SignUpGenius in Charlotte offers an event sign up and registration site and service for entities organizing small groups, with payment processing, email and text reminding, forms with visual design themes and templates, among other features.
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Acuity Scheduling, a Squarespace company
Score 9.6 out of 10
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Acuity Scheduling is an appointment management platform developed by the company of the same name in New York and acquired by Squarespace in 2019.
SignUpGenius is a great option for teachers and instructors looking to find a digital way to have their students sign up for anything that involves "slots," whether those slots are temporal/time-based (e.g., presentation days/times that are pre-scheduled), or whether they are more abstract (e.g., a limited range of subjects or topics that students need to pick from). Its free version is ad-supported, does not require registration, and operates primarily using links within emails for authentication, so while it isn't necessarily "secure," it is perfect for situations where the honor system is enough.
I think any business can benefit from Acuity Scheduling. In my experience, however, and maybe I just haven’t found the correct settings yet, it’s been difficult to manage 4 business schedules with multiple employees and varying hours that change day-to-day and week-to-week. So I definitely would recommend it to more simple business models with set hours, as it seems like it would have all the functions one might need. I still would recommend to more complex businesses like mine as well, but also include discussion of some of the potential drawbacks.
Post-sign up communications - allows for pre-event communication to specific rsvp types or to all respondents
Post-event reporting - allows for export of signup information
Easy to use - for our community, both management and volunteers use SignUpGenius to facilitate participation and planning for a wide variety of events and activities
Clicking on the link opens up my calendar, which has an uncluttered look, making it easy for my prospects and clients to review their options and make their choice.
I am able to customize my schedule, the types of appointments I want to offer, and even decide how many appointments I want in a day. There are so many details that I can customize.
I can customize how my calendar and emails look for my prospects and clients so that I come across professional and coordinated. I want the look of my business, website, etc. to have a polished, cohesive, and interesting presence.
I love that there is a workshop/class/series option for my workshops. My attendees reserve their place and pay upfront. I can duplicate these events or add future dates. It's wonderful. This saves us a lot of time and is so convenient.
I haven't had any trouble with my scheduler. It works flawlessly, so I don't have to take time out of my day to fix, troubleshoot or call customer service.
I love that I can add questions for my prospects to answer right away before booking a call. This means 3 fewer steps for me. 1. They answer these questions without an email from me. 2. They make their reservation and get a follow-up email, right away. 3. I customized the follow-up email with more details and actions to take to prepare for our call.
I think an area that needs improvement is allowing for more than 5 slots at a time. I would like to see at least 10 offered instead of having to keep adding 5 at a time.
Adding additional templates or templates in which you can just change a color selection would be great. Really utilize this for school PTO/Booster Clubs would be beneficial. Cater to them.
Allowing for a 'cheaper' price than what you have for the souped up version would be nice as well.
Acuity Scheduling has been very reliable. If you don't believe me, check out their status page here. They do a pretty decent job maintaining their app. To be fair, it's a pretty simple tool so they shouldn't run into too many hiccups given it doesn't feature near as many options as other applications on the market run.
It's just very intuitive once you get the hang of it, which won't take long. They try not to make complex things very complex and they provide explanations for everything with a greyed-out question mark icon next to the function. Also, I love that they encourage people to just get live help when they need it.
I don't have any feedback for support because I have not had to use support (if referring to IT support). If this question is in referral to support from other staff/company, then it has been received well in that sense.
Every time I had a question on how to do something or had any issues with Acuity Scheduling, mainly in the very beginning, when I was learning the platform, customer service was excellent. They were prompt to respond, friendly, and very helpful until I had the right solution.
We briefly used another sign-up website called "Bring the Cups."Needless to say, this website did not nearly offer the same amount of robust features as SignUpGenius did. Bring the Cups was streamlined and simple, but it bordered on simplistic. In all honesty, Bring the Cups did not nearly meet our needs the way SignUpGenius did. Consequently, I returned to using SignUpGenius as quickly as possible.
Acuity's user interface was much cleaner and easier to use when scheduling meetings. We love that you can embed it within your own website and it shows the calendar right there instead of redirecting you. Acuity gave us the ability to customize our meeting types and the information collected from the person scheduling the meeting.
Students and even other staff love it! It improved the turn-around time from when I respond to student requests for academic coaching to setting up the intake meeting about 50%. Also, in the case that I respond quickly but the student is delayed several days, the link I sent is still live and always has relevant dates and times (whereas in the past, I would send a few days' worth of options and by the time a procrastinator looked at them, they were passed).
It's an easy, mobile-friendly option that helps students to see that we're with it, not trapped in the stone age. That factors into their overall perception of our department, our services and our organization.
