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.
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SchoolMessenger
Score10 out of 10
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SchoolMessenger is a school community software featuring secure email, social media monitoring, school website, and mobile app. In late 2023 it was acquired by PowerSchool, and is now a PowerSchool product.
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.
This is great for schools who want a bulk package of services at a competitive cost. Older website designs limit functionality and have a very square design. SchoolMessenger has more modern templates with newer capabilities which is better for visitors of the site. The functionality is great for parents who are accessing the site on the go, which happens more often than you know.
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
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.
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.
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
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
SchoolMessenger serves our main purpose of sending out emergency notifications and notices to parents. It is great to cut down on the paper use and the ability to attach documents to our notes. We have used this to send home notifications from our Parent-Teacher Organization. Parents have thanked us for sending a back ups due to papers being misplaced and knowing that they have a backup through email.
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
Overall, this is a good, effective, and cost-efficient product. It is missing some key functionality we had with a previous program which limits my total score, but I still think a lot of school districts can get a lot out of SchoolMessenger. The features and functions they do include work well.
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.
The support is fantastic. I have never had such complete support from a technology service. Every issue has been resolved while I was on the phone. I never had to wait for a callback or an advanced support tech. Their people are very well trained in their product and how to meet their customer's needs.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
