Little Green Light vs. Slate for Advancement

I LOVE Little Green Light! I was part of my old org's transition to this database, then I consulted a nonprofit and supported their transition to Little Green Light. Then, I started with my current org 2 years ago and moved us over. It's by far the best donor database I've used.

Incentivized

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

• Donor touch tracking (calls, meetings, etc.)
• Relationships and stewardship
• Forms for event and other registrations
• Financial reporting and gift tracking
• Great support team! I was initially worried because they don't have a contact number, but they reply to support questions really quickly and are always helpful.

Incentivized

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

• I wish it had email formatting rather than integrating with MailChimp, but a small price to pay since it does in fact handle email communications. I've actually found that donors appreciate the "personal" touch versus the more polished, formatted email of MailChimp because they feel like the email went just to them.
• Wish it had the ability to email year-end statements as easy as it is to print them.

Incentivized

• Dynamic reporting and data visualization

We have had no issues with LIttle Green Light so I do not see us moving to another software platform at this time. We are all familiar with how to use it and we are a small and mighty team so we don't want to rock the boat too much. LOL

Incentivized

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.

Pretty easy to manage

Incentivized

LGL support is absolutely unreal. Send a question straight from inside the software and within minutes you will receive a response from someone at the company who will help you. Most of the time, the person responding to my questions is one of the developers or owners of the company. They are kind, patient, and very helpful. The online knowledge base is very comprehensive as well.

Incentivized

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.

Little Green Light blows these other two CRM's out of the water. {Little Green Light has] ease of use, user-friendly prompts, and more pertinent information is captured. Little Green Light is perfect for my small-sized Non-Profit organization.

Incentivized

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.

• In two years of using it, we went from $200,000 annually in donor revenue to $500,000. Many factors went into that, but the ease of communications through LGL is definitely one of them.
• We went from managing communications with ~200 donors to ~400.

Incentivized

• 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.