Apricot Review from a 5-year Admin/User
June 28, 2021
Apricot Review from a 5-year Admin/User
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Apricot Essentials
Overall Satisfaction with Apricot by Social Solutions
We use Apricot [by Social Solutions to] record data in multiple areas of our organization. The main problem Apricot solves is it provides flexibility. We were able to move from pen/paper tracking and mountains of spreadsheets to safe electronic storage of our many different types of records. The wide range of options for form creation and linking allows our organization to track data from all areas including: clients, volunteers, donors, mailing lists, etc. We can all access our data from any area of our building, and while we are offsite.
- Wide range of customizations available for building forms and reports.
- Freedom to build your own forms and reports from scratch. Able to build many different reports to isolate different kinds of data, from main records.
- Customer service responds quickly with via their chat window.
- Tutorial videos and quizzes great tool for training staff to use the database.
- Cost greatly increases each year that you are a customer. After 5 years, we are not renewing our contract this year and going with a different product.
- Some of the customer support agents I have communicated with were not the most professional.
- As an administrator, much of my learning of Apricot is self-taught as the customer service often directs you to read articles in their Knowledge Base to get your questions answered. This could be frustrating to someone hoping that Apricot agents will help you build items or understand the how-to's.
- Positive: Allowed us to create a comprehensive mailing list that we can easily update and run every time we complete a mailer.
- Positive: Allows us to run frequent reports to analyze our data, discover our strengths and weaknesses and report our stats to key stakeholders.
- Negative: The rising annual costs has forced us to leave. This will be a huge project, and not something I would have ever wanted to do, but we can no longer justify the expense for our usage of this product.
Our organization has been able to scale program delivery using Apricot [by Social Solutions]. We have developed new layers of our organization each year, including the major development of an adult education program open to our communities. This new program requires separate tracking for students including: demographics, multiple class participation tracking of attendance, homework, completion, etc. We have been able to easily build new layers to our database, create dozens of new reports without running into any limiting factors or issues.
Apricot [by Social Solutions] has given us greater ability to measure the success of our organization with raw data and statistics required for most grant applications. Our grant-writers are able to ask me for any specific numbers/totals that they need and I am able to quickly run a report and filter our data down to provide them the numbers they need by date, group, etc. Our comprehensive data collection allows to examine our annual impact to predict future budget needs quite accurately. In our annual appeal letters, we are able to share, in great detail, exactly what levels of funding are needed for specific areas of our organization.
I am not familiar with any other database products, but my experience prior to Apricot [by Social Solutions] has been using Microsoft Excel for tracking and record-keeping. I believe many of us are familiar with Excel, and while the functions and abilities of these spreadsheets are many, the stacks and stacks of data stored on spreadsheets can be cumbersome to sift through and not user-friendly for people who do not have extensive knowledge of using Excel. I am an Admin in Apricot, so I see/operate the back-end and am privy to the inner-workings, but our users on the front end have an incredibly user-friendly interface to work with. There is no mind-boggling mountains of data to look at, but organized individual records.
Do you think Bonterra Case Management delivers good value for the price?
Not sure
Are you happy with Bonterra Case Management's feature set?
Yes
Did Bonterra Case Management live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Bonterra Case Management go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Bonterra Case Management again?
No