Mongoose vs. PowerSchool Enrollment

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.

Incentivized

PowerSchool Registration collects all the data we need and more. It's easy to go from initial application to completed enrollment. I love how the software will help keep you organized with where the application is in the process, so you can quickly see at what stage you are at with processing a student's enrollment. You do have to be strategic and conscious about what you put on the form. It can quickly be a very long form. I can't think of any instance where this software would not significantly increase the efficiency and accuracy of a district.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• It is able to write back to the student information system with a matching process that ensures the accuracy of student data.
• It tracks the data and the changes, who made the changes, and when the data was imported.
• It organizes the process. It creates a system that relies on checks and balances, and causes you to re-evaluate your process.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Functionality of reports
• End-user ease of Gradebook
• Customization of reports

Incentivized

Overall support is excellent. The people are amazing. They have played with different ways of giving the best support, meaning a dedicated specialist vs. email vs. tracking sheet, etc., which was a little frustrating going through those changes. Still, I appreciate all their efforts in finding what works best for their customers. They listen to their customers and make changes.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I think powerschool excels at more simple enrollment tasks however Moodle does a better job being flexible and catering to anything a professor could want to do.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• If a student has been in the school district before, leaves, and then returns, a list of the students' previous teachers is kept in the system.
• Easy to enter and add students with minimum information.

Incentivized