Item: monday.com
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We're a fast growing edtech company that supports 100s of use cases in the K12 education industry. Project planning with our customer base has always been a challenge - especially given the fact that teachers and administrators have quite a few things on their plates (and project planning is not necessarily a forte in K12). In order to provide a degree of coherence to our use case implementations, we needed a tool that could:

Effective and versatile to the peculiarities of K12
Have automations and workflows that don't require my team to spend vast amounts of time verifying the completion of action items
Allow our customers to participate in the tool that guides their projects and outcomes

Every customer (ie school district) gets their own board that they can follow, participate in, and hold all stakeholders accountable. This type of product is really quite new to K12 schools (they're frequently surprised at how well it works). They tend to really like the experience.

Pros and Cons

You can share boards with particular customers and have them participate as guests.
You can set automations to remind customers of their action items.
You can create templates in monday.com that match your own frameworks and workflows.

Board integrations. There are a limited amount of board links you can have. We're tracking 200+ school districts at the moment (each with a board). That gets complicated.
I love Monday Docs. I would love to see export features: Specifically HTML and/or Markdown. It's what keeps me from using it in every form for actual authoring of content (i.e. - export to WordPress). There are some hacky ways to do this - but would be cool to see.
Some performance issues with Monday Docs. But it's new!

Return on Investment

Time savings with customers.
Increased transparency with customers.
Allows my team to keep our sanity with the million moving parts of K12 education.
One negative: I would love to be able to share boards (view only) with people in the company who we've NOT bought a license for. They don't need all the bells and whistles of a full license. But would to monitor progress. Right now I simply export as spreadsheet - but that seems silly.

Usability

Easier than Asana (why we chose monday.com over Asana). Your aesthetic is very K12 education in tone. It's the little things I like (and borrow) - like when emails say "made with (heart emoji) by monday.com".

Support Rating

I've not actually interacted with CS - but folks on my team have and they find them incredibly responsive.

Reliability & Availability

I've found monday.com to be pretty reliable. Honestly, two areas I've seen issues in are:

Monday Docs (mentioned before).
The email widget (can be really hit or miss - also formatting is wonky sometimes).

Key Insights

Do you think monday.com delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with monday.com's feature set?

Yes

Did monday.com live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of monday.com go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy monday.com again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Zendesk Support Suite, Slack, WordPress, Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), Canva, Salesforce CMS

Likelihood to Recommend

Oh my gosh, monday.com would be great tool for school leadership. Assuming they know how to use technology (not necessarily a safe assumption). I can easily see leadership and school boards creating monday.com boards to actually execute their strategic plans (which are rather big political affairs and you want to get right).

There still is a learning curve. Less about how to use the tool. Rather, how to have the tool support and rock your use cases and workflows. This is a particular problem in software (we face the same issue with our platform). You can figure out how to use a board. The next question is "how do a create an amazing workflow, board, framework, whatnot to support the real problem(s) I'm facing.

Indeed, everyone I know who really embraces monday.com usually takes their first creations (after a month or so) and deletes them. Better to just start over again once you really "get" how wrangle monday.com to your use cases. That was certainly true for us. (Thankfully, we were warned.)

monday.com helps my team keep their sanity. Now I'd love to see K12 education embrace it.

Overall Satisfaction with monday.com