Handshake for Educational Providers is a college-to-career network that partners with institutions of higher education to provide students access to reputable job postings, set up appointments, manage virtual and in-person events, and track student outcomes.
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.
Handshake is great if this is the expected website for your organization to use. It can be difficult to share out specific positions, but an administrator has helped me create links in the past in order to do so. However, if you don't already have traffic to the site I could see where that would be a challenge. It works well for multiple team members to organize positions and helps to make it smooth and easy on the back end. Overall it's a very easy-to-use site.
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
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.
Handshake provides a job-seeking function, while our mentor's app from PeopleGrove is more of a networking experience. It would be nice if the two functions could be in one application as it is nice to see who is open to networking at specific companies and in certain fields that also go to/graduate from your school.
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
