Influitive vs. Higher Logic Vanilla

We have seen success with information sharing. Giving customers another way to access our resources has been a huge help for them. While we see good engagement numbers there are still some limitations to getting our advocates to complete the 'harder' challenges, like a testimonial or reference

Incentivized

Vanilla Forums is well suited for growing communities that wish to expand without having to change software. Existing larger communities may find the user management part of the tool lacking, although this could be from my lack of experience.

Incentivized

• It gives us the opportunity to share valuable content with our users. (e.g. first looks at e-books, white papers, announcements of webinars, etc.)
• It allows us to easily collect feedback and insights from our community members through a variety of activity types.
• It makes it simple for us to reward our customers for helping each other, and our org, through a rewards store that easily connects to an outside vendor.

Incentivized

• They provide excellent customer service to us on a weekly basis. If we have questions or find something that we'd like improved or even something new we'd like to add to our program, we have a dedicated person we can reach out to who helps us facilitate that change.
• We're fond of their add-ons. We use many of them in our community. Some keep our members engaged on a day to day basis. We really like reactions, the keyword blocker, the civil tongue filter, and a few customized add-ons that Vanilla added specifically for our community.
• They send us notifications for all upcoming releases, and update their software frequently.

Incentivized

• Challenge Digest- I would really like to have the digest have a little more functionality. Such as being able to move around the challenges, maybe move them to the top rather than the bottom.
• The challenge image/the channel image- This is a feature I would really like to have more user-friendly, especially the crop feature. This feature is not very easy to use, so I have to go to another platform to re-size it. It would be so much easier if I could do this all within Influitive.
• Sign In Page Profile Fields- I would like to be able to easily rearrange the fields rather than needing to reach out to support so that they can update on their end. While I appreciate that they can do this, it would be easier and faster if I could have the ability to do it myself.
• Support-is AMAZING! But it would be great if they were more ways that an admin could be able to tweak certain pages rather than waiting till the engineering has time to update. I work on a tight timeline and it's hard to go back to the stakeholders and inform them that what they want can't be handled right away. Again I completely understand that other companies also have urgent requests, but if the admin had more capabilities then we wouldn't have to go to support as much.

Incentivized

• Creating visual themes can be difficult. Although there is an open source version of the software, some of the plugins (gamification, badges) are not available for download, so any visual theme that includes them will need to be at least partially developed on their servers, vs doing the whole thing offline and then uploading it all at once. This can be time consuming as each code change has to be checking in to Github and then imported into their server cluster.

Incentivized

I really like working with Influitive and with AdvocateHub. Their support staff is awesome and everyone I have come into contact with at the company has been friendly and supportive. Their corporate interactions with customers model their product philosophy incredibly well. I am very satisfied and trust in their attention to me as a customer.

Overall, Influitive is very easy to use for customers. There's a bit of a learning curve for new admins, but that's only because Influitive isn't always intuitive. The UI is confusing in certain places. I expect something to be in one place, and I find it somewhere else entirely. This is the only reason my usability rank isn't higher

Incentivized

It is very intuitive and simple to operate. Our customers immediately came up with the curve and began contributing content.

Incentivized

Yes, always available and extremely quick. The availability is 10 on 10 for sure. We also have situations where their team might not be working or on a holiday, but if we have an event, they are available and ensure smooth running. That is the beauty of having Influitive take care of you.

Incentivized

Influitive AdvocateHub interacts with Blackbaud Champions and is an on-time response system. What I mean by that is once data is entered in Influitive AdvocateHub, it is updated in real time and I can access a computer and the data is there immediately. Sometimes the rewards do not show up right away and I am under the assumption that the delay is caused by an influx of traffic.

Incentivized

I have never had an issue, small or large, that the Influitive support team hasn't taken seriously and given their attention to. Engagement with support is generally quick and painless. There is also a great user community that is monitored to some degree, and general questions are often already available there or answered in short order.

Incentivized

They did an amazing job transferring our content from GetSatisfaction. We had almost 100% success in the transfer of 8 years worth of content.

Incentivized

I was taught and made to show all features that could help me learn more about the platform and this was great hands-on training for me. I picked up things faster than others and did have time to create challenges and make changes while someone was around to supervise and help.

Incentivized

The training was extensive and gave me the knowledge/ skills that I needed in order to implement my advocacy program using Influitive's Advocate Hub. I also meet on a regular basis with my Customer Success Manager. My Success Manager helps give me ideas for my program and helps me ensure that it's successful. Influitive is really invested in my success. They act more like a partner than a vendor

I think some of the key insights I can put forward are all aligned to simply being organized. Make sure you have a well thoughts out plan where you have taken all factors into account. Prioritize the list of deliverables, and make sure you have all the right people alighed to assist internally & externally. If you have a well organized plan you will be set up for success.

The challenges were a big factor in our decision. We wanted to have a place users could consume and contribute, and not just browsing articles and moving on. We wanted them to be able to interact with the content, and each other. Many community platforms are just forums. We wanted something way more memorable and robust.

Incentivized

Most of all we could customize the forum to look and feel like an extension of our existing web properties. This makes the forum feel more native to the users coming from or being redirected to the forum. We also had plans of being able to create custom badges we could grant users which was a limitation to many of the platforms we look at at the time. Since we are a software and cloud company, working with a product we could customize and automate via the API was another big factor. Today we have automated flows for reviewing and accepting improvement requests and then pulling them into our ticketing system and updating the deployment status of those requests one we push our updates to our users. Most importantly, Vanilla came forward with a reasonable cost to match our existing CSS and make a template that was easy for us to maintain as we grew.

Incentivized

When I stayed using we only had a hundred or so Advocates and now we have 2100+. Pretty amazing product!

• Increased social proof is definitely a big one as this pertains specifically to my role. I've moved my program from collecting testimonials, case studies, success stories, etc. in a somewhat random, happen-stance way to primarily (90%) drawing from our Influitive members.

Incentivized

• Increased uptime and overall speed in the forum (compared to our previous phpbb solution)
• Increased usage by users which resulted in a higher pages/session in a short amount of time

Incentivized