Due diligence. It’s a real thing. And associations need to do if it they’re shopping around for an online community platform. You must explore your options! It was our pleasure to team up with SocialFish for the 2014 Online Community Software Selection Guide — there were more than 3,000 downloads! We’re doing it again for 2015 and we’re proud to announce the participants. Listed alphabetically:
CareHubs: Relatively new on the scene, this online community platform’s killer app is the fact that it’s HIPAA-compliant. CareHubs allows doctors and other medical professionals to communicate and collaborate online while staying on the right side of the US government’s HIPAA mandate.
Causeway: If your organization’s volunteers are highly collaborative, this could be the right platform for you. Causeway has a clean, intuitive user interface and boasts reply-by-email functionality that’s sure to help your organization overcome barriers to engagement. They’re one of two vendors offering a free trial on-demand.
HigherLogic: This online community vendor is the market-share leader in the association and nonprofit space. Higher Logic has spent the past year overhauling their design framework (it’s beautiful) and updating their email functionality. This year they’ve also partnered with us on the Essentials of Online Community Management course.
Kavi Workspace: If your organization produces ANSI or ISO certified standards — or does any work that follows a rigorous process that needs to be audited periodically — Kavi has you covered. Pronounced “KUH-vee“, this collaboration platform’s sweet spot is helping scientific and technical societies advance standards through an approval process. Also offers an on-demand free trial.
Small World Labs: An enterprise class online community platform that — for all the power under the hood — is as easy for community administrators to use as it is for end-users. Groundbreaking feature: Action Workflows, which automates many routine community tasks, enabling your staff to focus on higher-impact tasks.
Socious: A well-known option in the association and nonprofit market, this enterprise grade community is a BIG product with many lesser-known features to surprise and delight their customers. With a new consulting division, Socious is positioned to offer an end-to-end community solution to its clients.
YourMembership.com: It’s as if a full-featured Association Management System and community platform got together and lived happily ever after. This is as tight an integration between online community platform and AMS as we’ve encountered, offering a best-in-class social CRM solution for even small associations.
BE THE FIRST TO GET A COPY OF THE 2015 GUIDE
Keep your eye out late this year, when we’ll release the 2015 comprehensive Online Community Software Selection Guide. Within its pages, you’ll learn much more about these vendors, who helped offset the cost of producing the guide. Click here to reserve your copy.
