Apricot by Social Solutions seems overpriced and has mostly underwhelmed for this intermediary non-profit organization

We use Apricot by Social Solutions at Invest in Kids to collect data from classroom teachers that are located across the state of Colorado. These teachers are delivering a classroom program to students, a program that our organization provides training and coaching in for the teachers delivering the curriculum to students. We have set up the system so that teachers log in as guest users and complete surveys at the beginning and end of the school year to record demographic information and complete short standardized measures about each student's behavior. The software makes it easy to link the pre- and post-test records using the Apricot Tier I and Tier II record structure.

We also have staff on our internal team (the team that supports teachers with training and coaching) log into Apricot by Social Solutions as standard users and complete information about their coaching visits as well as a fidelity assessment about teacher's delivery of the program to students. Lastly, we use Apricot by Social Solutions for our annual RFP process, where directors of early childhood centers and school districts will log in as a guest user and complete the RFP application that we have set up in Apricot by Social Solutions.

I think that the scale of our program delivery is unrelated to our use of Apricot by Social Solutions, largely because no matter how awesome Apricot by Social Solutions is, its functioning and use at our organization won't help address issues related to the pandemic and the current workforce challenges in early childhood education, which are the main barriers we face in scaling the program that we support in Colorado.

Our annual documentation of program outcomes using Apricot by Social Solutions helps us secure and maintain funding annually, and this funding has always come from diverse sources. In 2017 or 2018, we actually received funding from the state of Colorado to deliver the program. I think this is largely because the program we support has a strong track record in terms of the evidence base and published research for it, coupled with the fact that we track program outcomes in Colorado and report on them annually. Apricot by Social Solutions allows us to collect and house all the data, but I think Apricot by Social Solutions hasn't helped us so much secure funding as much as our commitment to gathering data and using it to tell the story of the program to funders in an effective way.