Candid GuideStar vs. Meltwater

It is just my go-to for any information I need on a potential client as I work in the non-profit consulting space and need to better understand my prospects. As a former nonprofit exec, I valued what we could share on the site as a gold seal for others to learn about our worthiness to invest.

Incentivized

Meltwater is well-suited for agencies that have an engagement team who is looking to service a variety of client needs such as social media reporting, public relations outreach, and community management. If you're looking to have a platform serve just one need, you can still use Meltwater but will get more bang for your buck if you are needing a variety of tools.

Incentivized

• Identifying information from funder 990s
• Gives credence to transparency claims

Incentivized

• Media research - you can search for relevant publications and journalists to add to your media list.
• Earned media coverage - you can search for coverage of your brand and find news stories that also include data that may be useful (how many people did the story reach for example).
• Building media lists - if you have no current existing list, you can build and export one in Excel for example.

Incentivized

• Most 990s are typically a few years behind.
• Organization profiles are only as complete as the organization makes them.

Incentivized

• The dashboards are not user-friendly, customizable (color, font size, etc.), or worthy of presenting to a client. All of the insights from a dashboard get pulled from the platform and placed into a more client-friendly presentation.
• Paywalls for certain publications connected to who-knows-what. DowJones racket limits media monitoring capabilities and results in manual searches for a growing number of publications.
• TVeyes, the broadcast monitoring arm of the media monitoring capabilities, just needs TLC and to become more client-facing. Currently, the links produced to share clips look sketchy, and they have a relatively short shelf life.

Incentivized

Meltwater works well for our organization and has allowed us to meet our internal goals. We are always open to new products and services that may be able to provide similar or better features; however, our experience has been that many of Meltwater's competitors are not up to the task.

Incentivized

Once you get some basic training it's pretty easy to use. I would like to see training manuals, or instructional videos to help me explore features I'm not currently using.

Any support I've ever had to get from them was quick and professional. Their online guides/help docs are also easy to read.

Incentivized

Our account rep at Meltwater went dark for a long time. Then, a couple of weeks ago, our new account manager reached out to set up a meeting. Apparently, they had a big shakeup in the company, and there were some personnel changes. Our new account rep was great in discussing the platform's capabilities that were available to us and even offered to schedule a follow-up meeting with his technical team to introduce our new social media team members to the platform and how it could help them with their jobs.

Incentivized

Again, really in-depth and helpful for a program that is really easy to use.

Walked step by step through program. Very informative on a program that doesn't require much training.

You are only allowed 15 users, so make sure you've identified who will have access to use the tool.

I have always used Guidestar as my go-to not only when I was a non-profit executive and wanted to ensure we remained worthy of their rating but also now as a non-profit consultant where I need to understand my current and potential partners across financials, key contacts, board members, etc.

Incentivized

I was looking for a full-service option. I did some research. What really sold me was the presentation. They offered products that were helpful, and I wasn’t even aware of them. It is more expensive than the other products that are out there, but you get more. The other companies are good, but Meltwater Media Intelligence is more full service.

Incentivized

• More informed grant proposals.
• Able to easily and efficiently complete grant research.

Incentivized

• As a PR firm, we rely on the media databases that [Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform] supplies to deliver the media exposure that they expect from us.
• We utilize their tracking of media hits for our overall reporting to our clients.
• Both of these are advantageous in helping us to not only keep our existing clients happy but also to gain new clients (and, in turn - revenue), as well.

Incentivized