Hello, everyone!
My name is Rhonette Smith and I am the PR Assistant for Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. We are brandy new to Tessitura and are excited to be part of the community.
We are currently looking for software to monitor the following areas: Email marketing, social media management and analytics, and a communications help center/ticket system.
We've done a few demos with Wordfly and Prospect2 since they are among those with an easy integration with Tessitura and currently use Zoho Social for social media. However, Zoho offers a bundle called Zoho CRM+ which would be encompass all three of our needs at a reasonable price, but with some limitations in each software (i.e. image size requirements in Zoho Social, no dynamic layout options in Zoho Desk).
I was pretty happy with Wordfly's capabilities and feel it may be a great fit for us for email marketing. Zoho Social has been pretty great for social media management as well. However, the convenience of Zoho CRM+ (with its limitations) is also appealing since we would have our marketing tools in a central location. Our options are to either choose separate SaaS companies for each need, or sacrifice the quality due to the pricing. The major downfall is that it does not have an integration with Tessitura, which is vital.
Does anyone have any experience with working with outside companies to create a direct integration with another CRM/
Thanks in advance!
Rhonette
Hi Rhonette, Welcome to Tessitura!
Boston Ballet uses WordFly, and although not perfect (nothing is!) it works pretty well for us. I've not worked with Zoho before, but one thing I can tell you, when you are factoring in the pricing, think about the cost of doing an integration with Zoho (either through Tessitura Consulting or another agency). It always ends up costing more than you think it will, and my experience is that you always end up sacrificing the things that made it the convenient in the long run. Naturally that is only my opinion, and others may feel differently but sometimes the cost & convenience is just an illusion.
best,
Michaela