Austin community college
ACC Foundation Leverages Blackbaud Solutions to Streamline Scholarship Donor Communications
Higher Education Institutions
I think the donor portal is a really great way for
donors to see the impact they’re making.”
Austin Community College Foundation relies on Blackbaud Award Management™ to help their small staff effectively match students to scholarships. With the recent addition of Blackbaud Stewardship Management™, the foundation’s process became even more efficient by providing an online portal that allows donors to easily follow their funds and the achievements of the students they support.
ACC Foundation streamlines communications to scholarship donors, offers them online portal
Austin Community College District serves more than 70,000 students annually and is among the largest in the nation, with 11 campuses located across Central Texas and more than 100 programs in 10 areas of study. The college provides flexible, accelerated learning opportunities, and real-world experiences to help students complete their education on-time and graduate workforce-ready with many students receiving a two-year degree and continuing on to advanced job training or to large universities such as the University of Texas and Texas A&M University.
In recent years, Austin Community College Foundation has annually awarded $1.5 million in scholarships to 750 students who are selected from over 3,000 applications. “We are a small staff, especially for the size of our college,” said Operations Coordinator Ann Schubert, one of three foundation employees. “Without an online application and a way to review those applications and award, there’s no way we could manage. We just wouldn’t be able to handle that many applications.”
The foundation adopted Blackbaud Award Management in 2014 to provide a streamlined, flexible, and efficient process for students to access scholarship awards and to better serve the nearly 200 donors who make those scholarships possible. With the 2020-21 school year, the foundation enhanced its ability to report back to donors by adding Blackbaud Stewardship Management, which it found to be more “robust” than other products on the market.
Providing Donors with a Clear View of Their Giving
With Blackbaud Stewardship Management, a donor can easily and securely access a comprehensive view of their entire giving history and the financial performance of their funds, as well as the stories of the scholarship recipients the donor has assisted, all accessible online in one central portal.
In addition, the foundation now uses Blackbaud Stewardship Management to generate an individualized annual report for each donor—saving hours of manual work by eliminating the copying, pasting, and designing that Schubert previously did herself to create similar individualized reports. “We can just download donor reports from the system, and we don’t have to create them,” Schubert said. “That saved a lot of time.”
As the foundation transitioned to the new system, it sent each donor a printed report, generated using Blackbaud Stewardship Management, by mail with an invitation to access the new donor portal. With the start of the following school year, Schubert began pointing donors to the portal by email with plans to share annual donor reports with electronic links. Printed reports will only be
available upon request—a shift that will save the foundation even more time and resources.
“We can just download donor reports from the system, and we don’t have to create them. That saved a lot of time.”
Promoting Gratitude with a Personal Touch
The new stewardship management tools enhance the foundation’s established system of matching applicants with diverse interests and needs to the right scholarships through Blackbaud Award Management. Blackbaud Award Management already provided the foundation a component that requires students to write thank-you letters to donors before awards become final, while offering students access to donor profiles that help them personalize their thank-you letters.
Now, with Blackbaud Stewardship Management, donors can easily access pictures, bios, and thank-you letters of the students they have supported at any time through the portal. The portal also allows donors to check changes to their endowments and learn about campus news, activities, and further giving opportunities. The foundation can provide a “Donate” button on the page as well.
Schubert credited Blackbaud’s responsive customer support team for helping staff adapt to new processes and tools, and said the transition has been well worth it. She anticipates most donors will embrace the online setup, and after the first year, she had only heard favorable reactions as
donors and the scholarship recipients they support are more connected than ever before. “I think the donor portal is a really great way for donors to see the impact they’re making.”
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