Somewhat effective, depending on your needs
December 09, 2015
Somewhat effective, depending on your needs
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with eTapestry
We use eTapestry to maintain a database of our contacts (about 30,000) and send them newsletters with updates on our work, notify them of events, ask for donations, etc. It is not being used across the organization, but rather by a handful of people in communications and finance. We use it mostly to keep track of our constituents, especially as many of our employees do a lot of networking at conferences, etc.
- The ability to have multiple users who can navigate the site and once and use it for different things.
- The availability of online tutorials is helpful.
- Easy to use templates, once they are designed.
- Much of it is counter intuitive -- for instance, the whole process of creating UDFs and storing them can be very complicated, and the menus in which they appear are not straightforward either. It doesn't feel like the program understands that it would be most helpful to keep the most used tools available in menus, etc., instead of having to go search for them deep down in lists full of UDFs.
- The forms that have to be filled to create accounts have a lot of extraneous info that leads to the possibility of a lot of duplicates, bad accounts, etc. Too much info!
- Not enough of a filter for creating duplicates -- I think the requirements to make an account should be more strict and the filter should be better for duplicates.
- Increased efficiency and ease with monthly newsletters by using helpful templates.
- Negative: spending money sending emails to people who are not getting or reading them--and it costs a good amount to hire the consultant to go through and help us delete duplicates, bad accounts, etc.
- Very complicated system makes it so that it only makes sense for a few people in the org to become "experts" in the program--unfortunately it is not very suited to an organization-wide use.
It is not as intuitive as other programs. I did not select eTapestry, but was trained to use it when I entered the job. I have heard that other systems are better, and I have worked some with Salesforce, but I think eTapestry is decent for an organization this size. If we were any bigger or smaller I might look for a program that was easier to operate.