Online collaboration & event planning for small biz and NPOs.
I recently had a great conversation with Susan Bardack, the Chief Marketing Officer, over at iZoca.com. iZoca is a FREE new online communication and collaboration tool for nonprofits and small businesses. When I initially received Susan’s email about iZoca, I was a little skeptical. There are so many free online collaboration tools out there – why would we need another one? But after giving the service a quick review, I decided it was worth it to give Susan a call.
According to iZoca’s press release of Sept. 8, 2009,
“Social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn connect individual users to a crowd. iZoca’s platform organizes that crowd into groups and provides users tools to keep them connected with those groups at all times. With iZoca, individuals can join or create groups of professional interest including those focused on work, charitable endeavors and school and they can also create personal groups for family. The members of each group are subsequently able to schedule events and activities and share information. iZoca members are provided a personal calendar which can display all of the events and activities for each of the groups to which they belong.”
Our Pet Fiesta Committee page on iZoca.com
At a high level, iZoca.com offers:
- Subgroups – you can have subcommittees as well as your main group.
- Event Management and RSVP
- Calendar
- Discussion Board
- Photo Sharing
- Groups and profiles can be private or public.
Susan was excited about the possibilities of iZoca, not only as a communications tool within organizations but with its ability to extend a member’s reach to other groups of interest. I told Susan that my biggest challenge with online communications for GoodDogz.org was adoption – getting our members to actually use the tool. We’ve tried and failed with many online collaboration tools so if I get people to use this, I’ll be amazed. Yet another website, login and password to remember is often the kiss of death for usage. But if its easy to use and dynamic enough, our members might stick around.
There are a few things that I’d like to see from iZoca.com:
- File sharing (Susan noted that this should be available in a month or two.)
- Listserv capabilities (One email that sends email to the entire group.)
- Group-Specific Member Titles (I want to be able to assign a title and description to members that are group specific. For example, I am the President of the organization – as reflected in my profile – but I will chair the marketing committee for this group – this should appear on my group member profile.)
- Keep me logged in when I go to the homepage. Currently, it auto-logs me out.
We’ve just started using iZoca for our 2010 Pet Fiesta committee in order to collaborate on the 2010 Reston Pet Fiesta on May 1, 2010. I’ve set-up the group, invited members, added photos and set-up the calendar. I’ll keep you posted in what we think!
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Beth,
Thanks for giving iZoca a try! And also for taking the time to review things with the detail and attention that you gave it. Much appreciated!
I wanted to take a minute to talk about some things we are working on, and let you know that we definitely appreciate your “things that I’d like to see from iZoca.com” section. As Susan mentioned we are currently working on providing some document sharing features, and hope to have them in place as part of our next release. In addition to document sharing, we are investigating options to allow new members to use their existing Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc. accounts, instead of “creating yet another account to remember”. When we initially took the covers off of iZoca, we released it with support for OpenID, for just this same reason. However at the time it created some additional confusion to our early adapters, and we pulled it down until we could evaluate it further. It could just be that we failed at delivering that clearly, or that people just weren’t ready to understand single sign on. So, as we rework this to support other sign-in accounts, we want to make that as simple and straightforward as possible.
One of the features that we released during the summer was the ability to create multiple group profiles (title, about me) that you can share with one or more groups. So, in a little league group I might list myself as “Justin’s dad”, but in a professional group I might list myself as “CTO of iZoca”. I can then reuse these profiles as I join different groups. I think this might do what you were looking for with the idea of “Group – Specific Member titles”.
Also, we just reworked our group’s public page look and functionality. I don’t know if this would be useful for the “2010 Pet Fiesta” or not. But groups can now decide to have some of their content published to a public group page. This allows your group to go about your business as usual on the private member site, but selectively choose to make some of your content (events, discussions, photos, etc.) automatically available to your group’s public pages. This can be handy for groups that want to publicly promote some of their activities and content, but don’t want to have to maintain separate public and private sites. We allow you to selectively choose to make some content available on a public group page.
I hope the 2010 Pet Fiesta group is a huge success!
Thanks again for giving us a try, and for taking the time to write up your initial thoughts!
Scott
CTO, iZoca Inc.
Hey Scott – Thanks for the feedback! I will definitely take a look at the group profiles. This may solve our issue of giving each group member some sort of designation. I also love the idea of syncing with other social media with an OpenID-like approach. We’ve had most of our committee members sign-up for the iZoca group so far so I’m hoping that they get past the “another group to participate in” syndrome. Looking forward to new functionality and making iZoca work for us!
An interesting reviews, haven’t heard about iZoca prior, thanks for the heads up. Alternatively you can as well check our collab and pm tool http://www.comindwork.com, we offer huge discounts for non profits