Bonterra EveryAction enables nonprofits to increase efficiency, optimize supporter and prospect interactions, and raise more money by providing expansive fundraising, digital, and organizing tools on a unified CRM.
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Slate for Advancement
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Slate for Advancement is a CRM built exclusively for higher ed advancement and alumni offices. A license to Slate for Advancement is unlimited -- no additional add-ons or costs. Slate enables users to create a personalized constituent experience at scale with custom giving forms, donor portals, video messages, phone calling, and directories. Users can automate processes at scale while having control and access at every level of the system. And the platform includes inbuilt reporting.
Bonterra EveryAction is a good CRM to use if your company has institutional fundraisers, grants, and individual fundraising, as it is suited to manage the processes that go along with all of those. I've heard that SalesForce has more functionality than Bonterra EveryAction, but I think that Bonterra EveryAction has plenty to learn and is extremely useful.
What features/functionality pushed your team to select Slate for Advancement? The main winning aspect from our perspective was that all touch points of the donors record would be managed, maintained, updated in one location. We would not be reliant on a third-party vendor for main aspect like e-mail or texting or calling or payment processing. Slate for Advancement has an approach to technology that is embracing of our modern world of technology that I have not seen in other vendors. What lessons learned can you share? Any migration for your CRM is a huge change management project. If you don't have a strong project manager onsite then consider bringing one in as a consultant. If you could make the decision again, would it be the same one? Absolutely What peripherals were you able to replace with the Slate solution (giving portal, events mgmt, etc)? Our institution was a little bit different where we had already built out custom solutions for our alumni portal our event management and our honor roll of giving. Being able to replace those with a platform that's supported by a vendor and has a large community of knowledge base that can be leaned on was huge and another main consideration in moving to slate. For us one of the main selling factors was the depth and willingness of the community to support the rest of us in the effort of making slate for advancement successful in our institutions. And this continues to be the case to this day.
One stop shop for creating newsletters, sending them out to mailing lists, and tracking analytics (including donations).
Grants management (we are able to track funds received, reports due, and all points of contact associated with a given donor organization).
Contact records (the new contact record feature makes it easy to find past donation history, demographic information, survey responses, communication preferences, etc. for a given contact. We are also able to import information from our donor prospect software into the contact record so everything is in one place).
We will never us EA, nor recommend them to another org, simply based on their failed promises to deliver training, on-boarding and then charging our account during our free 3 month period, then after cancelling the contract their legal department tried to force us to sign a cancellation agreement that barred us from writing reviews, making comments, etc!
It's just so easy--there isn't a lot of techy lingo or graphics, so a regular person can log in and have a sense of what does what. There might be a few terms you need to learn, but everything is in common English so you can almost always find what you're looking for.
The only issue I have had with availability is when I don't have my work phone with me, which prevents me from providing a multi-factor authentication code to access the portal. Other than that, I have not had an issue with availability or outages.
I feel like product support and training should go hand in hand. Having to pay $5k to learn how to use a database is absolutely ridiculous and should be offered with the cost of your database, as it is with every other database I've ever used in the last 10 years of my career. With that being said, once I took the training, I found that the support was much more available. Having training and support behind a paywall is bad business in my opinion
Slate's business model does not assign a person to service your instance of the application. To receive effective support, you MUST engage in the online forums involving the greater Slate community. Once you embrace that model, the support team meets or exceeds any service standards I've experienced over the last 20 years.
They went through all the features and explained in easy-to-digest details what features the system had. They were also responsive to questions we had. We were able to check in with the support team after training and received prompt followups that helped supplement the training after we had real-world experience using the system.
It natively integrated with NGP Van extremely well. it also integrated very well with our zoom platform and our use of the Mobilize platform. The bulk upload feature allowed us to move large amounts of initial data into the platform easily. The removal of duplicates was also a fairly easy task.
Nation Builder—I would say this is a very pared-down version of VAN that requires extensions and outside software to do about 80% of what VAN can do natively. NB does have a better geocoding system that can geocode a location with just the address and does not require coordinates.
Slate for Advancement was more customizable, there is more community support, less expensive both overall and they don't overcharge you for phone calls and texts (if I remember correctly, they charge the customer what they are charged for each phone call or text). Overall, Slate for Advancement was the more innovative option. We switched from Banner to Slate for Advancement, with Banner we constantly had to create workarounds for what we wanted to do with the software, we no longer have to do that. If we dream it, Slate for Advancement can most likely do it.
Communicating with your audiences at a regular pace is a good thing, and Bonterra Development + Digital makes that easy enough to do. We see lower-than-normal open rates for our industry (per one study I read), but our overall reach is better than had we nothing. It's hard to give the credit for that to Bonterra Development + Digital.
