SocialChorus Reviews

The Firstup team and community that surrounds Firstup is invaluable. Firstup makes it easy to access other customers so you can share ideas on how to build out your platform and how to solve for common challenges your organization may face. As for the tool itself, so far it has already completely changed Corporate Communications throughout our organization. Frequent communicators are now empowered to drive their own comms instead of all content bottlenecking through our lean Corp Comms team. The single source publishing aspect of the tool allows our comms to stay up to date across all channels and truly reaches each employee where they want to receive their information. The list could go on about what we like best about it!

Tool needs a flow for content creators to send a draft to a content publisher once it's ready to be delivered.

Maintaining distribution lists, single-source publishing, scheduling communications, etc. All of these benefits have freed up more time for our Corporate Communications team to focus more on communication strategy instead of day to day delivery. We're now more proactive instead of reactive.

Strong product; customer service; prioritization of always improving; listening to our product ideas and suggestions to hopefully take into consideration for ultimate customer satisfaction. IT response rate and action has been great too!

There isn't a whole lot of dislike but if I had to answer, I'd say that from a customer side, there could be a stronger feedback loop on new product updates. We share feedback with our rep, but beyond that, we don't always have visibility into what efforts might be being made to improve or correct bugs we find, though not to say we don't see improvement over the course of time. On that note, when building the new product updates, if it's not being done already, a Comms professional on a panel for testing would be beneficial. When we do have feedback on new product updates, it's usually around something that is very niche to a Comms pro.

Firstup is allowing us to communicate with our entire employee base in a way they want to be reached; has closed gaps in access, with our frontline employees as one example. It has been beneficial in the last several years in getting important messages to our employees and ensuring the message has been received. Prior, we had no way of tracking emails, knowing what's been read, etc. We've also been able to decentralize communications giving regional team members an opportunity to communicate in the best way for their audience while allowing us the visibility to all global communications across the company.

It's not just a messaging tool; it's a comprehensive employee communication solution that engages employees and offers a suite of incredibly useful tools. I appreciate how the developers solicit feedback and how my account rep helps us with campaigns and other strategic ideas.

Technical support can be frustrating. It's not easy to open a ticket (the system doesn't remember me) and the answers are not always what you are looking for. Navigating metrics is harder than it should be.

Connecting to our employees on our business priorities.

I love the functions in New Studio. The publisher tools are great; the possibilities are endless. We are also excited about the advanced permissions and new insights/metrics.

Occasionally New Studio (the new publisher) has bugs, and sometimes it can take a long time for those issues to be addressed.

One of the largest solutions we get out of Firstup is expansive metrics/insights. We're gathering data we would have never had access to before. This allows us to be more strategic in our content creation and communications.

Also, shout out to intelligent delivery!

Firstup has been very helpful for our company to provide multiple types of communications to our employees. We have the ability to schedule notification, customize them with any rich text we would like, add pictures, send to specific channels (email, SocialChorus app, etc.), measure engagement from all channels, and view posts from an admin perspective in multiple views with the calendar view or list view. I would highly recommend Firstup for your companies communication!

I think something Firstup can work on is aligning on the naming. Social Chorus is the app, but then Firstup is sometimes used.

Firstup is solving the communication gap where we need to get communications out in various channels to ensure key details within our company (goals, health benefits) are communicate and it also helps with employee engagement because we need to communicate those type of events out to improve our employee engagement within our company.

It democratized communication for us with access to & for all employees, not just e-enabled employees.

No SMS text capability currently in the legacy Social Chorus app. It is available on the legacy Dynamic Signal app.

Our communication challenges included the following:

-Majority of team members (5,000+)  are not e-enabled and don’t have easy access to information

-No way to target communications to specific groups of team members. Communication is one-way, one direction; no easy way to get feedback

-Lack of analytics makes it difficult to understand how well communications are performing, what is relevant or important to team members

-No easy way for team members (enterprise) to currently find information or services in one place

-No easy way for leadership to connect with entire workforce

-Costs increase and productivity drops due to dependency on printing

-Translating content is costly and time-consuming. Untranslated content limits understanding to specific populations and impacts engagement and inclusion

We needed an integrated solution that:

-Design for inclusion - All team members have access to information that impacts their daily lives at Butterball.

