OpenWater Reviews

I like having all my symposium submission data in one place and the ability to run reports.

There is a steep learning curve if you are brining new team members on to manage the platform. It is not an intuitive platform. I don't like the website platform. It lacks the ability to have more customizable features. I end up not using the website for my event because aesthetically it is not appealing. I wish the virtual display of submissions. Public view was better. It looks outdated.

It's very easy to use and works intuitively in a lot of ways. When I took over administering the contest, I had to learn how to manage it on my own and it didn't take a lot of work to do that. The customer service overall has been excellent.

I'd like more options for customizing reports. For instance, entries are often submitted by contest coordinators who don't need to be part of the reports. We'd like to focus on the entrants themselves but the report configurations won't allow that.

Customer support was responsive when we had any issues

I did not like the way it is designed, it is not easy to navigate.

The options and customization for each program. The support team is also great.

Finding where to update items. When you copy a program it can be difficult to find where to update items. For example, when changes need to be made in public settings.

I like the customization, quality of support via Open Water support specialist, ease of use, and ability to pull data

More training sessions offered, more information on grant tracking, integrations with salesforce and MailChimp. Email Wizard can be tricky.

OpenWater's system is powerful and elegant. I'm only a daily user fwhen our contest is live, approximately half the year. I'm always pleasantly surprised by the improvements they've made when I open the next year's contest. I suspect that we are not using OpenWater's system to its full potential, but what we do utilize more than works for us. Their self-help guides are useful and when they're not, customer service is available (see caveat below). I have had several different dedicated service advisors; all have been uniformly excellent. Our entrants and judges find the system easy to use.

Communication is mostly by email. If you want a phone call, you need to make an appointment. That said, they are highly responsive when rare problems arise.

Top Notch Customer Service Representatives. I never had to wait for someone to help when I needed it. Ease of implementation. User satisfaction. Virtually effortless to maintain and copy to the next year award cycle.

I have not found anything to complain about or wish I could have. Our last awards and scholarship was such a horrible software--Open Water has been a dream come true. The obstacle we have had the most problem with is our emails from the Open Water system getting through to our customers/users and not going to their spam accounts.

We like OpenWater because it is a good platform for capturing information from our applicants. Customizable forms allow us to streamline operations and reduce the amount of time spent on administrative tasks... items like acceptance forms, photos, bios, and the like can all be collected in a passive way that makes it easy to collect and store in one place and now I don't have to worry about losing this in my inbox.

Some items can be a bit difficult to set up. The e-mail system is a particular issue - other submission systems and CRMs have one central email module where emails are generated using substitution variables, and are able to be created from a template. OpenWater's system is program-dependent (as opposed to being uniform system-wide). Wish this would get fixed.

OpenWater is very easy to use. The training videos and knowledge base are extensive and easy to use. The support team is superb - always available and willing to help. I have a dedicated support member, so there is excellent consistency. She knows our organization, she knows our program, and she knows our needs.

I would like more user-friendly reports. It would be nice to create my own custom reports a bit more easily. But this is not a deal-breaker. It likely has more to do with the kinds of complex reports I'm looking for than OpenWater's ability to provide good reporting.

My organization has been using OpenWater for a little over a year and it has been a life-saver for our company. We love it! It is easy to teach yourself things, and admin can reach out to customer service for calls and for help. There are many help articles. You are able to have applications, judging, and surveys. Open Water is very versatile.

While Open Water is easy to navigate and teach yourself, it is also very intricate. There are so many things that can be done in Open Water and so many different ways to do them that sometimes it is difficult to teach others how to use the program.

We weren't actively looking for a contest management solution but a Sales representative reached out to gauge our interest in OpenWater, after hearing about our Construction Intern Awards scholarship program. Up until that point we had been using Wordpress to manage this competition, which included a lot of manual maintenance, popular voting plugins, a bulky media gathering process, entry content display...

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Our contest is set up in a pretty unconventional way (weekly popular vote-based contests combined with a separate traditional scholarship application), and OpenWater has done a good job of keeping up with our requests. There are several smaller, nit-picky things about the popular vote functionality that could be improved but it's still better than what we were doing before. Another factor that we've had to work around is the fact that the contest dashboard looks the same for everyone who visits the dashboard, regardless of user type (applicant/judge/voter), which can be confusing for some users.

I like that we CAN integrate this software into our database and have our users log in using their credentials used in our site and have some fields pre-populated.

The multiple ways to access the emails and the judging settings. It would be easier to have a main area on the dashboard of the admin panel and be able to tie the information to a program. Would like to eliminate the number of places to remember to go set up. It also does not tie into our database to update a status as paid.

I love OpenWater. Not only is the system easy to use and to customize to your specific program, but the customer service is phenomenal. Any time I have a question or concern they respond immediately, and also do our external client-facing customer service as well.

We are currently working with our support reps to add in a few more layers of customization that aren't currently options (adding a level of won proposal, not won proposal, but also a third option).

We purchased the software primarily for abstracts collection, which the OpenWater platform excels at, but what we have found most appealing about the software is that its flexibility and ease of configuration have allowed us to apply it to many other areas to replace aging legacy, custom built software solutions (awards, elections, nominations).

