SAP for Higher Education and Research is a suite of scalable interrelated applications designed to support the various needs of higher education institutions, such as student lifecycle management, tuition and revenue management, grant and research management, research planning and analytics, and other institutional performance related modules.
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.
When I was at university, I used this product, which was quite new to me at the time. Since starting at my new institution, I've had the opportunity to learn more. It contains a lot of features and resources that facilitate integration with other systems and improve the efficiency of procedures. The software is not the simplest to use or comprehend. It has many features, making it challenging to learn everything. I had to enlist assistance.
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
Error Handling : Sometimes it created some issues where there was not enough explanation. But I think it is mostly related with the consulting company making poor development.
In every period, when students tries to access to the system all together and sign up for the courses, it always crashed for minimum a week. I think it requires Load Balancing.
The options we used were very limited there, I think there is more capabilities for collaboration is still needed. For example, exams, homeworks etc can be managed by itç
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.
With its many partnerships and connections with other software used in higher education and research, SAP may assist institutions in streamlining their operations and enhancing access functionality. I chose SAP because I am already familiar with the other SAP products. I couldn't think of any other tools which stacks up against SAP for Higher Education and Research
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
There were a lot of other platforms also used along with SAP for Higher Education and Research, I believe reducing these needs would be very important overall.
At the background, there are a lot of important functionalities reside like Accounting, HR etc. and this is where SAP for Higher Education and Research comes very powerful I believe
Cloud version would be a lot useful especially considering that, user logins are always seasonal so extra help always needed to balance the loads in the network.
