CommUnity by Personify vs. Workzone

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.

Workzone eliminates confusion and ensures that the team uses the latest version of files by organizing these files and adding version numbers as files are being revised. The team can share these files with other team members or with clients and even set file permissions to ensure individuals get access to those files that are only appropriate to them and avoid confidential information getting into the wrong hands. The system notifies the users of the progress of their tasks, comments or calendar events through alerts.

Incentivized

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• 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.

• WorkZone is good at basic project management like scheduling and time management.
• The software can be set to send you a daily email with the list of the tasks that you need to get done for that day.
• Workzone allows the admin for the account to pick and choose which clients/projects can be seen by each person with an account, which allows each user to focus on the projects that they are involved in without being distracted by other things.

Incentivized

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• 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.

• One of the reasons we left WorkZone was due to how videos/roughs were presented. While WorkZone does allow for a customizable and professional, clean looking interface; it did not offer everything we needed when it came to cross platform integration.
• WorkZone was also a little more pricy compared to a few competitors. WorkZone is worth the price and we loved using it, but a competitor offered an added feature that WorkZone does not offer that tipped the scales.
• There is no 'library'. As an AD Agency, we have worked on a lot of different spots for a lot of different clients. WorkZone did not offer a comprehensive library for us to upload content and use for presentations purposes. If WorkZone does add this feature later on down the road, it would be a great improvement and we would give serious thought about switching back.

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

Because of time constraints, our team hasn't been able to fully implement and change our existing processes. If we can get our templates set up and maybe some better export options figured out, I think it'll be a no-brainer to renew, but until then it maybe be difficult to financially justify something we're only partially using.

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

WorkZone was very easy to learn, especially for the members of our team who were not as technology-savvy. WorkZone offered unlimited training as well, making it easy to transition new team members to the program, as we were a startup organization consistently adding new team members.

Uptime has never been an issue.

Throughout the use of the WorkZone software, we never had a issue with it being unavailable. This is important, considering we wanted to access our projects and see our progress at any moment. WorkZone was always available and made constant supervision of tasks and goals easy; no excuses for not checking in on the status of a project.

Speed is not an issue.

I have zero complaints about the performance of WorkZone; for our organization's needs, it was a perfect tool for keeping track of various responsibilities and tasks. We never experienced a lag or down-time when using the software, and the simple interface made things exactly that from our end...simple. WorkZone is a fantastic tool for work management that never fails to perform, in my experience.

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 team at WorkZone is incredibly helpful and very willing to lend support when they can. Our team was constantly growing, and our new team members needed training every time someone cam on board. The WorkZone support staff was more than willing to ensure our new team members were completely comfortable using the software and set up for success.

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.

The WorkZone trainers are wonderful! They offered us unlimited over-the-phone and online support, and the trainings were always informative. The WorkZone support team was willing to answer multiple questions and review sections of the training if need be. They were always accommodating, and trainings were scheduled very quickly for when our team needed them!

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.

Implementation of WorkZone was very easy. We simply log into a portal online and begin to set up our projects. Access codes were sent very quickly to our team, so there was practically no delay once we signed the contract for our subscription. Training was scheduled quickly and was very helpful, especially as new team members joined our organization.

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.

I selected WorkZone based on several criteria: 1. It is web based 2. It has more robust reporting capabilities 3. the price was right 4. It was easy to use and easy to train people 5. Timelines are easy to update.

We are a small organization, so the need to expand our use of WorkZone was limited. I only rate it below a 10 simply because I do not have much experience with the scaleability of the product. From the previews and training sessions, it does seem that the software can easily be adjusted to accommodate a growing workload; something we may use in future, just not at this point in our organization's development.

• 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.

• It has positively affected our workflow - keeping projects moving without requiring constant back and forth of emails and other communications.
• It has helped our team to avoid missing crucial steps in project and client management.
• We are definitely more efficient when WorkZone is being used and updated properly!

Incentivized

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