Alumni Reach vs. Cadence

At our college, the admissions team also uses Cadence. I think it's particularly useful for back-and-forth interactions in real time (or through an AI chatbot) My department focuses only on donors and alums. These communications are much less likely to be back-and-forth. They're more informational in nature which makes some of the features un-necessary. It's easy for a recipient to opt-out, but not easy to set up scenarios where they can opt out of specific types of texts - all-or-nothing is more likely and it's difficult for them to re-subscribe once they've opted out.

Incentivized

• easy to set up segments in order to reach certain portions of the audience
• easy opt-out for recipients
• simple reporting after texts are sent

Incentivized

• There is built-in connection with Raiser's Edge NXT but the field mapping is overly complicated and setting it up requires action both on customer end and Cadence end
• Cannot update a bad email address without deleting the record and re-importing it
• Cannot simply add records - must be done through import from a spreadsheet
• assigning a record to a user can only be done during initial import

Incentivized

We are currently evaluating Mailchimp's SMS option to see if the price for adding that feature is less than what we are paying for Cadence. Currently we are ONLY using Mailchimp for email communications, but the interface is much more user friendly. We have not yet had a chance to demo the SMS feature to compare it to Cadence, but we plan to check it out.

Incentivized

• Too early (one year) to have hard ROI info, but we have had constituents who have indicated a preference for text as their primary means of interacting with our organization.
• Even with the integration with Raiser's Edge NXT it takes time to update the database with opt-outs.
• We have fewer constituents with mobile numbers than those with email addresses. We will have to appeal to our constituents to share mobile numbers with us

Incentivized