Ellucian Colleague vs. Ravenna

Ellucian Colleague is wonderful at streamlining processes and unifying data related to students, finance, human resources, and financial aid. It continues to support and manage administrative needs, enhance student experiences, and improve operational efficiency across the University. Ellucian Colleague is less suited for quick data retrieval and comprehensive financial reporting. These functions could use some improvement to optimize the user experience.

Well suited to having the ability to import information when there are large numbers of scholars to be updated, such as graduations or moving up a grade. On the other hand, the program is geared towards a school and we are not a school so we had to do a lot of tweaking for our purposes.

Incentivized

• Colleague Student allows us to integrate services across the university for students with staff in various departments able to see the information about a student that they need to serve the student well.
• Colleague Student makes it easy to see our students current academic record as well as transfer courses (and information) and their past records here at the university. Our old system required a lot of homegrown connection points to be able to see all of this information. It was neither quick nor easy.
• Colleague Student makes the registration process for our students much easier. Our old system was clunky and would often prevent students from registering for a class but not provide information for them about why. Colleague Student makes it easy for students to see if they are missing a pre-requisite, have a hold, etc., so they can know how to get their registration back on track.

Incentivized

• Customer service in response to problem-solving.
• Extremely hands-on in making additions to the software on the spot to fulfill a need.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• There are a lot of terms used for different information in the database. It would be nice if that could be streamlined somehow and more intuitive for the users.
• There are a lot of details to go through to make custom list or create reports. If you don't do these processes regularly, it seems you are always relearning the process.
• There was a point when data changes needed to be done in two different places, but I think we may have resolved that issue.

Incentivized

For decades, Ellucian Colleague has served the University as our primary student record-retention CRM. Its functionality has weathered many recent trends in CRM development and continues to produce the needed results for our constituency and the size of our university. We look forward to continuing to utilize Ellucian Colleague in the future.

Incentivized

Brian, our representative, as been tremendous. His response time is outstanding - and if he is able to alter the tool on the spot, he will. We've been able to do more sophisticated maneuvers because of his willingness to problem-solve with us. When the functionality isn't there, it is also a very honest conversation and we know when we have to work outside of the tool.

Incentivized

I did not use Jenzabar as extensively as Colleague, but they perform similar functions for student information tracking. I think Colleague is more appropriate for use across campus, as its student billing and scheduling options exceed Jenzabar. Jenzabar, however, offers better tools for use exclusively in student affairs. If an organization wants to track all student data, they should consider Colleague.

Incentivized

We were using the CRM database system, however it was too proprietary and when we wanted to make changes or customize we were continually paying an outside consultant to get things done. With inRESONANCE, we are able to make the updates, and customize as we need to internally. It has saved us a significant amount of money in this regard.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Annual fund tracking is very easy and pulling simple things like donors/non-donors is easy. Fine for a straight-forward appeal.
• If you are going with a comprehensive/combine ask - this is not the tool for you. There's no way to split gifts with % allocation. We're losing money in spending time trying to figure out how to configure pledges in accordance with the software.

Incentivized