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
I'll chime in to second Michaela's theme. The thing I've seen be most overlooked on this front is the costs of upgrades. Anytime you take on something custom, you hold the responsibility for keeping things compatible. Many times you can get lucky and the upgrades won't have any relevant impact, but then the expense is testing time. But there will always be some change that ends up requiring a reinvestment. The tie-in from the other system may still be worth it, but maintenance is a very real factor.