Vovici Releases Next Generation Community & Panel Management Platform
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Oct 13, 2009
Yesterday was Columbus Day in the United States-always an odd celebration, as we remember a man who discovered a new world (new to Europeans anyway) and yet insisted to his grave that he had just discovered a shortcut to an old world. Vovici celebrated Columbus Day with the latest release of our flagship product. Shortcut to the old world or unlocking a new world?
Our Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria are our three main modules: Survey Workbench, Community Builder and Feedback Intelligence. For this new release, we've extended the functionality of two of the modules.
- For the Community Builder, where organizations conduct qualitative research, we've streamlined the registration process for new members and added support for open membership communities (previous communities were invitation only). And we've made it easier for organizations to move from their existing communities by supporting bulk loading of new members and bulk permission-setting for existing members. We've added or enhanced modules for polling, idea voting and member profiles.
- For the Survey Workbench, where organizations structure quantitative research, our new panelist health scoring tracks the participation of individual panelists and of the panel overall. Of course, the value of panels is converting panelists into respondents: survey authors can now view and report on the delivery, unsubscribe, open, and click-through rates for any survey-invitation or reminder e-mail campaign. For appropriately configured surveys, panelists can see how their answers compare to other responses so far.
We've made 25 significant additions to the product and many smaller additions, based on the feedback of hundreds of customers. In some ways, these may seem like incremental changes to a core platform: shortcuts to the old world. But Market Research Online Communities (MROCs) and survey panels enable a new world of research: use the community for ideation and general feedback, discovering items of importance to your customers that you never would have thought to survey, then use the panel to quantify how widespread interest in these ideas is, so that you set the correct course through many priorities.
Almost every other feedback platform out there is either about community or panels. Both have their weaknesses when used in isolation. This latest release of the Vovici platform represents the best of both quantitative and qualitative worlds. And the extent of the value of that discovery is only beginning to be known.