Tech Review: Guru

Guru allows team members to create flashcards (called “Guru cards”) and share them with each other from a centralised intranet. It features artificial intelligence (AI) to identify trending topics at the organisation, the ability to import data, and works with other commonly used office tools such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Teams.

Charity Digital’s Chief Operating Officer, Alice Roche, introduced the tool to the charity, and here she reviews her experience using it in Charity Digital’s 22-person team.

In one word

Transformational!

Uses

We use Guru internally in Charity Digital – it’s fantastic because it is an electronic knowledge base. This is really, really good for staff turnover, which we know is obviously a big issue in the charity sector.

It’s especially great for me as a manager and a leader in the org because I manage lots of different teams with different knowledge.

At first, we started using the product only in one department, which was our customer success team, but now I am super thrilled that we are using it across every department in the entire org.

It’s such an incredible tool for onboarding new starters, for knowledge about your services, anything that your staff need to know can sit in this one electronic place. We also write down our processes there with each team, it really does improve how streamlined things are.

We have over 200 product lines in our catalogue, so it has been totally revolutionary for system knowledge for our customer success team.

Features

Guru’s most notable features are being able to create and capture content from anywhere, being able to customise your pages, being able to use templates, and my favourite feature? Importing pdfs, Word docs, and PowerPoint presentations! It makes creating your Guru content so easy.

The learning curve

I think this product is so self-explanatory and easy to use. I’d had no prior usage of Guru, but I found the company themselves had brilliant how-to guides and videos on their website. Their resources were excellent!

Value for money

We got great charity pricing and we were also able to have a free trial for a few weeks to get a sense of whether we would use it, which I always think is really helpful.

Pros and cons of Guru

The pros:

•  Very intuitive and easy-to-use system
•  Has fantastic integrations and has a browser plugin so you can search your Guru cards any time you need super quickly

The cons:

• They have taken away the “light user” functionality which means you don’t get free users anymore, all are “core”, however we are totally fine with that. We just started off with a couple of core users, and once we knew more staff wanted access, that’s when we increased our licences

Final score

10/10 - I absolutely love it!

Alice is the Chief Operating Officer for Charity Digital, deputy to the CEO and manages 75% of the business internally. Alice is responsible for all operations internally and leads on the business strategy of the organisation with the senior leadership team. She is responsible for driving strategic growth and progress in multiple areas, i.e Growth of Audience and revenue and Needs Based Selling within the Customer Success team. Alice also sits on committees and board meeting and leads on the people and culture of the organisation.