A Beginner's Review of Apricot
October 09, 2017

A Beginner's Review of Apricot

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Apricot by Social Solutions

Our agency uses Apricot primarily to manage participant data for an employee support program for women, and for our girls' summer camps. Apricot manages all of our participant enrollment data, classroom attendance and other program data, as well as exit surveys to better understand program impact. Reports are used to help populate our Results Based Accountability score card, to help understand program impact and changes needed internally, and for other external reporting needs.
  • Duplicate Field Check By Name so that you do not have to have social security numbers of clients
  • Customer support - quick and helpful feedback by staff
  • Export feature to be able to have data in an excel version, as well as using reporting functions on Apricot.
  • Visual format could be improved - for example, the title at the top of the screen, whether you are working with a participant or a report, does not stay on the screen as you scroll down.
  • I always say that Apricot is not intuitive, but it is user friendly. On the data entry side it can be a bit clunky at first entering data. Not sure the exact solution, but I know it takes some time for staff to get used to.
  • When filtering information on the front end by search fields, it would be nice to easily export this data into an excel sheet, as you can with reports on the back end.
  • Currently Apricot does not accept payment, so our agency is not able to use the software to enroll campers into our program.
  • Web based forms continue to be clunky, with danger of not providing an anonymous window for external inputters if the administrator who sets up the web-based form is not savvy, or overly familiar with Apricot.
  • Allows us to more easily keep track of the clients we serve, and get a distinct count of unique participants impacted.
  • Allows us to follow pipeline of a particular client, seeing their history with our agency.
  • Has helped us organize our data so that we have a system with all of our participants in one place, much of our outcomes data in one place, and standardized reports so that we can quickly and easily run monthly, quarterly and yearly reports.
We have made programmatic changes to our programs over the last two years. Apricot has been helpful to compare outcomes between different versions of the programs to best understand how program design changes have impacted deliverables. We are still in the midst of this transition and analysis.
Not sure I have a solid grasp on that, but as stated before it has helped us systematize our reporting so that we can quickly pull the information that we share with funders. Additionally, the reporting format in which individual participants can quickly be looped back to their primary records is something that has been useful as we tell specific stories to funders about the folks we serve, or as we want to dig further into the details to understand a participants story that we may not have in the quantitative fields built into our reports.
Many years ago I used an HMIS database as a front end user, but this is my first experience as an administrator of a data base. I was not on the team when Apricot was picked for my organization.
We use Apricot as a case management software, and while it has not been designed for this, it does seem to work fairly well.

Apricot is less suited for having clients input themselves, such as registering for a program or camp.

What I don't have a good sense of is how comparable Apricot is to other software on the market as this is the first one I have used.