-Promotes Employee Self-Service, giving all team members access to support information and services.

-Provides analytics that give insight into the efficacy of communication content, methods and genres.

-Builds our Talent Brand by enhancing our team member experience

Ans so we implementing Firstup.

What I find most helpful about Firstup is how quickly I get responses from the team. Be it questions about the platform (capabilities, best practices) or support help, it's never a long wait for a reply. Additionally, the team is active and readily accepts/is involved in discussions about how we (Dow) would like to see the platform improved (ranging from bugs/issues we encounter to new features to make content easier to create/publish or more engaging for end-users). The Knowledge Base and Training Center made it easy for me to understand the platform, and share my knowledge/experience with new admins.

The only downsides that come to mind regards the platform. While advanced permissions help us limit "miss-posts," I'd like to so more "controls" in the platform to help us prevent certain miss-posts (fixes regarding the email alias field (defaults to an address we don't want everyone to use)). However, this suggested feature has been part of conversations with the team and part of the "wish list" for future updates. I will add that no-one on our team has ever had a bad experience with the Firstup team.

Firstup has and is helping us solve many problems with the platform. Whenever we notice an issue with campaign delivery/display, engagement metrics, or using the platform, the customer and support teams are quick to answer our questions and provide explanations of any fixes they've implented. This ensures problems are addressed and resolved quickly, which makes it easier for us to continue using the platform. Even when we've had high-priority fixes/support needed, the team has been swift in responding to our email and giving us the help we need.

Building and publishing a newsletter used to take me hours and now I can create a great looking newsletter in a matter of minutes and quickly send to a targeted audience. Firstup has taken all the pain points out of my communications work and allows me to focus on strategy, content and UX. The insights provide in-dpeth metrics that I use for making a business case in my comms consults; it helps leadership understand decisions and reccomendations.

Fistup is a robust tool and while it's intuitive to use I would caution small teams or unsupported teams to implement and launch. There are many aspects to consider when building out program infrastructure for your business and the role of project manager can easily be a full-time position.

Reaching deskless employees and targeting audiences. For the first time, we have the capability to reach our deskless employees with the Firstup mobile app. Additionally, we can easily create dynamic audiences and send information to exactly who needs it and not an entire group of people.

FirstUp allows me, as a communicator, to get critical information to employees when I need to and in a format that they understand and appreciate. In this world today, we have to meet employees where they are. The days of a printed newsletter have passed, and our employees reach for their phones on their break time. This is how we can reach them with information that helps them to be successful in their careers. The program was easy to implement with FirstUp's expert guidance. We have the flexibility to do what we need to do to run an effective communications program. The customer support is top notch, and our issues are solved very quickly.

My only issue witht he program is the lack of ability to pin critical messages.

FirstUp solves the problem of issuing timely information without having to wait on the scedule of a weekly printed newsletter. This lets us reach employees with critical information quickly.

Firstup is a scalable, user-friendly platform that meets organizations where they are at on the internal comms maturity spectrum and meets their needs as they grow and evolve. The technology is backed by an incredible support team and knowledgeable experts at Firstup - they get internal comms and that's rare. The platform has so much to offer, one could easily get overwhelmed if they're not familiar with tech, but the best part is that you don't have to do it all at once. As an administrator, you get to choose what you turn on and when it gets deployed to your company.

It's a robust platform, and I love the data and reports available. Because the data is so robust, I find that my clients using Firstup find it most helpful when I'm able to come in from the outside, dig into the data and deliver a simplified dashboard and actionable insights based on how I interpret the data sets available.

It simplifies, streamlines and centralizes internal comms channels, and connect deskless workers to the organization, even if they don't have a company email address.