(3 votes, average: 3.33 out of 5)
Loading ...A lot of commercial websites are starting to use pre-built web applications to help them support their customers and offer a more social customer experience. But I haven’t seen many charities using them!
Pre-built web applications mean that you can get up and running immediately with no development costs or time consuming projects. The applications are fully supported and you pay a smaller fee to use them (usually on a monthly basis). A lot of web applications are free for charities, or at least have discounts.
Here are the ones that I really like…
http://www.zendesk.com/
http://getsatisfaction.com/
https://uservoice.com/
We recently used User Voice with a client and their supporters have really got involved in giving them useful feedback about their web experience. It’s really helped them prioritise what they should be offering their users.
ANYONE ELSE OUT THERE TESTING THESE & GETTING POSITIVE RESULTS??
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#1 by Byrnie on February 18th, 2010
I think this is a great idea to get something to market quickly and save costs. But charities must realise that there is no scope for bespoke development and must be happy with WYSIWYG.
Great example of this is GivenGain – http://www.givengain.com – full donations platform for minimal price and modularised so charities pay for what they need. Another great one is MailChimp. Quick and easy email platform which can scale according to need.
Having said this, I would not recommend doing any of this without a clear plan and strategy as to
1. what the actual benefit of doing this outside of the business is?
2. what happens to data and privacy of that data?
3. data and ecommerce security – in some cases these external apps are more secure that what businesses/ charities would build themselves – especially in relation to PCI compliance
4. How do you get any customer/ supporter data back into the business?
5. How sustainable it is – what’s the long term plan?
6. How do you track it’s effectiveness, if at all?
If you can answer these questions and you know exactly why you’re doing it and what you’ll save then go ahead
#2 by Nick Burne on February 18th, 2010
I agree with your points.
But I also think that applications for email and donations are some of the top priorities for charities and are therefore core to getting right when it comes to data compliance and security etc. But building a custom socially-driven supporter service area of a website is never going to be top priority and get investment, so it’s great that charities (even charities with big budgets) can launch these apps in litterally minutes!