look at that $5,800,000 that you can't do anything with now and sort of coming up with a way to to do that, to the basic things of just being able to use common language to be in the middle of razor's edge saying, show me all the donors of $500 that have the capacity to give us a thousand and starting using common language things. Those are all things that we're using in our daily lives now for those who are are getting into AI that that we're sort of we're we're also, encapsulating in our in our approach. So, what I wanna do now is basically give you a proof of concept. And I'm gonna sort of go live here in a second, and I'm sure I'll be very clumsy. You'll see my former development director, not technical director backgrounds diving in here. And what I wanna do is I'm gonna basically, be I'm gonna act as this handsome devil right here, Will Redway. And just to sort of set the table, I'm gonna be Will Redway. I'm gonna happen to be a parent of four kids, one in the lower school, middle school, upper school. I also have a, a child that's applying. I also happen to be a biology teacher. I also happen to be a coach. I also happen to be the nurse. I also happen to be a dorm head. So these are the things that for all of you on the phone, I'm sure you've several of you might be this type of role. This is this is private schools at their best. Right? I'm wearing I wear five different hats, and I just need to be able to come in and be able to do the work. So now I'm gonna be I'm gonna start here and give you the journey of the prospective family, then a current family, and touch just briefly on the teacher side, in just sort of a quick little look. So when I when we start the process, right now, I'm a prospective family looking at schools, and Blackbaud does a very good job of designing gorgeous websites, you don't have to have us design your website. We can attach a lot of our forms to your existing ones or do that. But the nice part is that our enrollment and student information systems like so news, calendars, sports schedules, faculty rosters, all of those things are attached to our front end website. So it just makes the tools, you know, connecting really well. And as we work with different schools, we'll work with you to, you know, design beautiful websites. But as you as I click through these, you're going to notice some very common things. We work with thousands of schools. We know that families are looking to prospective families are looking to quickly get there and and immediately be able to see, how do I inquire? How do I apply? How do I, you know, dive in? So literally, duh, right in your face, guess what? Register for this. Apply here. But the beginnings of the database are all common. All the questions that get answered here and are answered are now gonna be the starting of that database. So what I'm gonna do now is I am going to leave this, PowerPoint, and now I'm gonna log in live. And I want to make sure that I do this correctly, so hold on. So this is Brookfield School. I have just gone to the front of the website. I have been a parent. I looked around and, you know, Brookfield School is my, you know, my our fictitious school, but I saw a beautiful website. Wow. And I said, this place looks and feels like me. Isn't that great? And I'm now willing to apply. And when I apply, I go in and I fill out an inquiry form. I fill out an application and I fill out an inquiry form, and now all that information is automatically going to, you know, file into my actual application. Nice thing about inquiry forms, that I'm gonna sort of speak to here for a second, is that as soon as you, you know, go in and say I'm I'm I'm applying for, in this case, kindergarten, on the back end, before I show you the experience, I wanna let you know that when I signed up for kindergarten, not only did it line up a very particular, checklist of things that I need to do as a kindergarten person that might be different than for someone applying in fifth grade or seventh grade or ninth grade. All of these things are lining up. So, literally, it knows, what I'm interested. It's going to line up the, the particular checklist. It's going to line up the billing management piece that I'm gonna have. It's gonna line up with the GL of financial edge. So literally, at the very beginning of this, as soon as I'm putting information in, it's going to, you know, say it's gonna show me exactly what I need to say. So this checklist for somebody coming in in kindergarten now I will admit, since it's a demo environment, I'm showing off, a lot of capabilities that are here. And for kindergarten, you might only ask three questions. But I'm immediately brought into a series of things that we would like to, that we'd like to ask. And you can tell by the check marks, just like anybody who's going to a modern system, it's going to show me the ones that we already have. So thank you so much for putting in your name pronunciation, and you're signed up for your campus tour. This campus tour also can be on your front end website, so you don't have to log in here to sign up for campus tour. You can do it either way. And it's gonna show me, oh, great. You've got that. Yep. I want you to come to the lower school open house. And, you know, so here are all these parent interviews, candid