Knowing the Whole Story: Orah and Blackbaud Partner to Secure Student Locations

For over a decade, Orah has helped the world’s leading independent schools know where their students are, so they can keep students safe when it matters most.. 

Today, we are excited to announce that we are bringing that rigorous level of accountability to the entire market as an official Strategic Partner of Blackbaud. 

Beyond the Classroom: The "All-Day" Safety Layer for Blackbaud Schools

For private schools, blind spots occur during transitions, between the first morning sign-in, classrooms, and the final bell. 

Blackbaud recently introduced the capability for parents to submit absences via their parent portal, a positive step forward. Orah expands on this by accounting for students throughout the entire school day, ensuring you always know where your students are. This is in contrast to the traditional focus of Student Information Systems (SIS) on classroom attendance only, and safety platforms concentrating solely on 'outside of the classroom' activities.

By integrating Orah’s real-time accountability layer with Blackbaud’s administrative power, we provide a unified view of every student’s location, every hour of the day:

• The Morning Arrival: From the moment a student checks in on campus through a kiosk.
• The Academic Day: Precise classroom attendance through a simple browser extension for teacher, or student-led Automated Attendance for schools looking to eliminate manual rolls.
• Late Arrivals/Early departures: Parents have an app to report absences and log appointments for simple processing by the school.
• The Dynamic “In-betweens”: Tracking movements to the nurse’s office, music lessons, or off-campus field trips using passes.
• After-School & Athletics: Managing sign-outs and extracurricular participation using events.
• Dismissals: The final ‘hand-off’ back home and ensuring students are in safe hands.

Every one of these movements is captured in Orah and, thanks to our high-fidelity two-way sync, data is written back to Blackbaud every 15 minutes. This ensures your system of record always ends up with clean attendance records.

Boarding Roots, Campus-Wide Vision

Our history is rooted in the complex world of boarding schools, where knowing a student's location is a fundamental duty of care. For years, Blackbaud institutions like Philips Exeter Academy and Northwood School have relied on the Orah-Blackbaud partnership to manage these complexities.

“Within 90 seconds, everybody was accounted for and we identified the kids that were missing... Orah is incredibly effective at making sure your students are safe and accounted for. That's the most important thing we do."

-John Spear, Assistant Head of School, Northwood School

We are now taking that same level of accountability and applying it to day schools, where Blackbaud <> Orah have already seen great success.

“It was pretty seamless. Within three or four weeks, we pretty much had everybody taking attendance in Orah.”

-Nicole Jules,Assistant Head of School for Student Affairs,University School of Nashville

Whether you are a boarding school managing 24/7 care or a day school tracking complex class attendance, free periods, extracurriculars and emergency management, Orah provides the visibility you need to ensure no student ever falls through the cracks.

Why Schools are Transitioning to Orah

As schools (and parents) demand more sophisticated safety requirements, a significant number of Blackbaud schools are moving to Orah to replace legacy School Safety tools. They are seeking a school-wide platform that doesn't just "check a box" but actively improves their ability to protect students.

The transition to Orah allows schools to benefit from:

1. System Consolidation: A single platform that covers classroom rolls, passes, absences, leave requests, dismissals and extracurriculars.
2. Increased Compliance: Automated Attendance workflows that free up teachers to focus on teaching rather than administration.
3. Emergency Preparedness: With to-the-minute student location data, being prepared for emergencies has never been so robust: Instant, mobile-first roll calls that can account for the entire campus population in under 90 seconds.
4. Enterprise Emergency integrations: Orah is integrated with key safety solutions like VisitorAware and Informacast (Both SingleWire Companies) so Orah becomes your key ‘Safety Hub’ for knowing your campus is secure.

The Future of Student Accountability

This partnership isn't just about technical compatibility; it’s about a shared vision for safer school campuses. By choosing Orah, Blackbaud schools are gaining a partner dedicated to making sure you know where your students are.

Join Orah and Blackbaud experts for a live session in late April where we'll walk through the new partnership and how Orah’s full-day accountability layer will enhance your campus safety.

We'll update this page shortly with more details shortly. Keep an eye out on the Orah and Blackbaud social pages for more updates.

Ready to bridge the gap in your student safety?

We’d love to show you how our two-way sync can provide your school with 100% visibility from arrival to dismissal.