VeryConnect

Highly recommended for UK societies.

Comments: We decided on VeryConnect after a thorough review of the market, and they won out from quite an extensive long and then short list. Given the requirements we had against the costs, it was pretty much only down to VeryConnect.
They were very accomodating and supportive throughout development and go live for two instances of the product and have continued with this support after the launch.

Pros:

We were looking for a low cost but effective system to move two small societies off of a legacy system, that while out of date still delivered some complicated functionality. We needed a reliable company, and for a number of reasons a UK one was preferable (as it turned out, a very wise choice). The VC team are very knowledgeable and gave helpful advice through out the process, who focus on customer service and have given a lot to build a long term, trusting and friendly relationship. The platform is customisable for your branding, has pretty much all the modules you need for running all aspects of your society. There is little we can fault with the system (but note I have been very picky to add something in the cons). The team is quick to implement changes and they are updating the system with new features all the time. Their licensing is a very strong point compared to many per seat membership/CRM systems. Licensing is based on number of users, which includes all users, to be precise your admins and admin support don't require a separate seat license. e.g. you have up to 500 users, as many of these as you wish can actually administer the system. I'm not suggesting you let all your members in to the back end, but where you may really on volunteers for certain aspects of your societies activities, this can make quite a difference.

Cons:

So to be picky, and I am confident these will resolve in future releases. 1. I would like to see a more comprehensive in system way of highlighting and balancing off refunds against payments (the way it works, works, but could be improved). 2. I would like to see the ability to save and retrieve your custom built reports in system (the work around is to build templates in excel, I would prefer in system).

Great experience with a great team

Comments: With VC you get what it says on the tin. The platform and CRM represent excellent value for smaller organisations. They are a great organisation to work with and the quality of their overall work and product is high

Pros:

VFM of platform Approachability of team Knowledge of team Knowledge of sector

Cons:

Need to grow their PM capability to improve ability to plan

New Website for a Health Professional Body

Comments: Excellent. The team were exceptionally quick to respond to any queries and made time at very short notice for any video calls.

Pros:

Support and advice provided when setting things up and support and advice once launched.

Cons:

None I can think of to be honest, the team at VeryConnect were excellent.

Atypical Use Case - Still Satisfied

Comments: Overall, I am pleased with the platform so far. However, I do want to say we've only been on the live site for about a month and we haven't actually launched it with our stakeholders yet. So I am not 100% sure of how it is working for us. I will say that they were incredibly responsive and accommodating to an organization that wanted to use their platform for something atypical to their normal customers. I really appreciated that they were willing to build things specific to our needs.

Pros:

We selected VeryConnect to replace an existing solution that went out of business. We were looking for a way to regularly post public content to multiple stakeholder groups that could be tailored to each audience. We were also looking for something to engage work group members in closed groups. VeryConnect met both needs with a public facing landing page and the ability to tag content that is linked from those landing pages. And with a backend to engage registered members.

Cons:

There is no help documentation. In order to figure out how to use the system, I had to just play around it and ask questions. But it is hard to ask about things you don't know you don't know - such as they can create different role permissions if you need them. But I didn't even know to ask about it to start. Also, with out the help documentation, its hard to know if what I am asking is something the platform is built to do, or if I am asking for something special. In our build out, I would frequently realize later they were building something specific to just us because I asked. However, I would have been happy to find a work around if I just knew that it wasn't a typical feature. The fact that they did build those things was amazing though.

Alternatives Considered: Higher Logic Thrive, Workplace from Meta, TRIBE, Forj and Confluence

Reasons for Choosing VeryConnect: It went out of business.

Switched From: Engagement Communities

Reasons for Switching to VeryConnect: Meets all our needs. Good UI. Provides setup support. Reasonably priced. Integration with SalesforceNeeds: Create and/or link to content, easy login, shared calendar, email notifications for users, discussion or forum feature, host multiple groups, public landing pages, tags, members ability to post.

Positive experience all round!

Comments: Our overall experience has been a positive one. VeryConnect are a small business and have worked to meet our needs in a flexible and consistent way.

Pros:

I like the intuitive nature of the platform, the automated emails are fantastic, the report functions are good, it is easy to data cleanse and ensure we have accurate information stored in one place. Also really like the tagging elements of the platform, easy to categorise our members.

Cons:

The lack of control over elements such as editing our filtering categories for members, turning on and off different automated emails. Uploading different event templates. We want to be able to do it ourselves but currently have to ask VeryConnect to do a lot of this for us - takes time and doesn't allow us to act in an agile way.