Slate for Advancement Reviews & Insights

Currently, Slate for Advancement is used for gift processing, maintaining constituent and donor records, event registrations, electronic communications, territory management, and financial reporting on all of the above. It is our backbone of all things Advancement.

I think you get hug bang for the buck with Slate for Advancement, From the internal user perspective, you don't need extensive or even moderate understanding of sql, html, css or javascript to create rich and engaging interactions with the general public. Of course those skills wouldn't hurt if you have them! In other words, you don't need a team of programmers to maintain your event pages or forms or customizations in general; it's typical that the IT department needn't be involved in the day to day support of the application. I'll state the obvious in that it's extremely advantageous to pair Slate for Advancement with Slate for Admissions. It's helpful to have bench strength on the platform even if the users have drastically different workflows. The only scenario I can imagine where Slate for Advancement would not be a good fit is where the culture of the institution has issue with the entire Software As A Service model. If your institution needs absolute control over all aspects of your implementation, or is reluctant to use cloud-based applications, Slate might not be for you.

Slate for Advancement is Illinois Wesleyan's Advancement CRM and system of record for all philanthropy and alumni records. It is the main tool used for all gift processing, event management, data analysis and reporting, information gathering and distribution, email and text communication and many other functions that support fundraising best practices.

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.

Slate for Advancement is the one-stop-shop for our Philanthropy + Engagement team at Wofford. It is our constituent CRM, gift management system, event management system, communication system, and the list goes on. Slate allowed us to replace an outdated donor management system and many, many home-grown bolt-on systems that were needed for us to do business the way we needed in order to best serve our donors and alumni.

When speaking of Slate, I often frame my conversations in the context of… do you want your software to tell you how to do business, or do you want your software to empower you to do business in the way you believe it should be done – the legacy system model, versus the Slate model. You do have to build your processes out, they are not all delivered (but many are.) However, the build-out of your processes in Slate is often more simple than the configuration of the old-school legacy systems.

Slate was the right choice for Wofford! We have been live on Slate for Advancement for over five and a half years at this point, and I wouldn't change a thing!

Absolutely we would recommend Slate for Advancement to other institutions. The functionality, flexibility, and possibilities are unmatched.

Slate for Advancement is our primary CRM, it manages our Alumni and Donor constituent data. It is the primary Fundraising software, allowing for Major Giving fundraising cycle (portfolio management, moves management, proposal pipeline, etc.). It is our gift and payment processor. It also is the primary outreach tool, providing email, texting, and voice outreach for our alumni and donor base. Also, the event management tool that allows us to manage 100-200 high-touch events per year, with outreach, RSVPs, check-in and more.

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.

In my role, I use Slate for Advancement every day. As an organization this is the CRM that we use to store and manage all of our Alumni, donors, friends of the college, and more. We have everything from personal information, to giving history, we have reports and lists that we run daily. Slate for Advancement is very customizable, which is a problem we had with our last CRM. Every day we continue to learn new things that Slate can do, and Slate is constantly updating the software based on customer feedback.

I am a huge supporter of Slate for Advancement. A lot of the time, if people reach out to me to ask about Slate for Advancement, I will hop into a test record and show them all of the things that Slate for Advancement can do and track. Talking about Slate for Advancement is my favorite pastime. If you're looking for a CRM that will store and manage people, companies, schools, giving data, and scholarships, these are just a small hand full of things that we use Slate for Advancement for. We have projects and workflows, updates, automations, reports, lists, mass communications, events, phone calling, web pages (portals), these are all tools that we have used to enhance our relationships with our constituents. There is also a test environment that you can build new tools in and you don't have to worry about breaking anything. They have a clean slate environment that you can pull examples from. The possibilities with Slate for Advancement are endless. When it comes to Slate for Advancement - I'm a kid and every day I work in Slate for Advancement is like Christmas morning!