Blackbaud Continues to Lead the Private K-12 Software Market

Top private schools, including Pine Crest, Galloway and Punahou, adopt Blackbaud’s total school solution to streamline operations and optimize the parent experience

Blackbaud, the world’s leading cloud software company powering social good, continues to demonstrate growth and momentum in K–12 by creating integrated, seamless digital experiences for leading private schools across the country. With more than 30 years of industry leadership experience, Blackbaud has been the trusted partner for K–12 institutions for decades, providing comprehensive capabilities to connect the whole school from admissions to fundraising. As it wraps up a landmark 2019, Blackbaud continues to increase efficiencies and drive revenue for K–12 schools while rapidly growing its customer base.

“As private schools are facing more competition, it’s becoming even more important for them to operate efficiently while delivering the exceptional experiences parents, teachers and students have come to expect,” said Travis Warren, president and GM, Blackbaud K–12 Solutions. “Blackbaud offers a total school solution that is helping institutions meet these needs head on by streamlining data flow, boosting productivity and providing the holistic reporting necessary for school leaders to make informed, data-driven decisions.”

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Growing the Blackbaud K–12 Community With an Integrated Total School Solution

Leading private schools throughout North America are seeing the value and importance of connecting the whole school through Blackbaud. Since the beginning of the 2019-2020 school year in September, over 800,000 unique parents, students and school faculty and administrators utilized Blackbaud’s education management platform, which is a 14% increase year-over-year. Additionally, there were over 32 million total logins in September, up over 30% year-over-year. These increases reflect the growth in Blackbaud’s customer base as well as the effectiveness of the total school solution. In 2019, over 300 private schools adopted Blackbaud’s Cloud Solution for K–12 Schools, including:

• Pine Crest School, one of the nation’s leading independent schools. Pine Crest School selected Blackbaud to put a modern, scalable SaaS solution in place, which will greatly improve data integrity and the overall experience for parents, teachers and students.
• The Galloway School, an independent day school serving a diverse student body located in Atlanta, GA. Galloway selected Blackbaud as its total school solution to create efficiencies by eliminating duplicative vendors and connecting the school across offices and school levels. Galloway will also take advantage of Blackbaud’s comprehensive training, implementation and post go-live managed services to ensure long‑term success as it grows with the Cloud Solution for K–12 Schools.
• Punahou School, the largest coeducational, independent K–12 school on a single campus in the U.S. Punahou selected Blackbaud’s Cloud Solution for K–12 as its total school technology partner and is in the process of implementing Blackbaud solutions across the school – from tuition management and finance to enrollment and academic management. The school is also utilizing Blackbaud’s service solutions to support the implementation process.

“Our SIS selection committee selected Blackbaud because we felt it was the best fit for Punahou – now and into the future. Our technology team is very excited with the selection of Blackbaud because it is an integrated solution, which will free up our IT team to focus more on future technologies for Punahou, like enhancing our analytics capabilities and exploring more uses of AI. We feel this is a far better use of our intellectual capacity than spending our time and energy managing multiple vendors and bridging the gaps between disparate systems,” said Jim LaClair, Chief Information Officer, Punahou School. “For schools that select Blackbaud as their business partner, we highly recommend incorporating Blackbaud services with the implementation. We wouldn’t have had the success to date without the Blackbaud services team to support our implementation process. The team knows us and our school, and it’s made a huge difference. We’ve found great value in our partnership with Blackbaud, and we look forward to all that’s to come.”

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Enhanced Purpose-Built Solutions

As part of Blackbaud’s commitment to continually grow its fully integrated, comprehensive solution for schools, the company launched several key enhancements to the Cloud Solution for K–12 Schools over the past year:

• Blackbaud introduced online Committee Review as part of its Blackbaud Enrollment Management System, which significantly streamlines the candidate review process by providing a cloud-based hub for enrollment committee members to review documentation and provide feedback. Available on mobile devices, Committee Review creates efficiencies and eliminates unnecessary meetings by enabling admission officers to collaborate anytime, anywhere.
• Schools can now create their own transcript template to meet their individual schools’ needs and regulatory requirements using Transcript Builder as part of the Blackbaud Student Information System™. This capability simplifies the otherwise complex and time-consuming task of creating a customized transcript.
• Blackbaud’s education management portfolio is now OneRoster compliant. OneRoster is a standard set of REST application programming interfaces (APIs), which enable schools to securely and reliably exchange information about rosters, course materials and grades between multiple web services. For example, Calvert Hall College High School in Baltimore, MD is using the OneRoster integration to connect their Blackbaud student information with their digital textbook provider, so that resources automatically populate for the student.
• To ensure private schools deliver highly accessible websites, Blackbaud School Website System achieved compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines’ (WCAG) AA 2.1 standard.

“Blackbaud has been a trusted technology partner for St. Christopher’s School for 23 years. Through Blackbaud solutions, we’ve been able to better utilize and understand our data, so we can create metric-based decisions,” said Hiram Cuevas, director of academic technology at St. Christopher’s School and executive director of Blackbaud K–12 Solutions’ advisory board. “The enhancements that Blackbaud introduced in 2019 are exciting. The continuous iterations and enhancements to Blackbaud’s solutions continue to strengthen our technology landscape both operationally and academically. We look forward to all that’s to come in 2020.”

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