Very Promising
September 20, 2017
Very Promising
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Apricot by Social Solutions
Currently, we are using Apricot for Victim Services in three departments: Crisis Dept., Counseling, and Shelter Services. We will be launching its use in our Legal Dept. shortly. We must track every service interaction on 1600+ clients per year (i.e.: hotline calls for assistance, counseling sessions, and services provided in our shelter and legal departments) as well as demographic data. We have over 30 grants from Federal, State, and local sources which require data reports. Data collection was previously done on paper by staff and entered into spreadsheets by other staffer(s). Not only are we able to tabulate data for grant reports more quickly, we are able to analyze new service data that we never could aggregate before due to the intensive time that it would take. We can make corrections in data more quickly. Plus our data is more accurate because the direct service staff are entering their data directly in the data base and not on paper where handwriting and interpretations produce errors. Lastly, we are being required to increase the number of data elements collected each year due to funder demands and we are better equiped to keep up with these increasing requirements for outcomes data.
- It's easy for front line staff to learn and use. I can train them in 45 minutes to get them started.
- You can make your own forms or customize existing form templates in the system.
- The online "help" resources in AVS are very comprehensive and often you can answer your own questions as an administrator.
- Tech support is prompt and does great follow up.
- I was not aware that there would be additional charges for the updates to AVS for changes in HMIS or other federal reporting.
- This probably can be done but I haven't asked yet and it's a little on the picky side but staff are asking for this: when you see a list of entries, the default is to the oldest record and not the most recent. You can easily click to reverse that but it would be nice if the list of records defaulted to the most recent first.
- AVS is freeing up my time from data collection and analysis to being able to spend more time on pursuing other grant revenes. Since we have only recently started in the last quarter, I anticipate that will continually improve as we build and implement more data collection in AVS and as Department Direcrtors become more familiar with how to manage their own data.
- We still have a few folks who are not tech savy or comfortable with new technology or change for that matter. This hampers the full benefit of Apricot to our organization.
- It's a big upfront investment of staff time and cost to get AVS or any data base in use. Four years ago our organization spent $50,000 and countless staff hours developing a customized data base and then the consultant wanted another $30,000 to make the additional changes we needed. Needless to say, we never got a functional data base from them and we felt very skeptical of ever attempting it again. The fact that we can make the changes ourselves in AVS, assumming we learn the administrative functionality, is a huge plus to control costs in a small non-profit.
I think we are too early in our use of Apricot to tell what the full potential is for our organization. I think the utlimate result is for us to be able to quantify and report how are clients are "better off" as a result of our services. This end objective will increase our ability to "sell" our program to potential donors and to funders. Utlimately, this will improve our organizational sustainability and enable expansion of services in the future.
Not yet but we're working on it. One thing I've noticed is that state and federal funders are becomming more willing to fund data base costs.
- ETO
AVS is more ideal for our use as a victim service.