A Taste of Apricot: What my small non-profit expreience is with Apricot
September 28, 2017
A Taste of Apricot: What my small non-profit expreience is with Apricot
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Apricot by Social Solutions
We have consultants in the field who use Apricot to report data to use on a monthly basis. They collect demographic information from clients as well as notes and evaluations from field work. We then take this information and generate quarterly reports for funders as well as a end of year report to be evaluated by an independent research partner.
- Support. The help desk is full of great information and instructions on how to do everything I need to do in Apricot. When I submit a support request it is answered withing 24 hours and in a thorough and courteous way.
- Form generation. It is easy for users to enter information and to save their forms. The learning curve is short and people are able to get a hang of form creation after just a few experiences with it.
- Features. The main features of Apricot are all I need for the purposees of our organization. Submitting forms, generating reports, posting bulletins are the features I use most frequently. These general, main features are easy to use and intuitive.
- The administrator page. The problem is that it take a while to get used to the terminology and understand the organization structure behind the scenes. This is something you have to do as an administrator and it is not easy. The terminology they use is not intuitive and often changes with updates.
- Form design. It is easy to design very simple froms but when you get into more detail, more sections and more form rules, it is too time consuming. It takes too many mouse clicks/drag and drops to create complex forms and have the features you want on them beyond the basic features.
- Group Access. The structure for groups is not complex enough. It is not possible go give more than one user access to a Tier I form at any given time and this makes collaboration difficult
- It has been very helpful for generating reports. It is great to be able to choose which fields to report on and organize data in a useful way.
- It is excellent for storing data. We have records archived from the beginning of our use of Apricot and will continue to keep records of our data.
Our program has grown because we were able to collect data. Our data has shown that our program improves our clients' as we set out to do. Our funders have this data and are able to justify increasing our funding due to the positive outcomes of our program.
We use reports to fill out new grant applications. We track what populations we serve, client progress, time spent with clients and many other categories of data. Apricot makes it easy to generate these reports so that they contain exactly what the grant application is asking for. The same is true for our existing grant funders. We generate quarterly reports that contain exactly the statistics they track and care about so that they can make decisions about whether to increase our funding.
- social solutions
Before I started here, they used a different product by social solutions that I have only heard referred to as Social Solutions. They said it was difficult to use an ddid not have very man yof the features they need but I don't knwo anything more specific than that.