Charitable vs. Slate for Advancement

Slate has allowed information sharing and data integration, reducing our CRM needs from over 6 different systems into one. For example, the student call center is not managed solely out of Slate and all data is captured, collected, and then reported out of the system so that students can receive call lists, review the records they're calling, perform the call out of the system, collect gifts or other information through a form submission, communicate follow up with donors through email, text or video. All of this is done out of Slate allowing for all users to see interactions of donors / records, and easy triggers for follow up to be automated and occur

• Gift management
• Communications (email, sms, print, voice)
• CRM functions
• Calling campaigns
• Event management
• Online giving
• Portals

• Dynamic reporting and data visualization

The community support that Slate for Advancement offers is a huge reason, but also the number of things that we never dreamed of doing that we can now with Slate for Advancement. They also are constantly improving and bringing new tools and ideas to the table for their customers to use.

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.

• 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.