Case Studies

Such a global focus meant that Water For People had projects, offices, volunteers, employees and supporters widely distributed without a consistent and easy way to collaborate and communicate. With separate websites telling individual and often narrow stories, the tools did not interconnect or reinforce the organization's common policies, messages and brand. What's more, because these local websites were fragmented, volunteers, supporters and employees had no way to build on or easily discover the knowledge and expertise already present across their organization.

Water For People approached Ramius seeking to implement a consistent, global private network that incorporated some of the best social technologies of the consumer web with the security and scalability found in traditional enterprise intranet solutions. Most importantly, they wanted a better way of engaging and managing their relationships with volunteers, employees, supporters and other key stakeholders as they continued to scale their operations. Ramius helped them to implement the "TAP Portal" based on Sixent Enterprise in Spring 2009. Starting with a private group for their Board of Directors, the Water For People marketing team began a program of replacing local websites with online communities in the TAP Portal. The site continues to grow strongly and now contains 40 Groups, with the goal of 50 more in the coming year, including some that are open to the public, some that are completely private and hidden and a combination of public and private.

Groups in the TAP Portal have very different purposes, for example it is home to the CEO's blog, internal departmental working groups, country-to-country employee collaboration, a marketing community for interaction with the press, fundraising events and several volunteer Committee groups. Using Sixent's strong permissions engine, each group has different visibility and collaboration settings, members and customized tools. A consistent look-and-feel has been applied to the whole site to match the Water For People website, reinforcing the organization's brand.

Sixent's Site Administration tools make it easier for the Water For People marketing team to monitor and manage each local group and their members. Plus, each local group has the benefit of leveraging the organization's resources and the Sixent features to simplify their communication efforts. The platform's social features make it easy for new and existing members to quickly find any information they need and connect with the right people.

"Ramius worked with Water For People to customize its Sixent software to meet our unique requirements," said Eileen Lambert, senior online marketing manager, Water For People. "Throughout the development process, Ramius was virtually a member of our in-house team, providing innovative ideas and effective solutions.

"Water For People has grown significantly in the past couple of years. Sixent from Ramius has allowed us to interact, integrate and collaborate with our ever-growing global audience of staff, volunteers and supporters at a level that makes them feel like they're in the same room."Less

By implementing Sixent Enterprise, IEEE now offer the leading edge of web2.0 enterprise social technology to their members which helps to bridge geographical boundaries and provides additional opportunities for IEEE members, volunteers, staff, and governance to communicate and collaborate.Less

In 2008, UMW and Ramius worked together to plan and conduct research into what their members really wanted from an online community. It highlighted that members:

• Are looking for discussions, news and guidance.
• Would like the chance to build new relationships and maintain existing friendships.
• Want to be active participants in UMW and have the capability to share their knowledge and ideas, plus provide support to other members.
• Want knowledge, UMW resources and the chance to develop and share new insights.

Based on these findings, UMW took their online communities a step further by working with Ramius to deploy a Sixent Enterprise social network, UMWOnline.net, in support of key community initiatives. Beginning with a video competition, UMW encouraged members to submit their videos to a community and have them voted on by other members. Four finalists were selected to attend UMW Assembly, with the juried winner being awarded a mission travel tour.

Since then, UMW communities have been migrated onto Sixent along with their existing member database. Many members have created their own online groups and can now directly engage with each other, relate through their rich UMW web2.0 profiles, work together in public or private groups and keep in touch with what is happening across the widely dispersed UMW organization - meeting the objectives discovered from the 2008 study.

The organization of United Methodist Women is enthused about the direction that web technologies have taken them, especially Sixent Enterprise. Catherine Heggarty, UMWOnline's manager, explains;

"There are some really exciting elements of UMWOnline with Sixent, that we didn't have before. Members can relate directly with each other, without sharing private information (email addresses). They now have the ability to create their own interest groups, without having to call upon a system administrator. This allows greater freedoms to both the members and the organization as a whole. Each member can essentially create their own mini-site within the organization's network. They can control their own content. They get to determine, with multiple profiles, with whom they share each media item, document, article or blog, Our members can truly help to shape the focus of the organization, depending on groups they form, topics they create, and the frequency with which folks view and comment on these initiatives. And with all the freedoms we are able to offer, we are still able to maintain safeguards to protect our members and UMW. We are looking forward to what we will learn from our members."Less

Ramius was approached as one of five vendors by HPN to replace a customized but older collaboration system that had been in use for several years. That existing platform was being discontinued on short notice. After careful evaluation, HPN chose Ramius' Sixent Enterprise social networking platform to support the community of practice for its membership, staff and partner organizations. Their main criteria for evaluation was the software's ability to support fluid peer exchange and the creation and sharing of knowledge and best practices amongst HPN members.

Speaking about the selection process, Annie LaCourt, Director of Information Systems at the Housing Partnership Network said:

"After the demonstration and the trial evaluation, Sixent was chosen for several reasons. First and foremost was the flexibility of the interface, since it was important for people at HPN to be able to arrange the screens they way they wanted. Also, the answer to most questions about the system was "yes, it can do that." It meant a lot to me that we didn't need someone at Ramius to customize it for us."

Implemented and operational in less than two months, the Housing Partnership Network now has a platform that not only delivers the functionality and flexibility they need to work effectively today, but is being continuously improved with new features added every month.

"Clearly, flexibility was part of the design," said Annie LaCourt. "I also liked the admin and security features. We now have the ability to analyze the activity in the system that we wanted and the ability to segregate information that we needed. It was also important to everyone at HPN that we felt that we could develop a relationship with the vendor.

"Finally, it was clear that as we grew and got more sophisticated, Sixent would keep up with us. It's an elegant product - elegant being a technical term in this case. As someone who ran a software company for awhile I can tell you that I learned a lot from my mistakes. The biggest one I made was not having an independent vision for my product and trying to be all things to all of my users. I look for that problem in software products when I evaluate them. Is the design coherent? Is the system configurable so that neither I nor the vendor will be tempted to do a lot of customization? Does the vendor have a road map and when I make a suggestion are they more likely to add it to the road map or suggest a customization? Ramius comes up roses on all of those questions!"Less