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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Verint Community
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Verint Community (Telligent) is a community and collaboration software platform developed by Telligent Systems and was first released in 2004. Telligent's focus was on offering a platform that can be integrated and extended, but this requires technical expertise. Verint acquired Telligent in 2015.
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.
If you need a community platform that's very versatile and has a relatively low entry-cost to get started, Verint is a good pick. If you need a solution that is guaranteed to work seamlessly and have no hiccups or issues overall, it is not well suited. Although it is a SAAS solution, some of the aspects of the platform do not make it seem so.
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.
Forums - organizing forum questions and identifying answered
Various layouts of blogs, divided by groups to enable different or similar layouts throughout the site. Ability to enable all to view the same or have particular groups of blogs to stand out and have it's own look and feel
ability to customize widgets to the needs of your use case
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.
The terminology of some reports, and how the reports work, is not always clear at first. More could be done to educate on getting the most from reporting.
If there is a bug in your version, you are advised to apply a service pack which is not always possible to do. Not easy to get fixes for bugs.
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
If you are an experienced online community professional, Verint offers the flexibility you need. You do need to have a lot of expertise if you want to build a solid user experience because there isn't a template out-of-the-box that is just ready to go for various use cases. It will take awhile to fully understand the capabilities of Verint Community.
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.
While the support portal (cases) is helpful, I've been even more impressed by their own support community. I always get quick, thoughtful, and interesting answers to my questions from support personnel, in-house developers, other users, and even the VP/GM himself! They have a really wonderful thing going there.
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.
Both Higher Logic and Khoros came in with very few benefits compared to Verint with a much higher price point, and potential for additional expenses. With Verint, we added some initial implementation services but were able to plainly see and understand any future financial impact, whereas other vendors were much more ambiguous about how much we might pay for services we might need in the future. Both other vendors seemed to have plenty of integration options, but very specific ones (e.g. We have a CRM integration... if you use Salesforce. We have an LMS integration... if you use [this vendor]). Knowing that their out-of-the-box integrations were not in our existing tech stack made for a very unclear path forward
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.
Verint Community has helped to gain more than one lakh users which shows that the platform is extremely stable and engaging. This helped for more brand awareness and e-commerce conversion rates
We have had huge problems with non English countries where this platform's limitations has caused huge number of loss and less user count. Hopefully this is fixed soon.
Our major plan was to expand our segments and verticals such as gaming, education and business which was done very well by using this platform and our team was able to customize it based on our brand's identity. We looking to expand to much more countries and hopefully target all our worldwide businesses.