interviews. And I just wanna say, because we work with nothing but private schools, if you want to be the one who controls the keys, hey, they have to come for an interview first, and then we're gonna send them the the rights to be able to come into this, you can do that that way as well. So when I pop in here for the application or, you know, continue these things, I'm going to, it's it's gonna show me the it's basically showing me what I have and have not done. And when it's time for me to be accepted, you can do all the wonderful things that you're going to do. For example, when I was at St. Mark's, not only did we write them a nice little note, we also had a parent call them. We also had an alum call them. We did all these sorts of warm and fuzzy things that said, this is great. But these days you're going to all of a sudden say, hey, it's time for you to you're gonna get here, and your decision is available. And when I pop into this decision, I'm immediately going to be, woohoo. This is, this is what I'm gonna see online. And I just wanna show you that as part of the application, whether I filled out a financial aid form, you know, additional pieces, you have the ability in the acceptance letter to say anything personal as you want. It can include, if you want to, the incentives, meaning, hey. Here's our thousand dollars. Here's our discounted awards. Here's, you know, all those things. You can do that later as well. It's not like you have to do it here. But you have the ability, again, with a combined system to ask those questions as part of the application and then put them here. And now, also, if someone accepts you, wonderful. If they decline, you have the ability again here to say why. So if maybe you're in a very competitive market, and if you wanna know if someone else was choosing the other Catholic school down the road or the free public school or the new STEM school or whatever it is, you're now gonna be able to collect this information. And shocker, I'm gonna show you later how, again, you don't have to hire a new person and run a lot of fancy lists. You're gonna be able to come in and see one dashboard where you're gonna start to see why you're losing people, you know, and to who. So you've accepted me. Woo hoo. I'm all excited, and now I I wanna be in here, and now I'm gonna be Will Redway. I'm now going to be the new accepted family member. So as soon as I come in here and I'm you know, I've I've popped in here, it it recognizes me as, that, new family. And now I'm going to see this time to review forms. So instead of making this a separate, you know, a separate thing where you've now accepted me, let's go over here, literally, I'm going to come into one place. And remember, I'm Will Redway, father of three that are already there and one that's in the process. And I don't go over to an admissions thing over here. I come to one place, and this yellow bar, which we affectionately call the nagging yellow bar, is if the school needs anything from here, I'm gonna get it right here. So literally at the moment you've accepted me, guess what? We're gonna go right in and we're gonna figure out how we're gonna pay for that. And this looks exactly like their application. It's not another look and feel. It's not an invitation to go fill out another user ID and password. I'm gonna pop in here, and I'm gonna see my contract, and this is the one that says I'm gonna be a good kid. And if you're not a good kid, we get to kick you out and we get to keep your money. Isn't that great? Wonderful. Okay. Agree and sign here. Next. Now let's talk about the actual other part of the contract, which is the financial part. And we're gonna talk about what we do and optional fees and whether you wanna, you know, make this an automatic thing. Here's the tuition. There's a technology fee, which is how a lot of people pay for us. Here's the meal plan. Yep. Want that. Want the music lessons. Don't want the after school program. Okay. That's my total. Here's my permissions because I've got a faculty kid. I get that discount, and that's just yep. We agree. Wonderful. And now we're gonna get to those different payment options. And as I said before, literally at the moment you someone's coming into kindergarten level, maybe you don't allow for the 10 payments. You only get the one, two, four, and thirty. Right? So this is the again, it's already lined up from the very beginning. So any of you are doing lots of business office things between the admission office and the business office, that goes away. I can do incidental charges. I can enroll in autopay. If you wanna make this automatic and make this all go, you can force no. Can't say force people to do it, but you've got all those options that are there. Wonderful. So here I am. Great. You've accepted me, and ta da. I'm already here. As soon as that's done, shocker, I could go right here to billing. I can go and see my current bill, and it knows all of my kids in one place. I can see their different accounts. I can enroll them and just I'm not gonna go into this too far. But if you want the grandparents to pay for the books and you want the divorced parent to pay 30% and the other divorced parent to pay 70%, When I log into the system, I don't have to know those things. It's only gonna present me the things