Hivebrite Software

We have chosen Hivebrite to support our management of the potentially huge community of CERN Alumni. Throughout implementation we have been in close contact with both the management and the development teams and have felt effectively supported. Now in our first year of existence, we continue to enjoy a close link with both teams, a very important thing for us. The platform serves most of our needs and we keep on feeding our requests for more, although we could perhaps have better visibility on what their plans and delivery horizons are.

Pros

Hivebrite has allowed us to tailor the look & feel of our CERN Alumni community site as we needed to. The back office is simple and very powerful, and allows full customization of most aspects of the front office offered to our network members. The support team is great and offers personalized support.
The performance is top as the response rate is immediate.

Cons

It has happened that the software did not behave consistently on different supported browsers, which has caused confusion. The synchronization with LinkedIn has had its issues in the past.
In some areas, we feel that a little bit more of customization from the back office should be within reach and regret that we have to wait. The performance of the mobile app could be further tuned.

We were looking for a database, alumni platform and a workspace (groupe with feed, media center, event for meeting and deadline..) and billingual.

Pros

A lot of personalization (a lot of possibility)
Easy to learn and use
Best customer service you can have
Easy to admin
Always update et good communication
If you have idea (new feature) you can submit them on the blog, people vote and the most voted are choosed for devloppement
French and english customer service
Billingual platform
Back-Office CRM

Cons

The mobile application need some optimisation
The Media center is great but is not optimal as well
Except that, I think it is the best software on the market (I looked for more than 25 alumni platform before making my top 3 than my final selection)

Happy alumni, more contact with the industry and therefor more added value to our curriculum.

Pros

User friendly, a lot of possibilities to customize, in line with GDPR, adequate and friendly helpdesk.

Cons

Specific wishes on features is hard to get developped, since there are a lot of wishes. Would be nice to have a group of user in the same country where you can share your do and dont's.

Virtual communities are vibrant and collaborative with this software that delivers what it promises.

Pros

It's very easy to learn, understand, and use. Customization, depending on your community's need, is very flexible and multi-options are available.

Cons

Speaking of customization, there's still a lot left to be desired in the types of fonts that can be used.

Pros

It is easy to use, I could teach myself how to use it, it was very straightforward. I had been searching online for a while for a project just like this.

Cons

Sometimes the price can be a bit much, which makes it difficult being in a team, we can't all use the software.

Pros

I like that Hivebrite is an all in one community engagement platform that helps build connective engagement among out group.

Cons

There is a bit of a learning curve to Hivebrite and sometimes people are hesitant to add "one more thing" to their arsenal.

Pros

Functionality: Hivebrite has almost endless features and options to customize the platform, so that the platform is tailored to the needs of the network. Features and functions can also be used in a non-traditional way, enabling the administrator to create specific features, that would otherwise not be possible.

Look and Feel: From a user perspective, the portal is very easy to navigate (pending on how it is customized). The world map feature that displays network member geographically is a great asset for networking.

Administration: The setup and maintenance of the platform via the back-office are very intuitive. This applies to the user profiles, as well as the architecture of the site. It's mostly a one -click process.

The ability to streamline our Program to best fit our users. Hivebrite integrates numerous functions that provide an easy to use interface for our team as well as incredible customer service and support for questions that arose during the setup process!

Pros

The Front Office interface and mobile software is very user friendly. Our team members love the aesthetic and multi-faceted system that Hivebrite provides. It is also very customizable from the Back Office so from an Admin perspective, setup was easy!

Cons

The lack of customizable options when it comes to font, color, sizing, and general edits. However, I believe that this is something that is being developed so it's really only a growing pain that Hivebrite is adjusting to!

Pros

-User's layout is easily intuitive and makes sense.
-Content rich design has a lot of useful places for various types of data/info.
-Elegant visual design that draws your members towards useful info.
-Clean, cool, contemporary presentation.
-For admin, the backend is smart, efficient, and makes sense relatively easy for an intelligent novice to quickly get it and get to work designing and building.
-We're a U.S. law enforcement nonprofit and our member base is law enforcement. Obviously, data storage, login security, and hacking issues are important to us. We spent a lot of money trying to make another vendor's package adequately secure and never really got there. Hivebrite's top-tier data storage coupled with leveraging Google's streamlined sign-in authentication can't be beat.
-Tech support is outstanding, brilliant people who know how to engage efficiently, and even smile.
-Value. We shopped hard. We're getting so much more than we could find anywhere else, at a great price point.
-After over a year of struggling to get a competitor's product to work, we almost launched nationally with the thought to just make-do. But just a couple weeks before launch, our engineer spent several nights scouring the competition. He sold us on abandoning all our work and switching one of our endeavors to Hivebrite. After our first day of building, we knew this was the platform for both projects. We know what's out there. Hivebrite can't be beat.

