SocialFish Online Community Vendor Analysis Whitepaper

presents…
Six Online Community Vendors

for Associations: An Analysis
Compiled and Edited by Maddie Grant, CAE and Lindy Dreyer
FE AT U RI N G C ON T E N T S
2 A Note from the SocialFish
3 CEO Interviews
What better way to get to know each company than by
interviewing the six CEOs. We asked them some questions via
email—yep, just like homework—and included their answers
here. We give them straight A’s, by the way.
3 Rob Wenger, Higher Logic

4 Sterling Raphael, NFi Studios
5 Bob Cramer, ThePort Network
6 Chris Bucchere, The Social Collective
7 Scott Balthazor, Socious
8 Mike Steadman, SusQtech
13 Features and Specifications for Each Vendor

This document will not include one of those massive charts with
little check boxes. Instead, we thought it would be more useful to
lay out the particular platform specifications in a more narrative
way—in each vendor's own words.
14 Connecting People
19 Putting People to Work
26 Enabling Face-to-Face Events
28 Satisfying the 1%ers
34 Details for the Techies
38 Marketing Tools
44 Working Together
47 SocialFish Analysis: Putting the Awesome in "Awesomesauce"
48 Next Steps: Contact Details, Example Sites, and References
Share • www.socialfish.org ©2009 SocialFish •

