Apricot - great for flexibility in creating your data system and customizing links between data
September 20, 2017

Apricot - great for flexibility in creating your data system and customizing links between data

Pratik Mhatre | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Apricot by Social Solutions

We use Apricot for capturing, storing, and processing data for the Texas GEAR UP State Grant. We use this data for program implementation, early warning alerts, quarterly reports, and annual performance reporting. Using a link-to-person guidance, Apricot creates an effective audit trail for program monitoring. It helps us quickly and efficiently generate status reports on our grant progress.
  • Continual data monitoring
  • Flexibility in creating linked forms for data entry
  • Ability to bulk-process data in addition to individual data entry
  • Setting email or text triggers based on the date filter
  • Creating a individual dashboard interface to look at selected data points for one person
  • Creating separate bulletin spaces for different categories. The homepage gets quickly cluttered if you use too many bulletins.
  • Great tracking of data at an individual level and over time.
  • Effective targeting of groups and individuals.
  • Data monitoring focuses people to try to meet targets especially when they can see the progress.
  • Good comparison of the work you do versus the progress you are making (serving 100 people every month doesn't mean much in the long run if its the same 100 people).
Users are better able to visualize their service delivery and understand the reach of their services. Apricot has let us compare the reach to dosage i.e. number of people served compared to the amount of services each person received. We start with trying to reach all of the population we serve and when successful, we move on to increasing the dosage. Apricot allows us to keep tabs on both aspects.
We've used Apricot to demonstrate a reliance on data monitoring to track grant goals. This has proven to be effective in showing our funders that we audit ourselves first. We have demonstrated to other potential grantees how Apricot can be leveraged to maximize their reporting.
We looked at several out-of-the-box solutions as well as large vendors like Salesforce. We selected Apricot due to their focus on non-profit grant management and ability to customize forms and data points.
[Apricot is well suited for] Situations where you need complete control and customization over your data system's interface and linkages between data points. It can be a steep learning curve for some but only one or two people need to have administrator-level knowledge and control over these aspects while delegating different levels of use to the rest of the staff.

Apricot is great if you are interested in "lists of people" who meet or do not meet a criteria but less useful if you want to focus on an individual. I mean this on a reporting and visual interface level.

Speed and reliability can be sometimes be an issue although we have never lost data but our users always wish things were a little faster.