Populi Erfahrungen

This product was in place when I arrived in my role supporting it. It seems to be the choice of many smaller (< 300 student) post-secondary schools. It has served us well for tracking student records but there are lots of little annoyances that cause us to adjust our workflows in order to use the product. It would seem if you had no processes in place and wanted to follow their recommended ones, it would suit you well.

We couldn't be happier. Our sales contact gave us multiple demos of the different modules, trained us and was there for us during every step of the implementation. Everything was done remotely but it works well and there is no additional cost, which is extraordinary. I have helped implement three different SIS systems and the data transfer to Populi was the most efficient and painless I have experienced. The customer support is responsive and goes above and beyond what I expected. Overall they seem to really care about our success and we enjoy working with them.

Pros
Easy to register, add students, course scheduling. Fast customer service however, not very satisfying responds.
Cons
It is not user friendly, very difficult to customize features. Even sending emails to selected students is a hassle. Adding meeting times to courses is awfully difficult and annoying. If you are a new, small institution and need statistics / have to be able to pull out a data any minute when requested I would not recommend this product. Our application information wasn't transferring to system and we found out after customer service that our application was not set right. The reason for that is Populi updated their admissions feature a while ago but our applications were not adopted to new system. So I had to enter age, gender, address, email etc manually for the each student in the system to be able to have an accurate data. No help offered for an error caused by their own management system! Again reporting features lack accuracy and not customizable.
For accreditation purposes I found this system not reliable, I will start looking for alternatives.

Populi is a terrific platform for integrating various data silos across your organization. We moved from a number of different databases into Populi recently, and the combination of all of our information in one place has streamlined our communication process with incoming students and allowed us to more easily collaborate in helping students through processes like enrollment and financial aid. We've struggled with finding some features at times, and in the case of marketing automation, we've discovered that Populi's system isn't quite fully-featured enough for our needs. The UI, also, has a dated feel. Nevertheless, it's a solid, stable platform that gives us integrated access to our contacts.

Populi seems to be an overall better experience than Canvas both from the user standpoint and the administrator standpoint. It is nice having all of the information I need for my classes right at my fingertips.

I have enjoyed Populi. Great team, great price, and a product that works great for our very small online higher education institution.

Populi has good qualities for registration, communication, and finance. You have to have an internet connection for the lecture files as they are not downloadable audio/video. Would be nice if they added more controls for the notifications within a class discussion.
And icons - we are past the DOS era

Ease of use and confidence that the company stands behind their product and ready to assist the suer.

We use Populi as a database for our prospective and current students, alumni, workshop attendees, donors, and general community members. We use it for marketing of events and courses, overall communications with our leads and community. We also use it to manage the academic requirements and assignments of our current students. It has overall streamlined the process of review of student work, communication and discussion between faculty and students, among students, and allowed us to consider distance learning models for our upcoming courses. Overall, the experience has been great!

Our company has had no one who wishes we could go back to the way it was before Populi. Support has been consistently helpful, patient, and nearly always impressively prompt. I think it would be true to say we have never enjoyed this level of qualified, friendly support from any other software vendor.

I believe it's a good product and it has good potential, given the team's impressive efforts toward meet the rapid changing needs of their current and future customers.

Overall Populi has been a very solid product for e-learning. Although it is not an elegant or beautiful UX, it gets the job done and would be a fine solution for any online learning needs.

Populi does everything we need it to do, where in the past we've had to use multiple programs for grading, attendance, and messaging. It does seem a bit basic and simple, but it gets the job done.

Bethlehem College and Seminary is a small Christian college which sprung from Bethlehem Baptist Church and the preaching of John Piper. For over 10 years, Bethlehem Baptist had a non-degree granting institution. In 2009, after John Piper encouraged the leadership to launch a seminary, we realized that managing student data and finances would be critical. This began a search for low cost college management software that was designed for school with less than 500 students.

In 2009, there were few options. In addition to low cost and designed for small schools, we wanted a web-based solutions, because we did not have the resources or personnel to run our own servers. In addition, we are an Apple shop, and most all college management software ran on Windows servers.

Then we discovered Populi. With a flat monthly rate and a low per student monthly rate, Populi fit our financial model. In addition, Populi was web-based. This meant that we did not need to purchase any additional hardware, and all of our staff, faculty, and students were able to access the software without any additional client side software besides a web browser.

The Populi staff worked hard to help us transition our Excel files of student data into their database. They answered the phone in person and assisted us with all of our configuration. The website was simple enough that we learned on the fly. With any new venture, there are bumps and hiccups along the way, but we were able to work through those.

Over the last 5 years, we have grown at nearly 25% per year. Populi has seamlessly grown with us. They continue to improve the product and provide additional services, and so far, have not raised the price.

One recent improvement was additional Admissions applications. Since we are both a college and seminary, it was very important for us to have two different application processes. This solved a lot of headaches for us.

Five years later, this school is still very thankful for Populi.

Even though, I had some trouble with pulling data previously with customer support we had overcome most of the obstacles. I believe with right training the program can accommodate most of our needs as small institution. I highly recommend populi to small institutions like us with an advise to inquire and receive proper training when you initial start using it. Don't hesitate to ask for training and make sure to allow your staff a time for training.

Overall I liked using Populi. It made doing school from a distance very convenient.

We've been working with Populi for about 10 months at a small liberal arts college in Shanghai, China, and we've found it remarkably full-featured; its suite of tools -- it handles everything from online registration to interactive course shells to finances/student billing -- offers more than we're even using. Access to the system is based on user-roles, with roles ranging from student through system admin. Because it's web-based, it works anywhere (including in China) on a variety of browsers (we've used Firefox, Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Opera, and Midori).

I could go on. To get a sense of everything Populi has to offer, it's worth visiting their site. Before we started working with Populi, I researched traditional SIS systems and software, and learned that we'd never be able to afford it for a program our size. Populi is designed for colleges like ours, and the pricing is reasonable and scaled to institution size. Frankly, I it's hard to believe what we get for the money.

There are few drawbacks to using Populi that aren't common to other SIS systems. Among these, role-based access means that non-advising faculty aren't able easily to view course listings for a given term, for example. And few users have access to the full course catalog within the system. However, it's easy to export any of these sorts of things for sharing. More importantly, the user forums provide a place for feature requests, and these are often implemented, as the process of building and improving the system appears to be earnest and ongoing.

Finally, customer service has been great. We've made a few mistakes -- most recently, I managed to delete several months worth of teaching evaluations -- that the support team at Populi were able to help us recover from very quickly.

Increased data reporting functionality and low cost.

All possible

The software itself works great for our information and data retrieval.

Previous 2 SIS software were expensive and hard to use. Populis has been a much better fit with staff and students