The Power of Connecting Data, People, and Processes in Higher Ed

Advancement, finance, scholarships, and the student information system (SIS)—often run as separate systems, managed by separate teams, in separate buildings on the same campus. Yet they’re all working from the same underlying story: who is enrolled, how they’re progressing, which students need support, which donors are funding it, and whether the numbers reconcile on both ends. When advancement has visibility into gift disbursement, finance can see scholarship recipients, the scholarship team can view fund balances, and everyone has visibility into what the SIS knows about the student, all stakeholders move faster and make better calls. But when those systems don’t talk to each other, staff spend their time re-entering data, reconciling spreadsheets, and chasing down numbers that should naturally align.

That’s not just an efficiency problem. It’s a capacity problem. Every hour a gift officer spends tracking down financial reports, an admin spends manually matching a scholarship to a fund balance, or a finance team spends reconciling gift batches that posted a week late, is an hour not spent serving students, stewarding donors, and making confident, timely decisions.

The institutions moving their missions forward now have made a strategic decision: connect the systems, and the capacity follows. When Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT, Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT, Blackbaud Award Management, and an SIS like the one from Blackbaud’s innovation partner Student First share data instead of guarding it, information moves in real time across offices that used to operate on separate clocks. That shift changes what’s possible—not incrementally, but fundamentally.

The Case for Connection

Connect these systems and things change for the people who rely upon them. 

• Gift officers work from today’s numbers, not last week’s. When a gift posts, it’s already reflected in the fund balance and the donor record, so they can call with a real update instead of a stale one. 
• Scholarship administrators get their time back. When the system can auto-match eligible students via SIS data, they aren’t manually checking major, credit hours, and GPA one application at a time—they are gaining insight on underfunded programs and building next year’s ask. 
• Finance closes the books on numbers it can trust. When gift batches and fund balances sync automatically instead of waiting on a manual export, reconciliation stops being a monthly fire drill and revenue forecasting gets sharper. The controller isn’t cross-checking two systems by hand or waiting on someone in another building to confirm a balance.
• Advancement gains proof, not just promises. With accurate, connected student data flowing from the SIS, everyone supporting students can finally show scholarship donors who received their awards, whether those students persisted year over year, whether they graduated, and the stories that came out of it. Impact stops being a claim and becomes something the institution can measure. 

That’s what a connected campus changes: student data moves in one continuous journey—from enrollment to award to outcome to the next conversation with a donor. Financial information moves from donation to disbursement to reconciliation to reporting.

Here are some examples of what that looks like in practice.

Proof Point: SUNY Brockport eliminates the lag between gift and ledger

State University of New York Brockport already relied on Financial Edge NXT for complex fund accounting but its outdated Banner Advancement system couldn’t sync with finance in real time. Deposits recorded in advancement could take up to a week to appear in the finance system, and reconciliation stretched into hours of manual work every week.

Replacing Banner with Raiser’s Edge NXT and its native connection to Financial Edge NXT closed that gap.

Having everything under one umbrella has been a game changer. What used to take days of manual work now flows automatically between systems, saving time and cutting down on errors.

John Sapienza
Director of Finance and Advancement Services, SUNY Brockport

75% reduction in reconciliation time

Up to 5 days of posting delays eliminated

Gift batches entered in Raiser’s Edge NXT now flow immediately into Financial Edge NXT, cutting reconciliation from hours every week to half an hour or less.

The ripple effect went beyond finance. Because advancement staff no longer had to request reports from a separate team, they gained the ability to run their own queries and build their own donor lists. As Sapienza put it: “The biggest thing is people can run their own reports now. That literally wasn’t possible before.”

That speed and confidence showed up on the fundraising side, too. SUNY Brockport recently closed the largest fundraising campaign in the history of the SUNY comprehensive university system, raising $49.6 million against a $40 million goal—nearly $10 million over target—with 62% of the funds earmarked for scholarships. A connected system won’t run a campaign on its own, but it does mean advancement and finance can move at the speed a record-setting campaign demands.

Proof Point: Wake Tech Foundation scales scholarship access without scaling headcount

Wake Tech Foundation manages 450 scholarships a year for the more than 74,000 students across North Carolina’s largest community college—with a lean staff and one person overseeing hundreds of individual awards. Connecting Award Management, Raiser’s Edge NXT, and Financial Edge NXT is what makes that possible.