that are relevant to me and my relationship with the school and how I pay you. Now we have absolutely fabulous demos where we go super deep into all of this, and I want you guys to go see that. And there's lots of different ones we can do and we can anybody wants us to send you little three and four minute videos on going deep on these things, you can do that. But the beautiful part is I can come in here and how I wanna pay you and all my incidental costs and all those things. It just makes it super easy for a family to come in here and do one, you know, come into one spot and go. So now I've gone through the admissions process. I loved the website. I inquired. I applied. You've accepted me. I'm paying you. Wonderful. Now let's get to the parent experience of seeing how awesome all these great adults are gonna be in my life. So when we designed this system, the idea was that when I log in as a parent, I navigate by my kids. I'm gonna show you a little bit later that when I navigate as a as a teacher, I navigate by what I need to do. But the common things, everybody needs a directory. Everybody needs a calendar. Everybody needs news, but they're going to be different because they're going to be relevant to me. So when I come in as a parent, I'm going to start in a place that a parent might not navigate, but I just want to show off a little bit. So I'm going to come in and see my son, Robert, and Robert is a superstar, and Robert's currently in ninth grade. He's in the upper school. He's got an adviser. He's got all of these things, and a parent can come into one place and see everything. Now I wanna say, I'm saying they can see everything because and if the hairs in the back of your neck are going up going, oh my god. We would never share this much. Don't think of it that way. Think of it as I'm gonna come in here, and you're going to choose as a school pedagogically what you're gonna share, but I just kinda wanna show you what's there. So, obviously, I can quickly come in. I can see their transcripts. I can see the report cards from all the time they've been there. I can see if they've been a good kid, a bad kid. Again, don't need to show that if you don't want to, how they're doing for attendance. But this is where it gets great. This is why I send my kid to a private school. Right? Oh, too bad. Their team lost, today. But here's all the courses that they're in. Here's you know, if I want to, here's the assignments that are due today. Here's their current grade. Here's all this again. Here's the back of your neck. You don't have to show this much detail if you don't want to. I can easily message my my teachers, or I can email them again. Again, you're gonna have a communication strategy that that it it's gonna reflect yours. You don't have to have all those things. But I can come in and not only see all of their courses and go into each classroom and take a look at that, but I can talk to their adviser. It knows their athletics thing. It knows that I'm supposed to be doing workouts today because I'm on the the cross country team. Here's the dorms. Here's all the activities. So all of this information, as a parent, I can dive in as deep as you want to let me. But I'm going to tell you that the genius of the system is not that that's that's not the way you navigate. You just come into the core things that are built into every single one of my tools. So when I come in as a parent, I can go to the calendar. And the very first time I come in here, it's going to know who my kids are, that it's pizza Friday, that they have homework tonight, that they've got an afterschool activity, all those things that make my private school experience great. I'm coming into one thing in here and this can be on my phone. It can be on my tablet. It can be, it works on all devices. And I can come in here, and if I wanna get a little bit more about what's going on for Varsity tonight or see what's going on in my first my kids' first grade homeroom, I can pop in, get a little bit more detail, dive in, and shocker, guess what? See, I see an edit button here. Why? Because I'm not just the parent. I'm also the coach of the cross country team. So when you go into the pieces, it's not like you're just given rights to use the tools. It's rights to modify the things that you should be modifying because you are the head of of that particular piece. Now I'm a Seamus development director. All I really cared about was that my families were happy. And if they could see the stuff that was going on, with their students, this is what made them great. And one of the things that I like the most is many, many schools have something like this, and you can have it with ours as well. It's sort of like the newsletter. Here's the the basic news that's going out to everybody, robotics team, lower school program, isn't this great, wonderful. I've got lots of different things here. But what's really cool is that when everybody's doing the coach is doing their job, the teacher's doing their job, I'm gonna be able to come into recent activity. And I'm going to see the weekly bulletin because the head of school wrote this, and we wanna see everything that's going on. I'm seeing biology students explore local wetland system because it's my kids in the biology thing. Girls' soccer wins. This might