June/Jul 2010
Open for Business: Convio Summer Blockbuster
by Casey Flinn, Senior Product Manager, Convio
Summer is known as the season of blockbuster movies. While Convio might not shine like the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, the Summer 2010 release is sure to be a hit for nonprofits wanting their online presence to be Oscar-worthy. The theme of this release is “open for business,” and while Convio is always open for business, this release marks significant milestones in our continued leadership of being THE open platform for online fundraising, as well as, game-changing enhancements to data management and new ways to leverage the power of social media.
This release is much more than a ton of new features. The goal of this release isn’t to just be “open for business,” but to really deliver functionality that can help you change the way you do business. Let’s take a look at a few of the highlights.
Innovative and Open Platform
Delivering our user community more access to extend the Convio platform remains key to our mission of empowering online engagement with your constituents. In this latest release, we are delivering new Advocacy APIs, Custom Interactions and Open Authentication. With our new Advocacy APIs, you can engage with third-party sites and drive interaction via petitions and action alerts on those sites. This opens doors to create website widgets and other reusable components. Now, you can focus on placing your message where your audience is today (e.g., affiliate/partner sites, social media sites) versus having to pull them back into your website. Complementary to this, Custom Interactions allow you to define any type of interaction and track them accordingly. Now you can let the need of the campaign/program drive its execution and track the interaction.
Finally, one of the most revolutionary new tools at your disposal is our Open Authentication. The gist is that you can provide your constituents the ability to register and login on Convio-hosted pages using their Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. accounts. This has a profound impact on your constituents, because they can use their preferred credentials and not the ones you make them use. This will reduce duplicate account creation caused by people who forget their password and end up creating new accounts. This constituent-centric approach is exactly what your constituents want and in the long run, it creates an easier process that will help increase your site registrations and encourage logins. The fact that Open Authentication will help with your duplicate account is extremely beneficial to your data management.
Quality Data Management
How many of you struggle with getting good data in, keeping bad data out and sustaining that every minute of the day? I will go out on a limb here and say...everyone! With quality data management, we took a radical new approach to this problem; we want you to have the most accurate constituent database of record available.
This functionality is important to understand, because not only will we be cleaning data (e.g., properly formatting names, checking for common misspellings, physical and email address validation) as it is entered into Convio, but we will enable you to configure a scoring threshold that allows for duplicates to either be automatically merged or manually queued for review. It will allow you to reverse merged records even after you have merged them.
I know data management isn’t that exciting (apologies to all the Database Administrators out there), but having an accurate and reliable constituent data is not only “exciting” but critical. Our new Quality Data Management initiative will help transform your business by saving administrative and IT costs associated with duplicate accounts and will enable you to have the most accurate constituent information for your marketing and engagement programs.
Going Social with Convio
The words, “Hey everyone...check out this link,” are powerful for your advocates to spread your mission and message through their social networks. Convio now provides you with an integrated solution to implement social sharing functionality for the most popular sites on your Convio-hosted pages.
We aren’t changing the paradigm of sharing: See it, click it, share it. Instead, we are providing best-in-breed social sharing functionality that you can implement via our WYSIWYG controls and report on all from within Convio. This drives the goal of making social media connections easy to add to your online marketing toolkit and more importantly, it will provide you with data that can inform and drive your social media strategy.
These new enhancements will enable you to change the way you do business, and provide solutions for the challenges of today or the foundation on which to build your next big initiative. While we at Convio love the “open for business” theme and how it fits our strategic vision and this new release, the importance of the theme relates to you and your mission. We are rolling out the red carpet for this blockbuster, and the Convio paparazzi wants to know "What does “open for business” mean to you and how can these new additions to the Convio platform help you get there?" Share your comments below.
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