Bluescape vs. CommUnity by Personify

This digital version of a pin-up space is absolutely an improvement to my workflow. The input is so robust. What you do with it is where the magic happens. This program is best suited for team collaboration. It helps to discuss how/where the team will contribute information to it--whether that is discussing the templates or a plan of action. Otherwise, the workspace can tend to get messy. I like the idea of having a presentation mode, where some of the markups could be hidden. The idea of a working session with consultants or clients sounds appealing, but at the same time, there is a desire for a cleaned up, clear shareout.

Incentivized

You can tell from the CEO and all staff that this is a very competent company that wants you to succeed with integrity. There is a strong
support and services team that works collaboratively with us to make
sure we are always getting what we need. They provide
24x7 emergency support, online ticket support, email support, a client
community, and the ability to call and talk to the same account manager or
community consultant every time (I even have Mariano's skype and he replies on weekends!). They recently launched a client community - so they are now even practicing what they preach. Our questions in the client community are always answered quickly.

• Allows for a high volume of images and sketches to be put into the canvas
• Lets you drop in text, freehand sketching, and shapes quick and easy
• Can connect images and texts together using connectors, which can be customized

Incentivized

• It's easy to use. The admin panel has a number of drag and drop options to modify the experience
• Flexibility. There are a large number of standard block features that can be added to areas. In addition, each dynamic block as a number of settings that allow you to tailor the experience you want to create. You can do this without being a programmer.
• Personalization. There are good tools that allow you to personalize the experience based on whether users are logged in or not, whether they are in particular segments (which we can create) or recommendations based on information the user has provided about themselves.
• Mobile. Small World Labs has a really great way of doing mobile. They give you a drag and drop interface for designing the mobile environment so there is a lot of flexibility with this. We are currently turning this module on.

• You can use Zoom with Bluescape but it requires solid bandwidth and memory by users.
• A breadcrumb trail would be nice to watch students performance.
• I would like individual user analytics for each of my students to see where they’ve been and what contributions each has made.

Incentivized

• Integration with our Association Management System (AMS) didn't go as smoothly as I had wished. Having said that all of the issues with that integration have been addressed.
• Because the platform is updated so frequently you need to stay on top of what is available to you and your end users or you may miss out on key functionality releases.

From the first conversation and beyond, it has been a pleasure working with Small World Labs. Their staff are genuinely interested in understanding our business and our goals, and actively make recommendation on continued improvement and long-term strategy. All of their staff demonstrate a clear understanding of the product and when to expect new features. Furthermore, their CEO, Michael Wilson, is more than competent and has proven to be an industry expert. He understands both the technical side and the community strategy side of the business. In fact, we have already initiated a project to build a second community with Small World Labs for a separate business unit

There are a multitude of options to configure the exact user experience you want and what you want to emphasize.

Uptime has never been an issue.

Speed is not an issue.

The people at Small World Labs are very accessible. I can email, open a ticket, or call and they are there. I'd also point out that senior management is quite available too. We frequently have talks about potential strategies and new things we might be doing, which is great. I think the whole organization genuinely likes what they do and likes helping us succeed.

In-person training is more ad-hoc based on if they are traveling to you or you are going to visit them. I imagine that if I paid for in-person training that it would be set up as well, but I've just used the standard training that comes with the initial set up and ongoing support.

Online training is through online webinar & how-to posts and videos in the client community.

We had staff turnover at our own organization during the implementation. We were able to get the community up and live in a good timeframe even though that happened and we had to switch some people around for managing the project on our side.

We have Workware installed on different computers in our office that were supposed to be great for presentation but we had issues after a user connected their laptop then they no longer had access to our server. If they had files they needed for the presentation they had to save them to their desktop to make sure they were accessible.

Incentivized

We evaluated a few different community platform vendors over the course of a couple of months. I believe we also evaluated Jive, Lithium, KickApps, and Powered.

• Especially in a remote work environment, Bluescape helps us continue collaborating without missing a beat

Incentivized

• Our community has been very active since the re-launch of our site. Have seen some increases in member engagement.
• Feedback from our membership has been nothing but positive since we transitioned off of our older Sharepoint community. Look and feel and ease of use have been real pluses for our members.
• Having the Small World Labs community is allowing us to be more creative with the way we integrate our community into all aspects of our online presence, web-site, social media, etc.