have been a particular huge win, so we want the whole school to know about this. Or it's something specific where, hey, I'm part of the outdoor enrichment club, and I wanna see the trail adventure thing, so I'm seeing the things that relate to here. So, again, similar to other social media things, it's two thirds things that relate specifically to me and one third, you know, things that the school wants to tell you is going on. Now another thing is the resources as well. So now you guys have a tendency to, all schools have a tendency to sort of send emails and and push forms and and send a lot of things out. When I come into this, everything also knows me. So when I pop in here and I'm going to absence reporting, guess what? It already knows I have multiple kids. I can come in here and choose the ones and why and when their orthodontist appointment is out. And now I'm already informing the school and I'm informing the teachers. If I hit apply another child, genius. If in your in your admission process, you ask, oh, do you have siblings and how old are they and when would they do you think they would be interested? When I come in to apply another child, it actually already knows my other kids, and it will automatically fill out their application when it's time for that. So these are the types of things we know when we look at outcomes. We need to get more students. Well, make it really easy for the for their, the siblings to be able to go. We need to make it easier for teachers to know why the kid's absent so they're not running down the hallway wasting time in their classroom and getting frustrated. So cool. Let the parents come in and make the things so that when they that when parents come in when teachers come in and see their, their classroom, they're already gonna be seeing those pieces that are out. Shocker, donor portal. This is connected to Raiser's Edge. I'll be able to come in here and see where my gift is. And then all of these other options are personalized to me because the system knows I have someone in the upper school, middle school, and lower school. Wonderful. In addition, it knows I belong to all of these other groups that make schools schools, private schools private schools. So it knows that I'm a member of the Brookfield Parent Association. Guess what? Not only can I see information that's here, that's what everybody can see, but it's recognizing me as the person who runs that group? And guess what? I'm allowed to enter edit mode and add the notes and add the minutes. And guess what? If I need to communicate with the parent committee, I can come in here and the roster is already here of the groups, that are here. So I can see the other, you know, top volunteers that are helping us out as well as the other families, and you will decide as a school how much information you wanna give them. So basically, the dreamy part here is that you wanna allow the families to see how the three, four, five adults in their kids' life are getting into that. So lastly, before I show you it's gonna be sort of a transition is that all of this information that I can see, including their schedule, right, which knows that I've got, you know, things that go outside the classroom. It's not, here's my adviser meeting, geometry. I've got cross country afterwards. I can see all those things in one place. If you are, if you wanna see all your kids' assignments and, again, you know, the school that I worked at, you wouldn't be allowing parents to come in here and see the assignments. But if you wanna come in here, if you're going to allow that, this is something that either the student would see or the, or the parents could see. If you want to, you're allowed to sort of get into those, you know, the specifics on assignments. When it's time for to look at courses to move from, you know, ninth grade to tenth grade, if If you're going to allow the parents to see, you know, what are the course, what are the options for them, they can see that or not. It can just be about the student sitting down with their advisor. They can come down into their course requests and get into things. So this is the beauty of having the system understand when the enrollment system is attached to the learning management is attached to the student information system. It's great. Now I'm not gonna be able to do justice to the teacher side of things. But the only way that a family can get this beautiful experience being able to see all this great information is whether a teacher, a faculty member can just be able to come in and do their job. So as I switch over here to being a faculty member, who's also a coach, who's also an advisor, you're gonna notice that when I log in here, I'm not immediately presented with things about my kid. I'm immediately presented with things about my day. So guess what? Here's my day today. And if I need to take attendance, I'm gonna take attendance right here. If I need to do my grading, I'm gonna come over here and do it, and there's all different ways to do it. If I need to get my grade book, wonderful. This is telling me exactly how many days I'm gonna, you know, I've got until I'm gonna get, you know, hit with a ruler for not getting my grades in on time. All of these, basically, day to day things are here. I can come into the assignment