Community College - 2 academic year applications at the same time

Marie Janiszewski

Hello Fellow Community Colleges!  We are wondering how you all are handling two academic year applications at the same time. With one year coming to the end in Jan-Mar time frame with a Winter/Spring semester start and the need/push to have the new academic year up at the same time...how is your institution handling it? To our knowledge, Academic Works will not allow two up at the same time. We are trying to figure out how to tackle the task from our Administration and the what the system can do.  


Please share some feedback!


 

Crystal Bruce

Hi! Moved this to Award Management. Thanks!

Robin Kory

Good morning!  You can have two or more Opportunities up at the same time under one Portfolio.  Just go into the the Opportunity that you have already created and click the Clone button at the bottom left corner of the page.  This will create a new Opportunity that you can update and edit with the new year/term information.  The only major problem is that you cannot name the Opportunity what you want since it is based on the begin or end date of your Opportunity according to how you have it set up in your system.  This is a major problem for us since we have priority deadlines and post the same Opportunities at the same time for different terms.  I sometimes have two or three opportunities all named Spring 2021 so I have to go into each one just to find the one I am looking for.  The way to fix this problem for students at least is to list the term or year it is for as the first line in the description.  If you do not do this, your students will not know which Opportunity they are applying for and you won't know either.  I have requested that Blackbaud allow users to name their own Opportunities whatever they want multiple times over the last couple of years, but they obviously have not listened to me or others who have made the same request.  I hope this is what you are looking for and has helped at least a little bit.

Ivena Sakelarieva

Hi Marie,


We use the same process as Robin - where we clone the opportunity, assign the application and reviewer dates, and update the semester specific information (# of awards, award amount). For us it is a bit less complicated than Robin's situation. We have about 4 individual scholarships which are semester based and only clone our Spring scholarships which were unawarded for a second application period in the Fall. 


You could create separate Portfolios for each scholarship with the intended semester in the name. A couple of years ago I created separate portfolios for our study abroad scholarships with Summer, Fall, Spring in the opportunity name to discern which portfolio was for which application cycle because they were open nearly all year long. This proved to be cumbersome as the scholarships were not always offered, or would change from semester to semester. You could give this a try and see if it works for your application needs. I currently use the cloning method described above.


Ivena Sakelarieva

Santa Barbara City College