Q: Why did you select Blackbaud to be the provider
of your education management solutions?

A: We had long desired to find a solution to better serve our school
community. When our other provider gave us six months’ notice that they
were turning off the learning management system we were using, we saw
this as an opportunity to assess other products offered. Our elementary
school principal had used Blackbaud at her former school, and she shared
stories of how Blackbaud’s K-12 products served her school well. We
developed a product matrix for student information (SIS) and learning
management systems (LMS) which listed out pieces we were looking for.
After going through several demos, Blackbaud was the clear winner.

Q: What are some of the problems you wanted
Blackbaud’s solutions and services to solve?

A: Our old SIS and LMS solutions were integrated, but only to a degree, and the
product seemed cumbersome. Training and support were limited to a select
few. Families struggled to find the content they were looking for. Teachers
struggled to understand what their students and parents could see. We
wanted more intuitive navigation, easy to access information, and a place to
build community.

Q: Your school took a fun—and effective—approach to the roll-out of your Blackbaud software. Tell us more about that.

A: The concept of Blackbaud Day came out of the administration’s desire to
provide a full day of learning and working specifically on Blackbaud while
preserving the tradition of establishing culture and community building on the
first day of professional development. We desired to equip our teachers with
specialized training and sufficient time to get to know the system they will be
using every day. We decided to schedule Blackbaud Day on a Monday so our
teachers had time throughout the week to connect with Heritage’s Blackbaud
rollout team if they had any questions.

Q: When implementing Blackbaud solutions,
how did you communicate the changes to your staff?

A: We communicated the news of our partnership with Blackbaud through a
video in which we introduced the staff to the product and the rollout team,
and then we shared our ambitious timeline. Due to the summer rollout, we
communicated with the summer office staff on a daily basis. We wanted to
be mindful of our teachers’ summer, so we sent two emails updating them
on our progress and shared some training materials with them.
As we worked on configuration and implementation, we would meet with
the specific staff members with whom that piece would impact most to
get input on how it had been done in the past as we looked for ways to
bring efficiency with Blackbaud. The process of migrating over to Blackbaud
was a great opportunity that allowed our administrators to hone specific
policies so we could align the processes with those policies.

Q: What are some ways that you are training your staff on how to use these solutions?

A: We wanted to equip faculty and staff with how to use Blackbaud’s fantastic
Knowledgebase and Blackbaud University, and we would work to answer any
questions they may have had and review any training pieces.

After implementation of specific pieces, we would invite those impacted
staff members to specific Blackbaud University training and then walk them
through their new tool. Screen recordings also proved to be a valuable tool
for training our staff. We wanted to equip everyone well, so we created a
documentation spreadsheet that explains many facets of the final outcome of
the project. For example: School-level decisions made and the implications of
those decisions. We also added tabs based on the season of the school and
based on the roles.

We discovered the most important piece to training our staff was to let them
know that they were not alone in the process.