center, and now there's so many different ways I'm not gonna be able to spend time in here. But adding assignments, you could be adding Google Assignments, you could be working side by side with a different LMS, or you could be using our LMS. Ultimately, the nice thing about whether whichever ones you're using, you're still gonna be able to have that calendar show all that information, in one place. So all of the, the key things from a from a teacher's standpoint are, you know, popped into, one spot. So if I go into my biology class now, this is where when we start getting into the LMS, and you can use some of these things, we can work hand on hand with with other people's LMS. But when it's all together like this, as a teacher, I can pop in here and, you know, this is the the bulletin board page, what I actually call the boring page. And what you'll find here is, you know, very basic things. But when you get into topics, now we're getting into, you know, this is how people really work on the day to day, where we're gonna do six weeks of, you know, DNA structure. We're gonna do another thing on microscope media, and we connect to, you know, all of a variety of different things. So teachers can sort of basically do their classwork from within here and then share it out at the time they need to. And when it comes to communicating and seeing things, I can go into the roster, and I can easily see all the kids in my class. I can see any major issues that they've got, and whether it's, you know, they've got a a bee allergy, they've got, you know, you know, any sort of medical issues. I can see all that information, in in one place. So last thing I wanna sort of, show you is that once you're in and you're using all these things, teachers are coming in and doing their jobs, and I could kinda go over here and I could show you, you know, how when they're a coach, they can come in here and they can see everybody who's who's gotten their, shots and and all that stuff. I can see all this, you know, the the the basic information of which I'm not doing it justice today, but I would just wanna show you that it comes in and recognizes those things. And I can everything I just showed you for a classroom, I can do it as a coach. I can do it as advisor. I can do it as a doormative. I'm just doing my job, taking attendance, doing those things so that it shows up in that parent view. But, ultimately, the nice part is that once you're in here and once you are now running that as a system, you're gonna be able to kinda come down as a school leader. And, again, you're gonna decide who can see these things, and you're gonna be able to sort of get into deep analysis of things that cross all of these boundaries. And that boundary list is, you know, that ability to sort of come in as a head of school and look to see, you know, new and returning students, wonderful, average grade by sending school. So now you can see here's the information from your enrollment management system showing you that here are the types of schools that send us kids that that really succeed here. Here are students by school year and grade level. Everybody wants to know your retention and the pieces. And, again, these are ones that you can create on your own. This is just sort of a, ones that are here. We have a lot of them that are out of the box. But this is now one of my favorites, which is, you know, the at risk. You guys will decide, you know, one of the most important parts of a school is keeping people safe. And this is one of those places where when it comes to being, you know, at risk and you're going to decide what that means, you know, three days absent, kids' grade point average or, you know, overall grades dropped by more than five points in three weeks or something like that. And you're gonna be able to come in here as a leader and be able to see exactly what's going on, you know, one by one. So these will become your own thing. If one of your big goals is we must get, you know, more students, then we can go right down here and let's get right every single day. We need to be looking at the admissions management dashboard. We need to see which are the best schools that are that are sending us the people that we need. We need to know contracts by school year. Let's compare the different years. Oh my gosh. We're really tanking on this year. This is now when we talk to a school and you had given us all of those questions and the places you're gonna go. We're gonna set these things up so that you can see the types of reports that you need so that you can prove out that you're being successful in whatever those top goals were, raising more money, finding the better type of student, all of those things that are there. So I think what I'm going to do now is stop for a moment, and I'm gonna head back. And I wanted to talk a little bit about the timeline for something for just a couple of minutes, and, we'll go there. So I'm gonna stop sharing this. And now what I was, hopefully, you are seeing a, this is just a sample. And I you know, obviously, you don't have to buy all things from us. But if you'd gone through an evaluation, and similar to the one that I was describing and you were coming with specific goals, we don't suggest that you bite everything off and and do it all now. We would