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Slate for Advancement is the smart and strategic choice
April 14, 2023

Slate for Advancement is the smart and strategic choice

Keith McCants | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Slate for Advancement

Currently, Slate for Advancement is used for gift processing, maintaining constituent and donor records, event registrations, electronic communications, territory management, and financial reporting on all of the above. It is our backbone of all things Advancement.
  • Online event registrations / online data collection
  • Email communications
  • Gift & Payment Processing
  • Very flexible configuration and customization
  • Quick queries (exportable to excel)
  • File or web service integrations
  • More robust reporting functionality or visualization plug-ins
  • More influence on when enhancements are moved into production and test environments
  • Online Forms
  • Gift Processing
  • Donor Management
  • Email communications
  • Constituent Engagement Reporting
  • No hard ROI numbers available, but the pricing comes with unlimited users, unlimited email volume, unlimited storage with a very rich feature set.
  • As the implementation matures, I expect additional productivity gains as Slate automates more manual manipulation of excel spreadsheets across campus.
Unfortunately, I arrived after this application was retired. I've had no interaction with the functionality of that product.

Do you think Slate for Advancement delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Slate for Advancement's feature set?

Yes

Did Slate for Advancement live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Slate for Advancement go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Slate for Advancement again?

Yes

I think you get hug bang for the buck with Slate for Advancement, From the internal user perspective, you don't need extensive or even moderate understanding of sql, html, css or javascript to create rich and engaging interactions with the general public. Of course those skills wouldn't hurt if you have them! In other words, you don't need a team of programmers to maintain your event pages or forms or customizations in general; it's typical that the IT department needn't be involved in the day to day support of the application. I'll state the obvious in that it's extremely advantageous to pair Slate for Advancement with Slate for Admissions. It's helpful to have bench strength on the platform even if the users have drastically different workflows. The only scenario I can imagine where Slate for Advancement would not be a good fit is where the culture of the institution has issue with the entire Software As A Service model. If your institution needs absolute control over all aspects of your implementation, or is reluctant to use cloud-based applications, Slate might not be for you.

Slate for Advancement Support

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.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
No escalation required
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
I do not believe premium support is offered nor was sought by my university.
Yes - When I've come across what I believed to be a bug, I've raised the question in the community forum and Slate-sponsored feedback sites. More times than not, I was unaware of a setting or condition that impacted my results. There is an enhancement request queue that's leveraged to prioritize future development. Certain core functionality items are addressed immediately sometimes by CEO & Founder himself. Personally, I myself haven't discovered an outright bug, but other community members have. Time of resolution has met my expectations.
I had engineered a solution for a particular scenario involving a ticketed event which included a membership group. Although the acceptance testing passed with flying colors, after the launch of the event, we encountered some unexpected results. I brought this up during the bi-weekly open support calls, and one of the staff volunteered his personal email so that he could take a look. The next morning, he got back to me after taking a good look under the engine and let me know my scheme wouldn't work the way I'd hoped. He made some recommendations for a workaround and equally as impressive, championed support for a enhancement request. The path down this support channel is critical; when you follow this path, I don't think you there is a higher level of support.