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Cadence sometimes misses the beat
December 01, 2023

Cadence sometimes misses the beat

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cadence

Cadence is a texting platform that allows us to interact with our constituents via text. This works well for those that we can't reach through email and also allows us multiple avenues of communication with those donors who have both an email (we use a separate software platform for email communication) and mobile number. We inform our audience (donors and alums) of events on campus, opportunities for engagement, and ways to support our mission. We are able to reply to any responses in real time, or through "smart messages" where a key word or words triggers an automated response.
  • easy to set up segments in order to reach certain portions of the audience
  • easy opt-out for recipients
  • simple reporting after texts are sent
  • 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
  • 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 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.

Do you think Cadence delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Cadence's feature set?

Yes

Did Cadence live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cadence go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cadence again?

Yes

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.