Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review I would recommend Slate, by Technolutions for any higher education institution, big or small. Though there is a higher cost associated with Slate than most other options, it's well worth the price. The level of detail that you're able to gather, maintain, and query on within your student data is far beyond anything I've experienced with other systems. These insights help you pinpoint areas for action and improvement so that you can pivot when necessary, helping you reach your enrollment goals quicker and more efficiently.
Read full review Pros 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 Read full review Managing contacts. Smart communications (drip email campaigns). Real-time data management. End-to-end control of product (or instance of). Allows for easy to implement segmentation via smart rules and queries (data sets). Read full review Cons 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 Read full review Being able to have students register at an event without needing a wifi network Easier way to update records for individuals who move to a different organization Being able to start an application first without needing to immediately set up a user name and password. Read full review Usability It's incredibly usable and easy to figure out. It's modern and does exactly what we need for it to do
Read full review Support Rating While I do wish they had actual representatives that we able to come to you for trainings for implementation and new users, I understand that a big draw is the money that is saved by instead investing in knowledgebase, which is it's online tutorials for different functions of Slate.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review We had been on Recruitment Plus- it has been sunsetted, so we were forced to move. I also looked at Fire Engine Red. Slate seemed far and away the most robust CRM/Admissions solution.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 Read full review We aren't really a business, per se, but a nonprofit university. However, Slate[, by Technolutions] does allow us to easily sort applications into categories for different departments to review. And it provides a clear trail of who is looking at various documents when--and how long it takes to process them. Read full review ScreenShots