How It Works
In Fond, you fund your company’s account upfront with points. Points are distributed on a regular basis to managers or all employees, depending on if you’ve enabled peer-to-peer recognition. If peer-to-peer is enabled, all users can give recognition to other users, with or without points. Points that users receive can be used to purchase gift cards, physical items, or used to cover employee expense reimbursements. Users can also get access to corporate discounts for many products and services. Point distributions refresh every month or quarter and do not roll over. Earned points do rollover and can be saved up, but unspent points are returned to the company when an employee leaves.
Pricing
Subscription Fees
For your subscription fees, you'll pay per user. The Fond platform is split into two products: Fond Rewards and Fond Perks. Fond Rewards enables the points and recognition aspects of the platform while Fond Perks enables access to Fond's library of corporate discounts.
The subscription fee you pay per user will depend on whether you get both Fond Rewards and Fond Perks, or decide to only use one. Fond requires you to contact them to get a quote for your subscription pricing.
Point/Reward Budget
You must fund your account's point reserve upfront. You can set your own exchange rate, so points can have an exchange rate of 1 point = $1 or something like 100 points = $1.
Getting Started
Fond has no free trial or free plan, so to access the platform, you must reach out to them to setup a demo. This progresses through a standard sales process until you are handed off to your Customer Success Manager.
This process allows you to get up and running fairly smoothly since you have direct guidance and implementation assistance, but perhaps because of this there is limited getting started documentation or in-app guidance.
Ease of Use
Fond’s interface is boilerplate, standard online software fare. Not poor by any means, but isn’t particularly appealing or slick.
With that being said, it’s fairly easy to navigate. The Fond homepage makes it easy to see how you navigate to rewards, view the company feed, or start giving recognition. Since this is the majority of most users’ activities, it’s hard to get lost and easy to dive in.
For admins, there’s quite a bit more navigation required as you must move between three main menus that increase in granularity: a menu that opens when you click your profile, followed by a submenu that runs along the top of the page, followed by a left-side menu. This can be a lot to navigate at first, but becomes fairly intuitive once you get used to it. Though you’ll still find yourself occasionally getting lost searching for a specific setting or function.
But worthy of note is Fond’s impressive search capability. You can search for general themes/topics when you don’t know exactly what you are looking for.
Fond also offers some good automation options to help reduce manual actions needed. Admins can send reward points to all users every month or schedule a one-time reward for all users.
Reward Catalog
Fond’s reward catalog features hundreds of gift cards as well as physical products that can be shipped to you. The markup on physical products is high, but these are likely the price points at which it makes sense for Fond to list and handle them. There are also cash out options such as prepaid Visa/Mastercards and Paypal.
Availability of rewards will depend on the location of the user. Some regions, such as developing countries, will have access to significantly less rewards.
Also, Fond gives you the flexibility to remove whatever you like from the default catalog if you want to focus on a few popular rewards or eliminate problematic rewards.
Integrations
HRIS
Fond offers several pre-made integrations with some of the leading HRIS platforms. These integrations allow you to keep your Fond users updated based on what happens in your HRIS. Employees that are removed in your HRIS, for example, would be automatically deactivated in Fond.
SSO
Single Sign On (SSO) lets your users sign in with the credentials they already use for other company software. Fond has some pre-made SSO integrations for common providers like Okta and Google. Fond also gives you the ability to add custom SSO setups with other providers using the SAML option.
Common Tool Integrations
Fond offers a limited selection of integrations with common business software such as Slack and Microsoft Teams/Outlook. These integrations allow your users to view and give recognition from the comfort of the tools they already use.
Additional Integrations
Fond offers a public API, but it's not entirely open as you must contact them to request access. It's not intended to allow users to develop their own custom programs/functionality, but more for HR platform companies to develop partner integrations.
Fond has a Chrome extension for Fond Perks. When installed, it alerts you whenever you are on a website that has an available corporate discount you can use through Fond.
Analytics & Reporting
Fond provides a diverse range of reports covering aspects of engagement, rewards, and perks. These reports offer a wealth of insight into conveniently predetermined categories, making it easy to get to the data that matters most to you, though most of these more niche reports can only be exported and don’t offer a way to quickly view the data from inside of Fond.
However, a few key statistics, like recognition history, do offer some useful visualizations of the data in the form of line graphs and pie graphs.
Users that are set as managers also have access to graphs and charts that allow them to review the performance of their team.
Support
Fond offers phone and email support.
Phone support coverage is strong with 24-hour availability for four days of the week and separate lines for different regions, though phone support is not available on the weekend or holidays.
Fond also has a help center with articles that cover most of the basics for admins and regular users. There are almost no help articles based on their integrations, however, so getting stuck here will require reaching out to your Customer Success Manager or support.
Additional Features
Fond Perks
Fond Perks is the other half of the Fond platform. While Fond Rewards has to do with the points, recognition, and rewards aspects of the platform, Fond Perks offers users access to a library of corporate discounts for products and services from a variety of well-known brands and companies.
Fond Perks allows companies to offer a comprehensive corporate discounts package to employees with none of the heavy lifting. Companies can add existing discounts they already have to the Perks catalog. And if users want a discount from a particular place, they can submit a request and Fond will negotiate the discount on the company’s behalf. Users can even share access to Perks discounts with their family members.
However, some of the discounts in the Perks catalog are no better than what you’d find on your own or through the respective company’s site.
Reimbursements
Companies can use Fond to manage employee expense reimbursement programs. In this case, users are granted Fond points that go into their annual wellness balance. Users can use these points to submit a reimbursement request by uploading a receipt and details of the expense. Admins can then approve or reject the request. The company must have an external process to add the reimbursement amount to the employee’s paycheck.
Nominations
Fond’s nomination feature allows you to create an award, like Employee of the Month, then let users vote on who the winner should be via a survey.
Mobile App
Fond has Apple and Android mobile apps which allow you to view and interact with the feed as well as give recognition from your phone. You can also cash in on rewards or discounts. The app also has a geolocation ability that allows you to view all available Fond Perks discounts overlaid onto a map of the nearby area.
Additional Notes
- The points attached to recognition aren’t publicly shown.
- Recognition can be made private.
- Has feed filters to filter recognition in the homepage feed by department, office country, office state, office city, or supervisor.
- Has automatic cost-of-living adjustments applied to rewards to account for users in diferent regions.
- Supports 6 languages: English, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish.
The Bottom Line
Fond's platform offers an almost daunting array of rewards and discounts for users and a healthy amount of program customizations and integrations for admins. This may be excessive or overwhelming for some, but provides you with everything you need to create a strong employee recognition program.
