Building Online Community for your Business

An online community is a powerful tool for driving revenue, building brand loyalty, and creating an audience for your products and services. But to get a successful online community, the most important aspect is community engagement. One should know how to harness the power of social media and provide compelling content to its users. Creating online communities of customers or alumni is one of the main topics in business and technology nowadays.  Online communities are rapidly becoming a popular way to organize people and accomplish work in a highly collaborative manner.

 Online business communities don’t just become successful by themselves. They’re the outcome of a carefully designed plan, user friendly interface, and member engagement. Though it seems like putting a lot of effort in building an online community for your business, the benefits it reaps in time to build a strong brand make the efforts worthwhile.

It is important to understand that communities aren't just for providing best alumni features or socializing but for getting productive things done. Designing an effective community which can add value to your brand is something which should be kept in mind.

Viburnix, an online community software provides an array of features through which organizations can build successful online communities to promote their businesses in an effective way. It helps in attracting the right audience to your community by providing quality content and resources on the portal about your products or services. This in turn improves processes, adds equity and value to your business. Discussions, forums and engaging interactions on Viburnix help you to identify your goals and put a solid purpose behind your efforts. Viburnix provides various productive features like brand building, event management, social and professional collaboration and so much more which make your online community a big success.

How to start an alumni community?

Are you interested in starting an alumni community? Well, starting or creating an alumni community is not difficult but managing such community where members are equally knowledgeable and experienced is really challenging. Alumni management is as important as starting an alumni community for your organization. But the question is why and how to start an alumni association.

For starting a successful alumni association, it is important for organizations to have a clear vision and purpose as to why they want to have one. Generally, organizations want to start an alumni community for the purpose of nurturing the spirit of loyalty among the members, their professional development and to strengthen ties with the alumni for future business objectives. An alumni association supports organization to achieve intangible aspects of business and strengthen relationship among alumni, the community and the organization.

There are some basics steps which should be followed while starting an alumni community:

• Form a group of like-minded alums- for that you have to informally meet with alums to obtain names and directly ask for their interest in participating in the association.
• Communicating with the interested alumni, inviting them to join the community and requesting them to spread the word among their contacts.
• Getting organized by preparing By-Laws for the steady progression of the community.
• Arranging finances for a newly built community- it is sometimes difficult to arrange finances but there are several ways through which it can be done, like collection of dues/donations, annual membership fees, capital fund raising campaigns, and others.
• Engaging members through various activities like, blogs, forums, newsletters, events, meetings etc.

Community Software Vendors providing value to business

A software vendor is a company that makes and sells software products designed for a specific or niche market. Such markets may be diverse, including software for real estate brokers, healthcare personnel and so on. Similarly, the vendors that make and sell software for building online community are called community software vendor. These software vendors provide community software to the organizations that want to build an online community, be it for corporate alumni, consumers, vendors, etc. to deliver value to their business, keep the members engaged and integrate with membership management database, events system, and website.

How can community software help organizations to increase revenue?
Community software is one of the most active sectors in the tech industry. Large companies are depending on these community vendors to provide them with robust community software that best suit the requirements of the business, the culture of their organization and can generate significant revenue through various functions:

1. Physical Product Sales : Selling books, education class, industry-related material, magazines, and items branded with company’s logo by associations and user groups which are then shipped from the organization to the members.
2. Virtual Products Sales : Boost profits with high margins by selling recorded webinars, audio training, electronic documents or online tools. With virtual products, members and customers will use the familiar shopping cart process while enjoying immediate access to what they purchased. 
3. Membership Dues : Online community software can handle all the membership management dues allowing staff to use a single system to handle member engagement tasks and back-end membership procedures.

Why to start Alumni network?

If you think your former employees are valuable for your organization and want to keep in touch with them, then start thinking of building a corporate alumni network to tap full potential of your former employees. There is no doubt that your people are your greatest asset. 

Companies have realized the fact that alums are that intangible asset of a company who can play an important role in their business success. When employees eventually leave an organization, they take with them wealth of knowledge capital, their understanding of the organization and their corporate network. Moreover, despite being detached from their previous organization, ex-employees can remain a part of their previous organization’s business activities. Some of ex-employees become clients and some become business referral sources. It’s just a matter of strengthening relationships with them and maintaining contact on a regular basis which in turn form advantageous business connections and continue building professional relationships over time.

