Slate is a platform for admissions and enrollment management, student success, and alumni/advancement, from Technolutions in New Haven. Designed and developed exclusively for higher education, Slate by Technolutions supports the student and donor lifecycle, and provides a unified interface to CRM, outreach and communications, travel management, online applications, online reading, student success and retention, and alumni and donor engagement.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
