Comments/Review of Stewardship side of module

JoAnn Strommen

We are looking at purchase of this module but would only be using the stewardship side. BB staff of course asked all the right salesman questions like how many hours do you spend on letters to scholarship donors. Implied average of 315 would be now so small and what took one a solid month can now be done in two hours. All sounds a bit too good to be true. So, I'm looking for comments from those using the module.


What are the best features you use? Positive aspects?


What features do not deliver as expected? Negative aspects?


Are there features you'd like to use but reality is don't have time to implement? I don't see how we would have time to create frequent bulletins.


Is the financial csv data easy to pull from FE for uploads? Seemed like there were a lot of uploads and downloads.


I just read thru many of the posts here and definitely agree a manual/user guide would be helpful.


Any opinions you can share would be appreciated. We're meeting to go over our impressions in two days. PM me if you're more comfortable with that than forum post.

Thanks in advance.

Angela Tuttle

We are looking to purchase this as well and I would love to hear what others have to say!

Barbara Jones

Ditto!

JoAnn Strommen

I did not get much feedback to my post as you can see. I did initiate PM with two users I identified from forum posts. One used award side but not stewardship. Other if I remember correctly was just implementing. We're small university compared to those using. We decided it was not cost effective for us to purchase and only use stewardship side and felt like there would still be a bit of manual work even with the module.

Hope you are able to get some feedback.

Michele GuyorBorthwick

Hi JoAnn,

I had delayed responding to your question as we just completed our first year with Award and Stewardship Management (SM), and I have not yet had the opportunity to send out our annual reports using the program (waiting on info from our Finance department). That being said I can only give limited feedback so far on the Stewardship side and an impression on how well things went on the Award side as I did not do the work of processing scholarship awards. I have made some sample donor reports and I love the student information that comes over from post acceptance. I also have a feeling that being able to upload the financial info into SM will make putting the reports together significantly quicker than previous years. There are limitations, however, to the layout and design of the reports and disbursement pages with student info, and I am hopeful that may change over time.

I do think the Award Management (AM) program made a positive impact on identifying students for awards more quickly, though our inaugural year with the program got off to a late start and this caused the timing of wrapping up the awarding process (late spring) to not change much from previous years. I believe, however, that we will see a difference this year (21-22) and things will wrap up much earlier, which is our goal.

My Financial Aid cohort and I discovered a few things together over the past year:

The criteria works really well with most of the student info coming in from daily uploads in identifying potential scholarship recipients. This saved FinAid a lot of time that used to be spent combing through individual records. A few things did pop up that had to be changed - for example “academic standing”. This is a criteria on many of our scholarships, however we discovered that not every academic department adds it to student records. So if “good academic standing” was required I had to change qualifiers from “must include good academic standing” to “must not include academic warning, etc…. ” and FinAid would have to look at GPA, etc. Occasionally criteria had to be tweaked (temporarily) for a student hand-picked by a department because some anomaly in their record caused them to not show up in the pool of eligible applicants.

I am speaking for FinAid now, but I believe that AM works well with Banner during the financial part of the awarding process. I also felt that the post acceptance process was a godsend during the pandemic (students used to come to my office in person to write thank you notes) and ended up producing much better letters, and we could ensure some additional info would be shared by the student (i.e. photo, hometown, major) by making it “required”. Students seemed to write longer and nicer notes when they were typing them in at their convenience versus hand writing them in my office by appointment. I have individually created a few reports at the request of major gift officers who were visiting a donor. The letters and other questions in the post acceptance section would be included and I received a lot of positive feedback on the information.

An unexpected bonus – As I have limited access to information in Banner I found the ability to use AM to pull up lists of students for other purposes (i.e. students minoring in Leadership for our the Student Alumni Association) to be extremely helpful.

I wish I had more feedback to provide, but we are still a bit new to AM and SM. I can say, however, that we are pretty happy so far.