Ellucian offers Colleague educational ERP, including a student information system supporting higher education institutions with student admissions and registration, academics, curriculum management, and other aspects of student management.
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Ellucian CRM Advance
Score 5.3 out of 10
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Ellucian CRM Advance is a nonprofit constituent relationship management software solution offered by Ellucian, Inc.
Colleague Student is a great solution for smaller schools. I'm not sure it would work well at a large university (10,000 plus students) -- I'm not sure it has capacity to handle that. It is also well suited for universities where departments communicate well with each other. There is so much cross functionality, that if departments don't communicate well, issues could arise if one department makes changes without notifying or talking with other departments about the change
A potential student calls in and we can enter all the information in CRM right then. Ellucian CRM Advance makes it easy for when we go back a week later to see all the notes on the student rather than asking them all over again. Admissions takes the call and enters all info into CRM Advance and then Academics can just log in and see all the notes Admissions took on the student.
Colleague offers a single reference point for all student data, which creates consistency and unity across campus and ensures students hear the same information from every source.
Colleague recently updated its interface to be more accessible to all people. Previously, it was not accessible through any browser aside from Internet Explorer.
Colleague provide helpful user restrictions that prevent departments from altering or erasing data they do not typically use. For example, I cannot change student billing and accidentally wreak havoc for the cashier's office.
Develop API's that are vendor agnostic rather than selecting specific vendors (Clearinghouse, ImageNow).
Colleague tends to be to reactionary to the changing needs in higher education rather than developing the future.
Hound clients to pay extra for consulting (consultants are usually bad), rather than helping institutions to use the product. Seems to be the first thing help line personnel jump to rather than working with clients to figure out creative solutions.
Ellucian Colleague remains the most cost competitive solution for our organization. Alternative solutions, have had ridiculously high migration costs and ongoing maintenance fees which have not been friendly toward a migration of our existing data. Some the features of the other solutions are very nice to "haves" but the reward has to out-weigh the cost of adoption.
We actually recently dropped CRM Advance and are now live with Raisers Edge. Raisers Edge was much more user friendly and built around the fundraising experience. Integration was possible through a secure FTP interface with Ellucian Colleague. Other Blackbaud products have since been purchased to further enhance fundraising and gift giving.
By keeping student's academic work, financial aid, and accounts receivable information in one location we are able to report without the need for data aggregation.
Colleague's web applications allow the students themselves to perform tasks such as enrollment without assistance from staff members.
Using customized rules that we can set up in Colleague we can trigger events to happen as data is entered. This eliminates the need not only for someone to remember to perform an additional task, but it also saves the time of performing the actual task.
We are now able to do a more effective review of applicants and see overall trends of characteristics such as source locations. This helps to focus other efforts such as marketing to support those areas and increase others.
There is now a full picture of the needs of our students. By being able to view information in a logical progression, trend data can be identified and reacted to.
