Ellucian Portal has a lot of promise but anything outside the box will cost a lot in development
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We are a higher education institution with a need for a CRM that plays nicely with our current software. This is used to replace salesforce as our main CRM and other software that we used to use. We create request for information forms that we display on our website and the info goes straight into the CRM. We also use it create email flows that automatically send out depending on the time of year.
Pros
- Collecting information and putting it into a concise place
- Creating forms for use on our website to collect user information
- Differentiating between different user types and knowing where they are in the funnel
Cons
- We don't necessarily think that what the sales team promised us has been delivered. There are some features we thought we'd have that require hours of outside programming
- The forms that we create for the website would be nice to have more control over the look and feel
- Creating nice looking emails in ellucian is very cumbersome. It's definitely a far cry from a drag and drop like mail chimp or delivra
Most Important Features
- Prospect gathering and categorizing
- Keeping all student information in one place instead of having several different platforms and trying to make them play well together
Return on Investment
- It has turned out to be much more expensive to get what we want than we thought
- There is a lot of customizing for our institution so the dollar cost will not be seen anytime soon
- It has helped bring everything into one place, but that has taken many hours of training for a lot of our staff just to get up to speed.
Alternatives Considered
Salesforce CMS