Kindsight Ascend vs. Slate for Advancement

What features/functionality pushed your team to select Slate for Advancement? The main winning aspect from our perspective was that all touch points of the donors record would be managed, maintained, updated in one location. We would not be reliant on a third-party vendor for main aspect like e-mail or texting or calling or payment processing. Slate for Advancement has an approach to technology that is embracing of our modern world of technology that I have not seen in other vendors. What lessons learned can you share? Any migration for your CRM is a huge change management project. If you don't have a strong project manager onsite then consider bringing one in as a consultant. If you could make the decision again, would it be the same one? Absolutely What peripherals were you able to replace with the Slate solution (giving portal, events mgmt, etc)? Our institution was a little bit different where we had already built out custom solutions for our alumni portal our event management and our honor roll of giving. Being able to replace those with a platform that's supported by a vendor and has a large community of knowledge base that can be leaned on was huge and another main consideration in moving to slate. For us one of the main selling factors was the depth and willingness of the community to support the rest of us in the effort of making slate for advancement successful in our institutions. And this continues to be the case to this day.

• Amazing community support
• You don't have to be a huge tech person to use Slate for Advancement
• Just about everything can be customized to meet your needs

• Dynamic reporting and data visualization

Perfect tool for our institution and it only keeps getting better.

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.

• Reducing the number of other systems needed, saving overhead and man-power to automate data integrations
• Crowd fundraising capabilities that allow for real time reporting and decision making
• Campus-wide partnerships