CharityEngine vs. Ellucian CRM Advance

CharityEngine has the POTENTIAL to be a good CRM, but both unresponsiveness to the more complex problems go unresolved for months at a time. Employee turnover is huge, which is likely because upper management is doing nothing to solve the internal problems. I would NOT recommend this CRM at this point. While CharityEngine does allow reasonably robust storage and querying of data if you plan to send emails through your CRM, look elsewhere. CharityEngine's framework is clunky and counter-intuitive, in addition to frequently just not working at all.

Incentivized

SAAS or managed cloud scenarios would be best for new customers. Managed cloud seems to be the trend with existing customers to keep current customizations in place. Current Ellucian customers with Colleague or Banner make the most sense in using CRM Advance. Data doesn't need to be sent to a third-party application.

Incentivized

• Allows users to create unique queries to generate targeted data.
• Allows the entry of addresses from all around the world, not just US addresses.

Incentivized

• Easy to look up info on our students
• Shared across the campus and other campuses

Incentivized

• Reporting capabilities are limited.
• Navigation is not very user friendly.

Incentivized

There are a lot of frustrating things about the general usage of CharityEngine. It syncs with a nine-digit zip code database, but doesn't automatically populate exportable fields with this data - it must be manually requested for each record. Buttons that allow a user to quickly move to a specific area of the data in a customer record frequently stop working after updates; are found by users and reported, and then take a month or longer to be fixed. A clunky and counter-intuitive "creative" database frequently fails completely and is always slow.

Incentivized

CRM Advance is very efficient and overall a great product. We have been using CRM for many many years with really no complaints. It fits our needs.

Incentivized

Bryant and Stratton College chose to use both these programs. They are both so efficient for our company

Incentivized

• CharityEngine has allowed our organization to grow in the past few years, but it has not kept up with industry trends and avoids making changes and updates requested by users.
• Our overall business objectives cannot be met with CharityEngine alone. We must export data and use other applications to generate the data we need.

Incentivized

• We are now able to do a more effective review of applicants and see overall trends of characteristics such as source locations. This helps to focus other efforts such as marketing to support those areas and increase others.
• There is now a full picture of the needs of our students. By being able to view information in a logical progression, trend data can be identified and reacted to.

Incentivized