Salesforce.org Education Cloud vs. Slate for Admissions

It is most suited for those within the education industry. For students and staff in particular, the Education Cloud allows seamless connectivity between each person and helps students stay on task. It can be very overwhelming as a student to have so many responsibilities in different areas, so Salesforce does a great job of offering many features that ease this process.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Great use of integrating across all aspects of enrollment.
• Easy to create tasks for counselors to remember to call prospective students and keep up to date on goals.
• Reporting is fabulous inside of Salesforce.
• All of the Apps in the App Exchange.

Incentivized

• Managing contacts.
• Smart communications (drip email campaigns).
• Real-time data management.
• End-to-end control of product (or instance of).
• Allows for easy to implement segmentation via smart rules and queries (data sets).

Incentivized

• It’s hard to run reports or create working “views” for Enrollment/Student Advisor teams that include both Leads and Contacts in the same report.
• Some fields do not map from Lead to Contact object. When a student transitions from application to acceptance, some dropdown and fill-in fields completely disappear from the student’s page in Salesforce. Every version of Salesforce I’ve used has this problem.
• Salesforce overall is clunky and confusing for the average user. We require thorough Salesforce training for new hires on all teams because it’s not user-friendly or obvious what to click on to achieve a specific task.

Incentivized

• Doesn't automatically advance to the next application in the queue once one application is processed
• Doesn't allow an easy view of other queues to see what is coming down the pike
• Doesn't allow users to copy email of applicants

It was really so easy to sign up and get going with the whole process

Incentivized

It's incredibly usable and easy to figure out. It's modern and does exactly what we need for it to do

Incentivized

People will respond on time even though Salesforce is such a large organization. This also includes various methods of getting support beyond just calling - they have dedicated reps, chat, chatter, etc that all make the experience more pleasant.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I have not used similar products and I am new to this role. Salesforce has been very easy to learn and I appreciate the support and ability to access the platform when I need to. I was able to easily learn the program and become skilled in what I needed to do. It also made the transition to digital forms quite easy

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Positive: Our entire company is more aligned because while still complying with FERPA, the right people have access to student records while also having the correct permissions.
• Positive: we can integrate with our partners who also use Salesforce, while still complying with FERPA.
• Negative: we've needed to hire a Salesforce Development team with multiple people to accurately customize the tool to work for us.

Incentivized

• It has changed the culture of our office!
• It is by far the best resource that we have been able to implement in our business.
• It has been a huge return investment and allows us to do our jobs more efficiently.

Incentivized