I’m one person who oversees hundreds of awards and our three Blackbaud products help me do this effectively and efficiently. I could not manage that process single-handedly without Award Management working in the background to match students to awards based on qualifications, without access to Financial Edge NXT so that I’m confident that we’re awarding the correct amount per award, and without Raiser’s Edge NXT to steward our scholarship donors.

Maya Rosman
Director of Foundation Database Operations, Wake Tech Foundation

170% increase in scholarship applications

75% reduction in reviewer login troubleshooting

Zero out-of-system awards needed in three years

During peak awarding cycles, the foundation scaled from about 700 applications to more than 1,900 without increasing manual processing or complexity. After moving Award Management to single sign‑on, reviewer login issues dropped by an estimated 75 percent—freeing up valuable time for higher‑priority work.

The connection between systems does more than move applications through the pipeline. Every scholarship recipient becomes a constituent record in Raiser’s Edge NXT, helping the foundation trace a student’s full award history over time, show donors the specific impact of their giving, and use enrollment-versus-scholarship-availability data to steer donors toward underfunded programs. Finance and advancement even cross-reference each other’s records directly, closing the loop between what’s pledged, what’s received, and what’s awarded.

Proof Point: Cumberland University builds room to grow without losing the personal touch

Cumberland University has doubled its enrollment from 1,600 to over 3,500 students in seven years—a growth rate that could easily have eroded the personalized service for which the university is known. Instead, Cumberland connected Student First, Financial Edge NXT, and Raiser’s Edge NXT into a single ecosystem before that growth outpaced its staff.

By integrating Raiser’s Edge NXT, Financial Edge NXT, and Student First, we’re creating a level of synergy that simply wasn’t possible before.

Mark Hanshaw
Associate Provost and General Counsel, Cumberland University

System integration was the deciding factor in the university’s selection. Cumberland evaluated seven different platforms before choosing the combination that could talk to each other out of the box. Together, Financial Edge NXT, Raiser’s Edge NXT, and Student First give the university more granular visibility into revenue forecasting across an increasingly complex mix of undergraduate and graduate students. That same real-time student data enables automated degree audits and billing that were previously manual and time-intensive, giving students and staff a clearer view of where each student stands on the path to graduation.

With the new systems, the university will be able to analyze data more granularly, helping us better understand and plan for our complex mix of students, from undergraduates to graduate cohorts across different fields.

Mark Hanshaw
Associate Provost and General Counsel, Cumberland University

The Pattern Behind the Proof

Look across all three stories and the same pattern shows up: the value didn’t come from any single product. It came from the connections between them.

SUNY Brockport’s win wasn’t Raiser’s Edge NXT or Financial Edge NXT alone—it was the direct line between the two that turned a week of lag into thirty minutes. Wake Tech’s ability to award 450 scholarships with a lean team wasn’t Award Management in isolation—it was Award Management feeding Raiser’s Edge NXT for stewardship and drawing on Financial Edge NXT for fund accuracy. Cumberland didn’t choose Student First, Financial Edge NXT, and Raiser’s Edge NXT just because they are the best point solutions on the market—they chose them because they were built to integrate, helping the university scale without losing what makes it Cumberland.

That’s the real argument for a connected campus. It’s not about buying more software. It’s about making sure the software your offices depend on is working from the same data, at the same time, so your people can spend less time reconciling systems and more time driving impact for students.

Where to Start

There’s no single starting point for a connected campus. Each of these institutions began somewhere different—SUNY Brockport replaced an aging advancement platform with one that connected to the fund accounting system they already relied upon, Wake Tech layered award management on top of their strong fundraising and finance foundation, Cumberland started from the ground up with three new integrated systems.

What these institutions share is a decision to stop tolerating gaps between systems and start treating integration as core infrastructure, not a nice-to-have. Because donors don’t give to databases—they give to students and missions. 

When advancement, finance, scholarships, and student information are connected, institutions can show support moving all the way from gift to student outcome. The real question isn’t whether your institution has the bandwidth to connect its systems. Given what SUNY Brockport, Wake Tech Foundation, and Cumberland University have already proven, it’s how expanding capacity equates to revenue, revenue impacts operations, and operations impact institutional sustainability.