Award Management, Banner and Raiser's Edge

Lisa Bergmann

We use Raiser's Edge for our CRM and our campus partners (we are separate organizations) use Banner.  Our campus partner is investigating using Academic Works (is that now Award Management?).  I'm curious if anyone else is using Banner in conjunction with Academic Works/Award Management.  Also, how do those systems communicate with Raiser's Edge?  We handle everything from the donor side, and provide campus with the scholarship amounts to award, etc... but we do not share a database for security reasons.  We are looking to be more efficient in sharing information between the two organizations and not needing translation tables between how data is entered in RE and what is needed for Banner.  We are hoping that Academic Works/Award Management will help with this if it works with Banner and can correlate to RE.

Lindsay Marsh

Following

Lisa Knight

I am in a similar situation and would be interested in these responses as well.


LHK

Michele GuyorBorthwick

My answer may only be minimally helpful as we just began using Award Management (AM) for scholarship awards this fall and I am still trying to navigate and learn the Stewardship Management component.  At our institution Banner "speaks" to AM every night (I believe) to update student info in AM - i.e. if a new student enrolls, grades change, someone drops, address changes, etc.  This seems to be working well at this point, and Financial Aid has been happy with the student info updates.  Our IT department set this up. Raiser's Edge is separate and does not speak to AM or Banner at our organization.  I also serve as the go-between (and did prior to AM) and upload or input all spend budget information to AM (previously used a shared spreadsheet with FinAid), and will be eventually uploading year-end financials when needed for reporting.

Emily Savino

@ Michele - would you be willing to share your process for importing financial (scholarship) data into Award Management? We are currently doing this process manually, and would like to streamline. Import file headers, etc. Thanks!

Michele GuyorBorthwick

I hope my response will help as I am not sure what your manual process is. For spend budgets, I have to add each one to the new opportunity by hand - BBAM told me there is no way to do a mass upload of that information. The caveat I will share that I learned in our (now) second year of using Award Management is that the cloning of opportunities that happens during Cycle Management also clones the spend budgets. So you have to come up with a detail oriented process to keep track as you update each new spend. For example, if you have an expendable scholarship that was completely spent down in the previous cycle, (or was maybe a one-time award) you will need to go in after Cycle Management and remove all start and stop dates (for the one-time award), and remember to remove the spend budget. I learned this lesson the hard way when I missed a scholarship that was spent down, and FinAid awarded it again in this year before I realized I had missed it. If BBAM ever asks for my feedback I will suggest they try to find a way to easily zero out the spends as I would prefer to have a scholarship mistakenly show no money available, than an amount that is incorrect, especially if it is more than is available. Additionally the sorting ability on the opportunities list would make catching a scholarship with a 0 balance simple, but catching one you missed changing from the previous year is much harder.


This first year of using BBAM and Stewardship Management, I had to have BB customer service help me when I uploaded year end financial info as there was something wrong in the headers - file imports is not my area of expertise! I was able to upload our year-end financial reports from a CSV file I created from the endowment report and expendable reports I receive from our Finance department which dramatically stream-lined that part of my process when assembling individual reports. In Site -->Settings -->Fund fields I was able to create my "Label", which will show on the donor report. I had to ensure that the Import header matched the header on the CSV file I imported. The Import header is where I ran into problems twice -- there was some sort of "space" at the beginning of each header on my CSV file that I could not see but BBAM staff could and they had to fix for me. Once they figured it out uploading the info at Site --> Settings --> Stewardship Fund Imports only took a few minutes.


I am now hopeful that I don't have the problem with my headers again next year as I will never remember how they fixed it!

Emily Savino

Thank you so much!!

Cindy BrusseauHollander

@Michele GuyorBorthwick

Hi Michele! We are new to Award Management. We are wondering what process you use to connect the award donor to their profile in RE?