have a very thoughtful conversation about what you can bite off and chew. And this is a this is a good example of for schools that are looking for, you know, a '27 launch, this is the type of thing that would allow you to, to get there. And so part of the the conversation that we have is if you said it's all about, you know, making sure that our reenrollment numbers stay, at, you know, 97%, we need to keep all of our kids, then we're gonna focus in on that enrollment, reenrollment, and the the stress friction that can happen there to make sure that that is smooth. If it's all about, you know, hey. We used to be the school that's this, but we changed that five years ago. We're now the school of this. Hey. We're now gonna say, well, let's get that website up and attach it to this enrollment piece so we can begin those things, and then we'll get to, the learning management and student information system afterwards. But, generally, for somebody who's looking now, this is prime time. It's not a mistake that I'm here in Columbus, and we're talking to a lot of schools about the possibility of being up by Labor Day of twenty seven. And what you're seeing in front of you is a is a way to to do that. Let's, you know, have good evaluation, which takes, you know, a month or so to go through and have deep conversations much faster than fast talking will now, and have us give us the ability to, sort of walk through that piece and sort of get the project started, you know, by between Halloween and Thanksgiving. And that's you know, that timeline gives us plenty of time to get you up for the beginning of the year without everybody's, you know, hair turning color. So, Elizabeth, I'm going to, sort of slow up there, and I will stick around if people have questions or if there's any people. I know that there's a couple resources I'd love you to share with with the group. Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks, Will. I know that was fast and furious, and you did a great job as always. And rest assured, if you're listening to Will's timeline and you're like, oh my goodness. There are all the ways to approach this, and we are here to hold your hand along the way, whether it's one office, multiple offices, etcetera. So a few more of my favorite resources that I wanna encourage you to take a look at is, of course, our k 12 blog. This features a variety of different perspectives, whether it is, some of our customers, whether it's product leaders, partners, just a real wealth of information, a variety of perspectives that is exclusively focused on our k twelve schools. And as I mentioned earlier, our our customers say it and and tell it best, so be sure to check out all of our k twelve customer stories. Will did a fantastic job, but we have been working on all sorts of webinars to bring you all of the information as much as we can. So two of my more recent favorite on demand, from insight to action, the next generation of k 12 school technology featuring leaders across our k twelve vertical. And recently, we had the pleasure of hearing directly from Pete Moore, head of school at Oak Hill. He talked us through his school's evaluation and not just the evaluation, but the outcomes that they're seeing, thereafter. So think increased enrollment, greater parent satisfaction, and really an understanding of it didn't need to be the way that it once was. Will mentioned, of course, AI, and I wanted to call out the fact that, we are really committed to, resources to help you understand how we're approaching AI and really what that responsible AI commitment means. So we are part of the, collaborative for social impact, and you can come here and access, course one. It's free. They just announced course two, today at BBCon, so feel free to check out the resources and see exactly what it's all about. Whether you are a current customer or thinking about becoming a customer, I also always wanna give out a shout out to Blackbaud University. This is our training that focuses on real world application and achieves results through expertly designed learning experiences. So, this is another handhold and step along the way that we will help get you off to the races, as well as advisory plus. So we have a team of consultants that will help personalize one on one consulting to help you get the most out of your Blackbaud solutions. And before I let everybody go, I wanna call out save the date for our product update briefings. These will be November seventeenth through nineteenth, so go ahead and mark your calendar. We expect registration to open soon, and this is where you will hear from product managers, about what's coming, what's ahead, and where we're going. So it is always a must attend. So one more quick reminder about our current promotion. We'd love to help you start strong with your first year free. And if you haven't already, click that purple button to request a discovery call. And, Will, I think we hit so many things that we don't have any questions left to answer. And so with that, I'm gonna let you get back to your day in Columbus. I'm gonna let everybody else get on with their days. Thank you so much for spending the afternoon with us. We can't wait to talk to you about what the future could hold partnering with Blackbaud. Thanks, everybody. Thanks all. Bye bye.