There's very little negative I have to say, but if I had to quibble with anything it would be sometimes the form and report building tools are a little clunky for nontechnical staff, but that's a pretty nitpicky complaint for such a powerful tool.

In our organization the greatest asset for this software is the ability to host multiple sites. We're able to put application opportunities on separate secure platforms, each for different audiences.

The round options and judging settings are not automatically user-friendly. Another staff member had to spend some time explaining the features in detail before anyone from my team could use the product. For instance it isn't clear that the open round automatically has judging set up based on which program type is selected. And there is no testing feature- in order to test the application portal you must open the submission round. We also had to switch which staff would have super-user status since only two are allowed.

So easy to use, the software has self explanatory navigation, intuitive organization and all the functionalities we need for our awards programs. If issues do arise (though not that often!), the immediate customer support and service streamlines our work-flow and save us time and headaches. The OpenWater team truly does respond within 10 minutes of opening the chat box, which hovers conveniently but covertly on every page of the site when you are logged in as primary admin. (Shout out to the rep who always provides instant solutions!) The platform is ever improving. We are always finding new updates within the interface and its capabilities that are obviously informed by customer feedback. They truly are the most receptive and adaptive team we've worked with.

If the software team weren't so amazingly immediately responsive, we could have small grievances to list in this cons corner, but all gripes are attended to and abolished within the same day they are discovered. So the only issue this leaves us with is one that really does have a solution, but one that requires more funds: We have multiple awards programs running at once, and although the upgrade is available to have additional programs open simultaneously, it would be an economical advantage to be able to have at least one more program live within the payment plan we are currently using. This wish aside, OpenWater and their team have been nothing less than one of our best investments to date.

- It integrates well with our CRM but still flexible for users to find/create/consolidate when needed - Clear workflow for admins to manage programs, including dates, forms, reports, rules, communications - Awesome customer service. Seriously. - All "programs" can function together (other abstract management software programs have issues flowing data between functions or are managed by service reps who never cross over) - Staff works hard to understand our needs and keep us on track

- App still in development, but scheduled for beta release in 2019

Once I get a tutorial on what i'm looking to accomplish, the software is easy enough to manipulate to do on my own without having to bother my customer rep.

Some items aren't intuitive. Making reports etc. And it looks like the new interface of the portal isn't as easy on the eyes as the past look. But that might just take some getting used to.

It is fairly user friendly, which is always very nice and allows for us to continue to use and learn the program.

Sometimes updating the website portion is difficult and you do need to know how to code/html coding. If you don't know that, you aren't able to fix small issues because they are buried in the background of the coding.

It is extremely configurable and the company is very responsive to the needs of the customer. They have added features and functionalities that were not available so that they could suit our needs.

Some of the native reporting features could use improvement but were created for us at our request. It would be nice to be able to duplicate entries from a 2 step program into a 1 step program.

The Open Water platform is one of the most robust and full-featured systems we've come across. It's extremely detailed and customizable, with the ability to adapt various templates to suit needs as simple or complex as you desire. Some of our favorite features include the external and internal linking within forms, program duplication, easy to create conditional child forms, and the autoscoring feature. However the best "feature" of Open Water is their customer service team. They are, hands down, the best CS team I have worked with out of hundreds of vendors in various industries. They are fast, polite, and know their product down to the smallest details.

After managing the Open Water platform as the primary admin over the course of nearly two years, I have no serious complaints. The platform has a steep learning curve and we have found it somewhat hard to retain configuration knowledge since the system makes it so easy to duplicate past programs, so we rarely start a new one from scratch. When we do we sometimes need to reach out to the OW team for a refresh, which they are always happy to help with.

Although OpenWater is already very intuitive straight out of the box, I really like how support is just a chat button away. I receive instant, friendly, expert support whenever I have questions or concerns. No waiting on support tickets! They also have an excellent collection of pictorials, videos and docs on their academy site: http://academy.getopenwater.com/v2. Last but not least - OpenWater actually listens to their customers. If we have an idea or would like to see something changed, they submit it into a queue for review and if approved, it's implemented. They have used a couple of my suggestions in the past two years.

Some areas could use better means of access. For instance - I think that project-related themes and websites should be available from within their own navigation menu. This is really not even a "CON" for me. It's just a matter of opinion. I'm also not particularly fond of the checklist process that was recently added, but I can see how others could find this useful, especially new users.

Thanks for your comments and suggestions. The checklists you reference can be turned off, I'll have a support rep reach out to you with more info regarding that. Also your feedback is noted regarding the menu structure, we understand it can be tricky, especially with the number of websites and programs you manage.

Ease of programming, ability to change and update at any time. Functions such as cloning, email notifications, and form management.

There are many capabilities that we do not utilize. I would love to have more time to explore those.

OpenWater will do their best to add custom solutions to their platform.

The back end doesn't allow for easy manipulation of large amounts of data. Would be great to have a table view to edit data.

Hi Michael, Thanks for your review. We added a bulk edit view to our software. It covers many, but not all cases. Take a look here: http://academy.getopenwater.com/v2/articles/bulk-edit-view Your support rep will be reaching out to you with some more info about it.

It works all the time.

No cons were added to this review