Likelihood to Recommend Apricot by Social Solutions is a great program for organizations wanting a user-friendly option to help organize the personal data of individuals served, volunteers, and even donors. It's a program that is built off of an individual page, where you house all the personal information for a single person, and has a virtual "document folder" to house attendance information, enrollments, donations, trainings, and other kinds of pertinent information. Apricot by Social Solutions is not a great solution for organizations wanting to save money on a CRM program (it is quite expensive, in my opinion), and can pose some struggles/limitations for organizations providing family-based programming or wanting to track donors and donations in the most efficient way.
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For updating tone's skills and finding out the current jobs on the market.
Read full review Pros Updates built in reports to match the requirements for HUD reporting. Innovative ways to batch and group clients data collections. Offer ongoing training when new features are added. Constantly making it user friendly with updates that support standardized data entry Sharing data about clients with partner agencies Having controls where data is only shared with users who should have access to it Read full review Digital Strategy Technologies
Way of connecting people Way that it restricts access to user records Read full review Cons Almost every year I get a new customer care support person, and it can be hard to reorient each new person to my unique business case and use of Apricot by Social Solutions In the past, I have had issues with communication from different departments in Apricot by Social Solutions about what I was getting as part of my contract. In my experience, when I had my initial meeting to kick off upgrading our Apricot by Social Solutions instance, the majority of the information the project consultant had was incorrect. I had to send an email to someone else to rectify the situation. If Apricot by Social Solutions was compatible with phones that would be really helpful. I wish the font size and formatting were more customizable when building out forms in Apricot by Social Solutions (e.g., more similar to how customizable Surveymonkey is with different surveys). Read full review Digital Strategy Technologies
It's definitely the UI Can add lot of other features, where they can get in touch with them using their own chat application, for instance. Read full review Likelihood to Renew I went to the Summit a few weeks ago to learn about the future expansion and vision of Social Solutions. I already been with Apricot for 5 years and researched other products I still come back to Apricot and where it can grow with us.
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Usability Without any formal IT education, I was able to utilize their articles and videos to teach myself how to configure and customize the software to our organization (although I do recommend their Apricot Admin training to polish your skills). The majority of users are able to adapt immediately with minimal training.Staff that have challenges with technology in general do adapt to using the system once you can create buy in and engagement (although it does take time and training)
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Reliability and Availability It is usually available when I need to use it
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Performance The system does tend to run slowly when pulling more complex reports
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Support Rating This is a difficult question to answer because when I hear the word "support" I think of this in multiple levels. The customer service on the front end, with my account manager is pretty good. There was a time for about a year and a half where I didn't even want to get to know this persons name because they wouldn't be there there long enough for me to get to know them. For the past 8-9 months we've had the same account manager, and this is helpful as a way to grow our trust in Apricot social solutions as well as the account manager understanding the needs of our organization. The technical support is also fine. The issues we most have problems with is how the technical support is calculated and the lack of roll-over of technical support time. If our account has 1 hour of technical support per month, but we don't need any technical support for 4 months, it would be great to have the ability to use those 4 hours (as time allows per the IT calendar) when we need them, even if it falls within one month. We've also had instances of working with IT persons who didn't seem to care at all about our issues, and seemed eager to put our call behind them and get onto the next without much thought as to why we were calling them in the first place. We've also had instances where the IT person didn't seem to really be listening to what it is we needed, and was heck bent on what they THOUGHT we needed rather than listening to what we actually did need. While we also have had experiences of working with IT persons who were absolutely great at working through issues. They were patient and understanding and would explain why a solution (c)would or (c)would not work. We even worked through those options in real time if they were unsure whether a data solution would work or not. That was great because we felt heard.
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In-Person Training Online training only
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Online Training There are good training guides.
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Implementation Rating There need to be specialists who know how to best work with an organization developing a new program, not just transferring existing forms to a digital format.
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Alternatives Considered The ability to customize Apricot and the simple interface is incredibly appealing.
Salesforce CMS may be more well known, and cheaper for nonprofits, but it's also seen as the "Cadillac" version and is overwhelming for many small to mid sized organizations. The build out can be expensive as well, although there is a more general knowledge about the product and integration options.
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Provide a much interactive and well designed and clear UI
Read full review Scalability This software doesn't work well for our organization
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Return on Investment Our data reporting capability. We're able to do the most robust reporting we've ever done. Was able to handle our rapid expansion (doubling program in 1 fiscal year). We did have a loss of data near the beginning of our use of the system and never got a clear answer why it happened. Data was never recovered. The cost to add additional users is really high, and there aren't many options to bundle or review user licenses to ensure we're getting the best deal. Read full review Digital Strategy Technologies
The UI is not really improved, which has a huge scope for improvement Wish there is a in-built chat or some sort of mechanism to communicate with the alumni Great algorithm that's running behind though Read full review ScreenShots Bonterra Case Management Screenshots