Mixed Review
Updated April 26, 2019

Mixed Review

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

Overall Satisfaction with ETO by Social Solutions

It is used by the entire organization. ETO quantifies our results for reporting to funders.
  • Lots of customization available
  • Clean design
  • Frequent performance issues.
  • Many features feel 'grafted' on without a full scope consideration of how they could be best integrated into the existing interface. The result is a congested array of settings UIs that require the primary user to develop and maintain workflow checklists off of the site itself.
  • Reporting tool has numerous performance and design flaws.
  • We are not a business (non-profit/NGO), so none.
A high degree of customization, poor performance, and design. I did not select ETO (predates my time here), so I can't speak to that.
Very helpful for tracking client records; leaves much to be desired as a reporting tool.

Using ETO by Social Solutions

200 - Front line staff, Case Managers, Program Managers, Program Directors, and assorted administrative staff. In terms of business functions this means direct service providers, their managers, and teams of support staff. ETO is used by the direct service staff to record provision of services and as a field notebook to support case management, while admin teams use it to quantify and report out on the key metrics of interest to funders.
1 - Just myself! I am the only admin at our agency, and am responsible for training, maintenance, support, and improvements. My manager has some knowledge but at the moment I am the only FTE capable of executing the above functions. These functions require attention to detail, project management skills/tools, customer service orientation, an iterative approach (for design and redesigning improvements), and public speaking (for the trainings).
  • Quantifying program outcomes
  • Reporting out key metrics to external stakeholders
  • Field notes for frontline staff
  • Supporting supervision conversations between managers and reports
  • Digitizing workflows (requires add-on)
Despite some challenges with the software and ongoing areas of improvement, we have so much data invested in the system now that it would be tremendously disruptive to switch platforms. Turning that battleship would require a much more urgent problem with the current platform, which does most things we need it to reasonably well. We're not a "10", however, because we are passively always considering alternatives and if another platform that provided similar functions approached us we would almost certainly take the call and do our due diligence.

Evaluating ETO by Social Solutions and Competitors

Yes - A single excel spreadsheet, which had gotten far too difficult to work with across our growing agency, and a SQL database system which we still use parallel to our use of ETO to track a few slightly different metrics. The excel spreadsheet was simply a vestigial relic of the days our agency operated at much humbler scale.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
While I was not with the agency at the time of selection, I know that ETO was especially appealing to us as a platform that was grounded in the work of other non-profit service providers and was set up to best facilitate that sort of work. Additionally, it includes features such as alert functionality and reporting that we knew we needed.
Difficult to say as someone who was not present for the actual process itself, but if I were able to go back in time and be present in the conversation I would raise some of my concerns about the reporting tool (ETO Results) and make sure we had done our due diligence evaluating other platforms with reporting functionality.

ETO by Social Solutions Implementation

Hard to say, as I was not with the agency at the time. However, based on our use of the software ~5years later I can say that there were no catastrophic design choices made during implementation that have become unduly burdensome as we've scaled up.
  • Imposible to say, as I was not present for it

ETO by Social Solutions Training

  • Online training
  • Self-taught
Really good trainer and exhaustive curriculum covered, but ETO is a complex enough system that you don't *really* know how to use it until you've been in the trenches for a few weeks. For instance, I took a Report Writing training and emerged with some fluency in the reports interface and a vague understanding of the process, but immediately encountered a legion of instance-specific idiosyncrasies that would have been totally impossible to address in a webinar training for a dozen folks from different orgs working in different instances.
Definitely not! This is a highly complex software with labyrinthine and interlocking settings UI's that require a carefully established workflow, as making changes to one part of the site can adversely impact others without warning. I find the product difficult to use even WITH training, let alone without any! I do frequently need to self-teach new features, but it is my grounding in the rest of the functionality (achieved through taking online trainings) that gives me confidence to do so.

ETO by Social Solutions Support

Very helpful individual support staff, who have strong customer care orientation and have gone out of their way to learn more about our instance to be better advocates for our needs within the development cycle. With "how do I..." questions this team does a great job, and I am often very pleased with the handling I receive.

That said,technical issues that rise to the level of needing backend fixes from developers take much longer to address and resolve. I don't know if it's an issue of communication or developer time, but those issues can go unresolved for long periods of time.

ProsCons
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
Slow Resolution
Poor followup
Difficult to get immediate help
Not Available - It is included in our license
Yes - I report bugs frequently. Often, the support team can identify a setting that needs to be toggled, which is fantastic. Sometimes they need to escalate the matter internally which can lead to a few days lapse between bug reports and resolution. More problematically is when bugs require backend fixes by the dev team, as this can easily become a prolonged fix taking weeks (or months) to see movement.
Yes! Recently my account representative went out of their way to set up a time for a "reverse-demo", where I took them on a tour of our instance. They asked some thoughtful questions, and by the end of the 30minute demo had achieved a deeper understanding of some of the idiosyncratic design choices we made with our instance. This will enable them to better advocate for us internally during the development cycle, and anticipate how new features might impact our work. On a deeper level, this demonstrated an ownership and partnership mentality that I am grateful to have in support staff.

Using ETO by Social Solutions

As a technically savvy person with experience learning new database software systems I find ETO relatively straightforward now that I've been trained in it's use. However, many of our staff are less technically savvy and the learning curve for ETO can be grueling for many, who require frequent troubleshooting and support from me. Additionally, there are small quality of life improvements that would increase usability even for me - such as allowing multiple tabs to be open simultaneously or being able to use the browser's "back" and "forward" buttons.
ProsCons
Consistent
Feel confident using
Unnecessarily complex
Difficult to use
Not well integrated
Slow to learn
Cumbersome
Lots to learn
  • Participant lookup
  • Switching between programs
  • Reporting! (ETO Results)
  • Creating new programs
  • making changes to existing data objects - not much clarity around what metadata survive these changes or what parts of ETO will be impacted by changing naming syntax etc

ETO by Social Solutions Reliability

The core product scales well, and we've grown quite a bit as an agency during our use of ETO. However, there are some real pain points particularly around creating new programs and managing report universes that require extensive offline checklist resources and a full-spectrum understanding of how changing settings in one part of ETO can have downstream impact in other areas. This can introduce a "chilling" effect on proposed changes to the system, where there is strong incentive to leave things as-is to avoid unforeseen consequences.
Routine maintenance is announced with plenty of lead time, and the few times I've been unable to log in to the system properly a simple refresh was all that was required to fix.
Mostly really strong now, although I understand that for some years before switching their hosting service to AWS performance was a real issue with ETO and we had frequent problems with pages timing out or other glitches stemming from performance issues. With AWS that is mostly a thing of the past, although it is still a major issue with the reporting tool which is unable to run reports on the entire database due to performance limitations, instead requiring admins to define universes prior to running queries.

Relationship with Social Solutions

Unsure, as I was not present for sales process.
Mostly good. I know that for some time immediately after sale we had a lot of difficulty reaching anyone who could help us with support issues, but I am also aware that after a personnel shake up at Social Solutions this has changed dramatically and now they are mostly a pleasure to work with.
I don't have sufficient knowledge to speak on this matter
Very important to be persistent! I sometimes need to send follow up one or more follow up pings to get issues resolved. Also, use the Ideas Portal for any issues that don't get addressed and post the link on their internal forums so others know to go upvote your ideas (otherwise they'll never go anywhere).