Ensworth embraces integrated technology,
opens doors to new ways of working together

Ensworth School strives to inspire K-12 students to be intellectually curious,
use their talents to the fullest, be people of integrity and contributors
to society. That mission has resonated with many families in Nashville,
Tennessee, and with the addition of a 127-acre high school campus
Ensworth’s enrollment has grown to 1,200.

The school’s use of technology to power Ensworth’s mission has grown as
well, and their relationship with Blackbaud has deepened in dynamic ways
over the three past decades.

Ensworth connects across both its campuses, using Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge
NXT to support fundraising and Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT for financial
management, alongside Blackbaud’s K-12 education management portfolio
to manage enrollment, tuition, the school website, student information, and
classroom learning.

With Blackbaud’s Total School Solution, Ensworth has strong, integrated
technology with single sign-on convenience. Plus, the school has the
flexibility to seamlessly add applications provided by Blackbaud partners
through the Blackbaud Marketplace, as well as online educational publishing
offerings available with Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI).

“In today’s world, where everyone has so many different passwords to
so many different sites, we want to get it all under one umbrella,” said
Ensworth’s Director of Technology Jason Hiett. “Being a teacher, coach, staff
member, or administrator at school is complicated enough. Why wouldn’t we
want to provide everyone with a single sign-on to make it easier and support
their success?”

Making Tuition Management Easy for Everyone

During their technology journey, Ensworth’s stakeholders have seen notable
leaps in efficiency.

In the past, Hiett said he would dread the season when contracts were being
set up and renewed because of the busywork and headaches it created.
“When Ensworth School adopted Blackbaud Tuition Management,” he said,
“my life was instantly better.”

Families noticed as well: “You have made this so easy,” parents told
school staff. Blackbaud Tuition Management seamlessly synchronizes with Blackbaud Enrollment Management and ultimately Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT, so the school can track a student’s progress from “inquiry to alumni,” without data re-entry by staff or parents.

“From the moment they visit or inquire, students and their families are in
our system,” Hiett explained. “Once we go through the enrollment piece, all
the checklists and the application are there for them. If they accept that,
they complete the enrollment contracts and their data flows into tuition
management with a contract.”

Syncing With the Fundraising Side

Students and family members are also added to push notification groups in
Tigernet. Named for the school’s mascot, Tigernet helps connect the school
community and incorporates Blackbaud solutions for the school website,
student information, and learning management.

When students graduate, their status is updated in Tigernet as well as the
school’s Raiser’s Edge NXT database, which the school uses to fundraise and
nurture relationships with suppporters. That last sync happens thanks to
an integration with Raiser’s Edge NXT that ensures that student and family
records in the school’s fundraising CRM automatically reflect other updates
from Blackbaud education management, such as address changes.

“Before it had all been so siloed,” said Registrar and Database Manager Susan
Ott, considering the improvements that came as Ensworth implemented
Blackbaud Tuition Management and the connector to Raiser’s Edge NXT. “We decreased the amount of double and triple entry into systems.”

“In just looking at the enrollment period where you have new students, new
parents, new grandparents, and new faculty/staff that have to be entered, we
have calculated a conservative time savings of close to 100 hours,” Ott said.
“That’s huge, especially during one of the busiest times of year.”

With that time savings, Ensworth can explore ways to tailor communications
to nurture stronger relationships, for example, engaging alumni in more
targeted ways besides class reunions. “There’s more opportunity to get
granular and specific,” Hiett said. “If you want to know every alum who was in
a play from this period to this period and invite them to your next production,
we can ask, ‘How do we categorize and query that?’”

Creating Possibilities Through Improved
Collaboration and Communication

At the same time, Blackbaud’s education management portfolio provides a
framework to strengthen teaching and learning with solutions that open doors to new ways of doing things. From the moment they sign on to Tigernet, users have customized dashboards tied to class pages and an easy-to-navigate assignment center, while user groups support meaningful collaboration. For example:

• In elementary grades—when Ensworth’s students begin to learn Spanish as well as Chinese—the school’s world language teachers can work with music teachers on class productions that are captured on video and shared with families through Tigernet.

• In the middle grades, teachers share lesson plans and divide prep work
based on their respective strengths and interests, which optimizes the
curriculum and promotes consistency for students while saving
teachers’ time.

• And at the high school level, where staff and teachers may use the
capabilities the most, counselors provide students with a cascade of
college admissions resources timed for their progression to graduation.
Teachers also have the flexibility to tie into Google Classroom applications,
and the school has added a growing number of electronic textbooks available through the single sign-on set-up. Ensworth also looks to the Blackbaud Marketplace for applications from Blackbaud partners that are designed to complement Blackbaud education management offerings.

Go-to apps for Ensworth include pickAtime for scheduling meetings like
parent teacher conferences, BrightArrow for mass notifications, and Magnus Health for student health records. With the rich and growing number of K-12 options in the Blackbaud Marketplace, Hiett said he expects to add more. “Blackbaud allows us to find solutions to almost anything.”