Application grid view

Arly Douglass

This is the first year that we have implemented AM at a medical university comprised of 6 colleges, all of which approach the awarding process differently. We have only 1 college that is using the review groups functionality of AM in this first year of implementation. The rest are relying on the application grid views for each scholarship to see which applicants have auto-matched, and they view those together as a scholarship committee. The problem comes into play for scholarships where the majority of applicants match to them because the qualifications are not limiting. We’ve discovered rather quickly that the sorting abilities on the grid views are very limited (i.e., cannot sort on more than 1 column) and they are bulky in general even when hiding a good amount of the data columns. If your school has groups that meet together and use the application grid views/auto-matching to make decisions when awarding, do you have any tips or tricks to streamline the process?

Joel Spiess

You should be able to filter on more than one column at a time. We do this frequently. Chat with Blackbaud Support to make sure the system is working as designed for you.

Arly Douglass

Hi Joel,

We can filter, but not sort on more than one field. For example, one school was trying to sort by a Total Debt column (high to low) and then GPA (high to low). We couldn't do that. The Total Debt sort disappeared as soon as we sorted by GPA.

Shawndi Wilson

We actually export out to excel files and then do the manipulates for the committees.

Jonathan Blevins

Good morning!

Ditto to what Shawndi Wilson stated.

Our users that rely on the grid view to make awarding decisions will export the full view and then just manipulate the information using excel functions. We find this to be most effective. In all honesty, we only use the grid view to create standard views to export from or to quick-search for student applications. The only thing you have to be conscious of is that your system may be importing new information automatically (our imports run every morning) so the information you rely on may become outdated depending on the timing.

The Sort and Filter functions in excel are definitely your friends when cleaning up the data.

Arly Douglass

@Jonathan Blevins We do nightly imports so we would need to be conscious of that. The other thing that concerns me about exporting them into Excel, if we did it prior to ‘awarding day’, is that the encumbered amounts would not reflect the latest and greatest. Our committee members are loving being able to see who was already awarded money because we award as we go and put applicants in a finalist category so we can see encumbered amounts.

Mallorie Fonseca

@Arly Douglass
I'm not sure if it helps, but one review group I've been a part of would use the fields organization features at the top of each column to help narrow it down or find the ‘most eligible’ group and then do something like organize ABC/123 style. They'd also save that view to hopefully save them just a bit of time from organizing their view again. It would also give them a sense of consistency in their process each year but also a chance to easily tell what they did and whether or not it should be evaluated.

For example, a scholarship that looks for students that ‘have the highest GPA’ and ‘have financial need' may be very open to committee discretion. Perhaps the committee says, let's automatch students with a 3.5+ GPA, but also have taken out loans or have ‘unmet need’. So maybe that application grid now has 1,000 students. The committee might then narrow it down to GPAs of 3.8+ so they enter the code in the GPA column, “>3.8” which makes it now 50 students. Then the group is smaller but they can also add another field entry or organize 123/ABC for things like ‘unmet need’ or ‘total loans’ to decide how to select the best student at that point.

Jennifer Rudolf

@Mallorie Fonseca How do you know if a student has loans or unmet need? I don't know how to incorporate this information into Blackbaud. Any advice on this would be most helpful!

Mallorie Fonseca

@Jennifer Rudolf We use the user data imports from Banner. I'm not sure how it works on the technical side of things, but our IT folks make anything in Banner available for us to import as long as we request it, then we map it to the correct column (or create a new column) in AW/BBAM so that the data from Banner appears in the application information. We have to be specific sometimes and use ‘current’ and ‘upcoming’ fields for 21-22 and 22-23 which is about to roll over to 22-23 and 23-24 in August.