Using Apricot for Workforce Development tracking
September 15, 2017

Using Apricot for Workforce Development tracking

Gene White | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Apricot by Social Solutions

Commonwealth Corporation (CommCorp) is a quasi-public state agency in Massachusetts. We provide public funding to local community based organizations to run training and education programs for youth and adults. We use Apricot to have local grantees enter participant profiles, services and outcomes. We use Apricot, and provide our grantees the ability as well, to report on program performance and client demographics to manage local grants and to provide reports to our board and funders. It is used by 2 departments - one for a youth jobs program and another for adult sectoral training programs. Staff at CommCorp do not provide direct services to clients so it is not used internally across our organization. Other CommCorp programs do not have the requirement to track or case manage individuals served by other types of grants that we award.
  • We have found Apricot effective for designing data entry screen for our local grantee organizations to track clients in our programs. The ability to establish field and other edits has resulted in quality control for entered data. The capability to tweak screens through form logic for skips and consistency checks has made it easy to customize.
  • We provide our grantees with access to only the clients in their program and the user/group/programs profiles have helped us to efficiently manage this process and provide custom access profiles as needed.
  • The reporting capabilities have allowed us to design a long list of client listings and performance reports including plan versus actual reports. Grantees have found these reports useful for their local management of programs.
  • For programs where we need a copy of the signed participant applications it is great that grantees can upload a scan and attach to each participant's profile.
  • There are limitations in sizing and formatting columns and rows in reports using the standard applications (we don't do SQL ourselves.)
  • A wish list feature would be to do charts and graphs rather than exporting data to Excel, etc.
  • We migrated from a MySQL database that we maintained through staff and consultants on our own server to the SaaS solution of Apricot. This has been very cost efficient, saving equipment upgrade and maintenance costs and eliminated need for consultants.
  • We were able to provide our grantees with a wider variety of reports to manage their local programs. We were able to maintain and expand the reports and access that Central Office staff had in our previous system.
Apricot helps to ensure we have the data to be accountable to our funders. It provides us the capacity to meet the reporting requirements of new program streams without additional costs. We have always been committed to the use of data and assessing impact but Apricot allows us to continue this commitment more efficiently.
Our organization is dependent on state funding and it helps us make the case for continued funding in the current tight environment.
Apricot is well suited for our needs - a few specific programs we fund without a lot of changes from year to year. For education, training, work experience programs with defined start and end dates, with somewhat straightforward tracking of services and case management, it has been a cost effective solution for us and with relatively limited investment of central office staff to manage it.