This can only be achieved by having a successful alumni portal through which organization and its alumni members can stay connected with each other. Since contacts and recommendations in business world have an important role, utilizing a corporate alumni network to improve these should not be ignored. 

Viburnix, a robust corporate alumni software helps the organizations to build and maintain a successful alumni network. It is a user friendly software which comes with various interesting features, like creating and managing profiles of the members, event management feature, collection of dues/ donation online to name just a few. Besides it also keeps the members involved and engaged by creating polls and surveys, encouraging blogging and host forums, jobs postings and members referrals.

Helping Customers through Customer Portal

In today’s fast paced world, people are highly connected and have easier access to information than ever before. Finding solutions via self-service has become a way of life. Today’s generation is more inclined towards using Web services than time consuming agent assisted support.  Today Web has made the information available at just one click away anytime and anywhere. Not only are customer portals highly effective, but enables customers to find answers to their questions online.

If you are a manufacturing company, it is always advisable to have an online community portal where customers can connect with the company 24/7. It is important for the companies to stay connected with their customers as it says satisfied customers means more business.

Fast-growing companies that invest in a self-service customer portal have noticed numerous benefits including:

• An increase in customer satisfaction
• Better use of their product or service
• More collaboration between users
• An increase in productivity

An online software for customer community - Viburnix
Viburnix, as an online community software acts as a critical link where an organization can connect with their customers and build an online community to serve basic needs of the customers by collaborating, connecting and contributing.

Viburnix helps in building a strong customer portal which runs online in the cloud, eliminating the expense and headaches of software and hardware infrastructure, makes it easier for the customers to use intuitive tools, powerful search capabilities, and extensive knowledge base. A customer portal that makes it easy for customers to find the answers they want, when they want them.

Connecting with Alumni Online

In the past few years, there has been an enormous increase in the demand of online community portal when it comes to connecting with past friends, education institutes, alma mater, colleagues, and organizations with each other. Many Social networking sites nowadays are managing to create huge user databases to provide quick and easy solutions to connect alumni groups.

Viburnix - alumni management software acts as a link for connecting alumni and its Alma Mater where they can collaborate and contribute to each other’s success. It is an online community portal which provides compatible features with cutting-edge technology. Viburnix is one such alumni portal that receives maximum number of registration from schools, colleges, universities and corporates because it helps these institutions to maintain valuable relationships with their past students and alumni.

This alumni software has been designed keeping in mind the basic needs of organizations to communicate, collaborate, socialize, control and giving back. Viburnix has a slew of features using which members can perform a number of functions like running social networks, email campaigns, event management, advanced alumni directory etc. This alumni portal assists organizations in providing all the tools they need to keep their alums connected with each other and their Alma Mater.

Viburnix a remarkable alumni software gives robust solutions to manage alumni groups online and provides innovative methods for user interactions to create a sense of belongingness to its members.

Viburnix a Power Alumni Portal

To develop interest driven communities, Viburnix is one of the most effective online community portals which provides an opportunity to education institutes to reunite students and alumni on a single platform. In order to provide further career opportunities and better job prospects to their students and alumni, it becomes essential for education institutes to have an online community portal for easy alumni integration. Viburnix, a user friendly software enables education institutes to reconnect and communicate with alumni and build a powerful community online.

Viburnix is an excellent community portal which best suits the requirements of institutes and successfully builds online communities of alumni.

 Viburnix Services

• Members can create their professional and social profiles to share knowledge and ideas
• It allows members to integrate with their friends like any other social networking site and helps in growing their own network
• Integrate with student management systems 
• One of the best features of Viburnix is to enable members to post, organize and manage events
• Viburnix  can assist you with geographic and data center location strategies
• Viburnix has some enhanced features for an easy alumni integration, which allow its members to chat online and even exchange personalized messages with each other
• Another important feature of Viburnix is that it runs in a cloud environment without any hardware setup which provides institutes a cost-effective and hardware free online portal
• Helps in customizing the alumni status to meet the institutes’ needs