Awards Management

Jo Holland

Are there schools that use Awards Management in there packaging process for financial aid including federal, state and institutional scholarships? Or, is Awards Management used for Endowed/Donor Scholarships mainly?

Jennifer Rudolf

@Jo Holland
Following…..

Lauren Hackett

@Jo Holland We use it only for Endowed/Donor Scholarships.

Joel Spiess

@Jo Holland, at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, we use Blackbaud to award all scholarships, in the broadest sense of the term: philanthropic, institutional, state, new freshmen merit, etc. We recently defined for our campus (on our Scholarship Policies website) what a “scholarship” is, and we clarified that if the payment to the student satisfies this definition, it must be awarded via Blackbaud.

Jo Holland

@Joel Spiess
Joel,

Thank you so much for the response. Do you use the Awards Management Software and, if so, is there a person in your office that is assigned to the use and maintenance of the software (updates)? Is the Financial Aid Office where the use of the software takes place, or the Advancement (Foundation) Office?

Jo Holland

@Lauren Hackett
Lauren,

Thank you for responding so quickly.

Jo Holland

@Jo Holland
Joel,

Also, who set up the software at the initial installation so that you could use it for awarding all scholarships. Also, what financial aid system are you on? We are on CAMS.

Victor Swindell

@Jo Holland
Our setup grew from the initial concept of the Stakeholders (Financial Aid, Scholarship Office).
We got the product when it was called Academic Works.. Blackbaud/AW did the initial configuration based on those initial specs. Our IT department did the data loads and built the interface between Banner and BAM
After the department got involved they started adding fields to have for the scholarships

Joel Spiess

@Jo Holland, yes, we use Blackbaud Awards Management. Like the other response here, our institution purchased it when it was called Academic Works. A staff member at our institution and an Academic Works consultant worked with our IT team on the initial configuration. We use PeopleSoft as our student information system. At our institution, the software is administered by the Office of Student Scholarships (OSS), an independent department (a peer of the Financial Aid Office) in Enrollment Management. When I started as the director of OSS a few years ago, we weren't using it for all scholarships but quickly realized we could be doing so if we made a few tweaks to our import file of student data. We regularly modify the import file to adjust to our expanding needs.

Jo Holland

@Joel Spiess
Sorry for so many questions, but still looking at the Awards Management System. When your scholarship information integrates directly into the student financial aid award screen, do you know what procedures the Financia Aid Office has in place to ensure need based aid is correct, no over awards, etc.

If the Financial Aid Office does not key scholarships into the system who developed the checks and balances? IT? or Awards Management Team?

Someone mentioned you could package federal aid through Awards Management? This concerned me as a potential federal compliance issue. I have not been in contact with a school that has implemented a process with federal aid eligibility determination processed through AM.

Thank you.

Joel Spiess

@Jo Holland, we have homegrown, automated PeopleSoft queries that run every time a disbursement file is sent from BAM to PeopleSoft that identify over-awards, etc., and a member of our team reviews these and makes adjustments, as needed. Our institutional IT team developed the checks and balances and then validated the process with our office. Essentially, the financial aid team was involved in the development and signed off on the execution. We do not package federal aid through BAM.

Jo Holland

@Victor Swindell
Thank you so much for responding.

Jo Holland

@Joel Spiess
Thanks so much for the information.

Victor Swindell

@Jo Holland-as part of our BIO-Demo upload we have a field called unmet need and it returns three values ‘Highest Need’, ‘High Need’, ‘Some Need’, ‘No Need’ which is used in the determinaton. It is based on the banner baninist1.F_calc_total_budget