Item: Firstup
Rating: 8
Author: Ben Peck

Overall Satisfaction with Firstup (Dynamic Signal + SocialChorus)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Firstup is being used by our whole organization. It is our primary means of communication with employees. We also use the quick links as an entry point to many essential systems to drive users through the communication platform. It helps us reach employees where they are, especially for our employees that do not have email access.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It looks professional and creates trust.
They worked with us to ensure a seamless authentication for SSO.
It simplifies the back end article creation process.
It reports well on our outreach metrics.
Their weekly customer success meetings keep us in the know.

Cons

In the past year, we've had a couple of multi-hour outages. They could do better at fault tolerance.
The steps required to update apps is quite cumbersome, especially for the Apple store.
I have problems with user management around rehires. There is no mechanism to unsuspend users automatically if they are in a new user upload.

Return on Investment

It is our primary communication platform and we've obtained a very high percentage of reach though it.
Employees trust the content since it is our authoritative source.
We have confusion when people leave the platform via the link and subsequently have a problem and believe it is a DySi problem. It integrates that well.

Systems Integrated With

We manually upload users from PeopleSoft.
We authenticate using Okta.

Our user base integration hasn't been able to happen yet outside of manual imports. I don't think there was undue difficulty in getting Okta set up other than DySi had to help us use our employee number as a record number over email, which it prefers.

Likelihood to Recommend

Firstup is good for when most of your users are on mobile. It is also a requirement that the links be accessible from outside your network. This was a challenge for us. We found the desktop app to be redundant to the web site. The only benefit was the alerts you would receive while it was open. If your employees are not comfortable with online communication, be prepared for extra work. I could also see it being less useful in a small company where you have fewer "stories" to tell.

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