Slate for Advancement vs. Virtuous CRM

What features/functionality pushed your team to select Slate for Advancement? The main winning aspect from our perspective was that all touch points of the donors record would be managed, maintained, updated in one location. We would not be reliant on a third-party vendor for main aspect like e-mail or texting or calling or payment processing. Slate for Advancement has an approach to technology that is embracing of our modern world of technology that I have not seen in other vendors. What lessons learned can you share? Any migration for your CRM is a huge change management project. If you don't have a strong project manager onsite then consider bringing one in as a consultant. If you could make the decision again, would it be the same one? Absolutely What peripherals were you able to replace with the Slate solution (giving portal, events mgmt, etc)? Our institution was a little bit different where we had already built out custom solutions for our alumni portal our event management and our honor roll of giving. Being able to replace those with a platform that's supported by a vendor and has a large community of knowledge base that can be leaned on was huge and another main consideration in moving to slate. For us one of the main selling factors was the depth and willingness of the community to support the rest of us in the effort of making slate for advancement successful in our institutions. And this continues to be the case to this day.

Virtuous is a great tool for fundraisers and nonprofit organizations that want to keep all their donor records, gift transactions, donation landing pages, and reporting in one platform. It may not be well suited, though, for for-profit businesses, organizations, and agencies.

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• Amazing community support
• You don't have to be a huge tech person to use Slate for Advancement
• Just about everything can be customized to meet your needs

• User-friendly CRM.
• Knowledgable support staff.
• Allows for email marketing on a mass level.

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• Dynamic reporting and data visualization

• Virtuous only keeps track of contacts on forms for a given period of time, not the lifetime of when the form was deployed.
• Virtuous Customer Support can sometimes lag, and you end up waiting days for a response to your inquiry or issue.
• Virtuous reporting, while very detailed and segmented, can sometimes be a little overwhelming, and the terminology does not always translate to what you are looking to accomplish with your reporting outcomes.

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Perfect tool for our institution and it only keeps getting better.

In my experience, Virtuous CRM has great self-marketing, talented salespeople, and a half-baked CRM that shows glimmers of competence but the actual experience is more akin the the scene in the Simpson’s when Sideshow Bob keeps stepping on rakes.

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Slate's business model does not assign a person to service your instance of the application. To receive effective support, you MUST engage in the online forums involving the greater Slate community. Once you embrace that model, the support team meets or exceeds any service standards I've experienced over the last 20 years.

Slate for Advancement was more customizable, there is more community support, less expensive both overall and they don't overcharge you for phone calls and texts (if I remember correctly, they charge the customer what they are charged for each phone call or text). Overall, Slate for Advancement was the more innovative option. We switched from Banner to Slate for Advancement, with Banner we constantly had to create workarounds for what we wanted to do with the software, we no longer have to do that. If we dream it, Slate for Advancement can most likely do it.

In my experience, the sales pitch and demos are slick, but upon actual use there is a quick realization that no small or medium charity should touch this software with a 10-ft pole. In my opinion, if you have a large org with lots of cash, and a dedicated database manager who is tech-literate, you can make this work. HubSpot is by far my favorite but lacks the nonprofit features needed to truly manage donor relationships and portfolios.

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• Reducing the number of other systems needed, saving overhead and man-power to automate data integrations
• Crowd fundraising capabilities that allow for real time reporting and decision making
• Campus-wide partnerships

• Better donor management.
• Better predictive analytics on donors and giving numbers.
• Increases were seen in overall revenue since joining with Virtuous.

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info