It is was nice to work with such an experienced partner in community management, that not only offers good value for money, but also offers good advice in building a professional community platform.

Pros

I especially like the event user tap. Via Hivebrite, you can invite your members easily to an event and the platform ensures a smooth processing of payments. Furthermore, Hivebrite provides a platform, which completely undertakes the task of data management. If there is missing data of your members, you can easily start a campaign to collect the data you need. Since I am not an IT nerd, I really enjoy the user friendliness and the intuitive handling of the platform. Our alumni and student community is really happy about our new homepage. Especially the live feed and the weekly digest, which summarizes news, forum discussions or job opportunities, has become a must read for every community member.

Cons

Some features are not costumizable, but the Hivebrite team is doing the best to fulfill the special requirements of an alumni association and takes every suggestion into consideration.

Advice to Others

Finally, I can really recommend the hivebrite professional community platform and the team that stands behind it.

Hivebrite are incredibly professional, the team are highly competent, very flexible to our needs and solution focussed in their approach.

Pros

The software is very easy to use, simplistic for the user on the front-end and adaptable to our needs

Seriously.

I found Hivebrite at the very end of an exhaustive search of over 50 different alumni management platforms. After countless platform demos that would generally end with having witnessed a feature/function-poor platform, or witnessing a polished platform that cost 3x or 4x what my non-profit was looking to spend, I met Jean, who gave me a tour of the Hivebrite platform. I think at one point I literally asked Jean 'What's the catch?' because I didn't get it: Hivebrite was the sexiest, most-feature-rich platform I had seen, yet its price point was one of the lowest of all the vendors I had vetted.

There was no catch. Jean and his team have built'and are continuing to evolve'an incredibly sophisticated alumni management and engagement platform. Let me expound just a bit on a few points:

»»Cooler. Richer functionality.
- The overall structure of the site is clean and tastefully executed.
- The map interface of the `Events' of `People' is not just slick, but also super-functional as an intuitive and inviting way for alumni to engage with relevant fellow alumni and happenings. It's leaps and bounds better than anything I had seen from any provider.
- With its ability to have alumni create `pitch pages' for their businesses and ventures, interact in group and forum tabs, post and attend events together, Hivebrite simply does more'and does it better'than any other provider. Hivebrite's functionality actually gave me ideas on how I can create engagement with alumni that I had not previously thought of.
- Targeting a specific segment of your alumni for an email campaign is perfectly straightforward. Did I mention they have integrated email-campaign analytics?
- With all this functionality housed under one roof, I no longer need to waste time toggling back and forth between my alumni CRM/Eventbrite/MailChimp/etc.

»»More flexible.
- When you talk to the support team at Hivebrite, if the answer isn't 'Yes', it's 'We'll make that a priority in our next iteration'. They have integrated many, many adaptation requests into their platform, and their platform is what it is today largely due to them improving based upon their client feedback. They have really valued my input and make me feel like we are on a team together, working to develop an awesome solution for my alumni and for my organization. That means the world to me.

Thank you Jean, Flo, and the whole Hivebrite team for helping me do more for my alumni.

It has been a great pleasure to work with Hivebrite team and to introduce this platform to alumni. As a luxury institution, we needed a unique product that would offer a high-quality solution for our end-users and optimise the current alumni network. This is exactly what we got from Hivebrite - a true win-win solution: a user-friendly and fun platform for alumni; and simple management and strong support for the alumni association.
The platform offers an easy-access to the alumni from anywhere and more opportunities to engage and stay connected.
Moreover, the Hivebrite team is constantly improving everyone's experience by actively listening to suggestions and finding innovative solutions for all requests.

Pros

The features offered by Hivebrite platform are very useful for both end-users and the administrator, for example:
- The possibility to connect with channels like LinkedIn simplifies the login for users: one less password to remember! And the simpler it is, the greater number of people will stay connected which will facilitate the administrators' jobs.
- The interactive map and "check-ins" are an excellent tool for alumni to find each others and strengthen the network.
- The possibility to create chapters is one of the most important features for our network. Through the chapter live feed, alumni can discuss the popular topics in their countries or organize more gatherings independently. For administrator, this feature helps in chapter management and creating greater alumni communities around the world.

But the greatest advantage of this platform is that it is constantly improving. The Hivebrite team takes every suggestion into consideration in order to develop new features that enhance the users' experience even further. I cannot give them enough positive feedback!

Being still a relatively young company (compared to Graduway, Simplicity, Intraworld...), Hivebrite is proposing a solution that benefits from a wide knowledge of the existing solutions, but with the force of a solid foundation based on Ruby/Ruby on Rails and flexible architecture. The Team is really professional in its answers to our Request for Proposals