Dynamo Software is a purpose-built investment management platform that can support the entire private market investment lifecycle. It offers modules for CRM, deal management, investor relations, investor portal, portfolio monitoring, fund accounting, research management, portfolio management, and ESG reporting.
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CommUnity by Personify
Score10 out of 10
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Small World Labs Community is a hosted collaboration and social networking platform with easy drag & drop modification capabilities. Small World Labs offers implementation and community engagement services, plus an open API for integration with other systems. Small World Labs has clients across industries, but a high concentration in the nonprofit area.
Small World Labs was acquired by Personify Corp in 2016.
I think to organise and view information Dynamo has shown it's capability. However, it's still not a workflow or project management tool. It's a great hub for inhaling and presenting information of magnitude, and it does so well. But there are limitations to how Dynamo can be used to allow interpersonal and teamed type collabs to happen. We know it's not an Asana and not built for that, so it's not a negative feedback, just not the appropriate platform if full fledged proj management and logistics, comms need to be housed somewhere along with the data, It's not within Dynamo for now.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
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.
Some functionality is clunky: Mailing Campaigns, Passthrough Integration, Dynamo Accounting Complex Transactions. At times it seems functionality is rolled out too soon.
Onboarding of new clients for us seems a bit haphazard. We just added a new tenant with CRM, Dynamo Accounting and the Investor Portal and we weren't exactly sure what the state of the new tenant should be based on what was copied over from a prior tenant or how much Dynamo Software time or support we would have to customize the new tenant.
At times it seems Dynamo Software's terminology with relationships either isn't intuitive or is repetitive creating additional time/confusion when modifying workspaces, portal set-up, etc.
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
I find it easy to use and very intuitive once you get into the weeds. We also prepared an entire policies and procedures for utilizing it efficiently and not making many human errors. This guide has helped our employees understand how to use it. In addition, the help guides on the Dynamo website are really useful
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
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.
Main arguments were: pricing as well as the usability. Setting up Dynamo is not difficult. Especially if you don't know what you really want. Dynamo offers out of the box views. Adjusting these is simple. Other competitiors like eFront are very customisable but need to be set up from scratch. Dynamo offered some type of canvas.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
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.
