We are having huge problems with the inability to award students easily in bulk. Currently, our users have spreadsheets with their results from their review processes - perhaps some massage the data and do a second round of reviews with a smaller committee; perhaps others make decisions with their committee in a room together; perhaps others make the final decisions themselves. However they get there, users have their awarding decisions made on spreadsheets - it's just the way that people work.

Currently, their only option for awarding students off their spreadsheets is to a) do it one by one using the Categorize feature or Award Mode b) use the || OR statements to award 10 students at a time (involving manual work to add the || in a Word doc or something) or c) ask us, the System Admin team, to load their potential awards into a custom field in an import so that they can quickly and easily search on it on their 'Applications' grid to award. We are offering C as our best bet for now for larger awarding cycles, but users are understandably annoyed at having to work through our team, and it burdens our team with extra, manual work.

This could be easily resolved by allowing users to paste IDs/UIDs/etc. into a selection box in the system to grab the 60 students that I want to award out of 1,000 applicants. Alternatively, this could be resolved by allowing users a pared-down version of a user import where they could set a 'Finalist' flag for their applicants. While I understand that a custom Application Category could help, it still requires setting it by selecting students through one of the three options laid out above, so we'd be right back where we started. This continues to be our biggest hurdle to get over with our users and their biggest system complaint thus far. Blackbaud has mentioned that this is difficult to develop, but, given that we had it in our old system that was not nearly as robust as BAM, I know that it can be done, and I'm confident that other schools would find it helpful.

In short, the inability to quickly and easily award students in bulk is greatly holding our user community back - we've continued to ask for this request or something similar, but we're getting near a critical need for something to be put in place.