Slate for Admissions vs. Raiser's Edge

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Slate for Admissions
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
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.N/A
Raiser's Edge
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
N/AN/A
Pricing
Slate for AdmissionsRaiser's Edge
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Slate for AdmissionsRaiser's Edge
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Slate for AdmissionsRaiser's Edge
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Slate for AdmissionsRaiser's Edge
Small Businesses
Jotform
Jotform
Score 8.7 out of 10
Bloomerang
Bloomerang
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Jenzabar ONE
Jenzabar ONE
Score 9.4 out of 10
Bloomerang
Bloomerang
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises

No answers on this topic

Blackbaud CRM
Blackbaud CRM
Score 7.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Slate for AdmissionsRaiser's Edge
Likelihood to Recommend
8.1
(8 ratings)
7.0
(82 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
6.2
(27 ratings)
Usability
7.2
(2 ratings)
9.0
(10 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(1 ratings)
7.6
(19 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
5.9
(5 ratings)
User Testimonials
Slate for AdmissionsRaiser's Edge
Likelihood to Recommend
Technolutions
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.
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Blackbaud
Raisers Edge is outstanding for storing and reporting on constituent data and communications. There are many options for creating methods of tracking by different information included and also for creating personalized tracking methods.
Raisers Edge is not very well suited for an organization that also has a gift shop and visitors center. Allowing membership admission and item sales is not practical.
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Pros
Technolutions
  • 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).
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Blackbaud
  • Raiser's Edge is good in allowing detailed categorizations for donations - Funds/Campaigns/Appeals/Packages
  • Raiser's Edge has good query functioning and is helpful in pulling lists and segments of constituents and donations
  • The variety of detail across sections (Gifts/Bios/Actions) is helpful for recording and archiving constituent information
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Cons
Technolutions
  • 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
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Blackbaud
  • Data posting to Financial Edge (FE) is limited and complicated to understand (took us time to adjust). The posting report does not have enough info: Appeal, campaign and who posted to FE. In genereral, RE/FE integration is not explained by Blackbaud properly, we had to figure out everything on the go.
  • Volunteer module is a bit cumbersome; some fields have duplicate fields in the event module; the identical information ends up being recorded in two different places.
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Likelihood to Renew
Technolutions
No answers on this topic
Blackbaud
There are many CRM tools on the market however Raisers Edge especially with NXT offers everything you need in one database. It’s a little pricey however Blackbaud support is super helpful and they offer so many tools and add ins.
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Usability
Technolutions
It's incredibly usable and easy to figure out. It's modern and does exactly what we need for it to do
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Blackbaud
it does lots of things well (prospect tracking and event management), some things FANTASTIC (gift records and donations and relationships). It is rigid enough for the database administrator to maintain good clean data, but flexible enought for customization across organizations so specific data can be kept as needed for YOUR specific organization needs.
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Reliability and Availability
Technolutions
No answers on this topic
Blackbaud
Since the software is expensive to use, only so many people are able to active users at once. There are times when I may have to wait or ask another user to log out so that I may log in.
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Support Rating
Technolutions
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.
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Blackbaud
For most users, only chat support is available. There is a phone number, but it is very labor-intensive to get someone on the phone, and the chat does not include an easy way to screen share. Those sessions need to be scheduled in advance and almost begged for; the chat line always has a long wait time, and sometimes it seems their support personnel is chatting with more than one client at a time.
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Implementation Rating
Technolutions
No answers on this topic
Blackbaud
It's critically important to consider where you are taking your fundraising efforts and strategy, and to collaborate closely with other departments who will also use RE. I would strongly recommend that you investigate best practices -both from Blackbaud (theory) and with other organizations (practice) - to create a user manual and guide for RE within your organization
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Alternatives Considered
Technolutions
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.
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Blackbaud
Salesforce has a more modern feel and I felt that it was easier to perform functions beyond the basics, such as running reports for analysis, on Salesforce. But The Raisers Edge already existed at my company and given that I only needed it for basic functions and did not need much training to do those, I decided to use The Raisers Edge.
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Return on Investment
Technolutions
  • 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.
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Blackbaud
  • It takes longer than necessary to do things so that makes it cost more staff time to complete the work we need. One example is with online gifts since you can't import these into a batch we have to manually add all of the online gifts which is time consuming.
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ScreenShots