A N OT E FROM THE
W
e have been approached many times by association • Social objects: Social objects are pieces of content that compel
colleagues looking to investigate the possibility of members to take social actions. What are your social objects? Or
setting up a white label social network or online another way to ask the question: what will your members do in
community for their association — something that the community? The vendor you select should offer the feature
would integrate with their AMS or single sign-on, and something that set to accommodate that activity.
would merge seamlessly with their main website. We’ve been asked,
“who would you recommend we look at? Who have you worked • Culture and vision: How well does the vendor’s vision of online
with?” The purpose of this paper is to highlight six online community community match your association’s vision? The CEO interviews
vendors, and show off what we feel makes each special. We’ll be included in this document should help you get a feel for the
looking at Higher Logic, MemberFuse™ (by NFi Studios), ThePort vision behind the tools.
Network, The Social Collective, Socious, and MemberToMember™
(by SusQTech). We sat down with each and asked all the initial • Outposts: If your organization has a presence in outposts like
questions we feel are important and compiled their answers for you. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or others—or you’re planning to have
a presence—it’s important to consider how your white label
The online community vendors we have chosen for this paper online community might feed your outposts and vice versa.
are among the companies we work with. They are also an integral
part of the association community—which is massively important. • Compatibility: You may want to make sure the vendor you
They understand association issues and concerns, and understand choose can work seamlessly within your IT infrastructure. We
community needs based around a framework of membership and put this last because if this is important to your objectives, we
citizenship (volunteerism and work). They even helped fund the bet it was already at the top of your list.
costs of writing, designing, and producing this white paper so that
we could offer it to you as a free resource. There are other great Most importantly, make sure you approach this process armed with
providers out there, and as long as you know what you are trying an understanding of specifically what YOU want out of setting up a
to accomplish you should be able to find a good slate of people to white label social network for your association. Avoid the “feature
demo for you; but you can’t go wrong by starting here. creep” trap. Just because many, many features are available does
not mean you or your members need them all. Think about your
We have very specifically chosen NOT to put together one of social objects—the things you want your members to DO and
those massive tables with check marks that no one outside of the IT talk about in your online community—which is more than giving
department can actually interpret. This paper is aimed at the rest of members a way to connect. Connecting in itself is not enough to
the decision makers—those of us who are less from IT but instead sustain an online community. Will they be mostly working on specific
from marketing, communications, government relations, PR, and committee projects? Will they be posting events? Will they be using
membership departments, or those “many hat” wearers from small it as an information and news source? Will they be sharing photos
staff associations whose responsibilities cover several of these areas. and videos? It may be all of the above, but some actions will be
more important than others.
C h oosing a Vendor
This document is just a starting point. None of the specs are fully On the back end, too, certain aspects may be important for you
detailed, but we feel there is enough information here for you to get to prioritize. Will your community be more open, or more closed?
a feel for each of the vendors. You’ll definitely want to experience How important are permissions for different kinds of members to
the demos, as we did, so you can see and touch each tool. do different things? Will you want to help members link to some
or all of their public outpost profiles like Twitter or Facebook? How
Vendor selection is a very individual thing for every association. much flexibility do you want as staff administering the site? Do you
A few things that we feel are very important to keep in mind… want to be able to play around with the design and modules as
the community grows, or do you want it to be all set up for you?
• User experience: Does the platform accommodate the way Knowing the answers to these questions ahead of time will help you
your members use the internet, or is it something you believe focus during your demos and eventually choose the right platform
they’ll easily adapt to? This is why demos are so important, along for you.
with a list of sites and references for each vendor so you can see
the product in action. Maddie & Lindy
2
C E O I N TERVIEW S
SF: What’s your vision for the company? Where are you going?
RW: During the initial phase of our company’s growth, we
focused on getting the platform and the tools built, and on
developing a clear understanding of what our clients needed from
these tools. This is a never-ending task of course—as needs change,
new ideas come up, and lessons are learned. I am very pleased
with where our tools are today, and I am even more excited about
our upcoming Connected Community suite enhancements and
new products.
Rob Wenger, Hig her L ogic
In Phase II, our focus is on what it takes to make social media
SF: Tell us a bit about the history behind Higher Logic. tools even more successful for our clients. When we started, there
How did you get where you are now? was little to no history on social media tool use in associations.
However, after two years, we have a much better picture of what
RW: I have been designing and building web software for works and what doesn’t.
associations and non-profits for over 10 years. Initially, I designed
websites and applications that integrated to the back-end systems My goal is to provide meaningful, tangible ways for clients to
that organizations used to run their business. Later, I became the measure success, and we are doing that now. By empowering our
principal R&D architect for one of the leading AMS vendors where staff, clients, and industry thought leaders to analyze how the tools
I designed the next generation Association Management System. are being used, I have no doubt that together we can come up
with even better blueprints for success. My vision for Higher Logic
While thinking about the future of the AMS, I started looking at is that we continue to innovate and produce exceptional products
social media and social networking tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, and provide associations with new opportunities to enhance their
Digg, Google Groups, etc. I realized how well the community members’ experience.
building concepts of these tools matched with the goals of most
associations: real-world networking, information sharing, and group SF: What makes Higher Logic’s platform unique?
collaboration.
RW: If we are just talking about the technology, the actual tools
I saw a need for a social media solution that associations could use that we sell, I would say there are two major things that make our
immediately with little to no customization— a solution that would platform unique:
extend the value in their back-end systems to their members. I was 1. The focus on integration with the AMS. We built our suite
very fortunate when hiring my management team at Higher Logic from the ground up with integration to our customers’ back-
to bring in many veterans of the association industry. Higher Logic’s office systems as a primary architectural feature. I don’t think
Connected Community was developed with input and ideas from anyone else has really done this nor does anyone else have
people with real world experience and a clear understanding of anywhere near the experience in doing this that we do. We
how social networking can radically change the member experience. integrate to 15 AMS systems now and have more coming
online all the time.

2. The extensibility of our platform. Connected Community
is almost as much a development platform as it is a social
media product. Our services staff, clients, and partners can
build customizations or extensions and add them to their
community sites using our tools.

Interview continued on page 9
3
C E O I N TERVIEW S
“ Our clients can and do direct our

feature development and often see
those suggested updates soon after
their feedback was provided.
”
S terling R aphael, NFi Studios SF: What makes the MemberFuse platform unique?

SF: Tell us a bit about the history behind NFi. SR: MemberFuse is much more than a Social Networking
How did you get where you are now? platform. Although it has many social/community features, our
infrastructure is built on a User Centric Architecture (UCA)
SR: NFi Studios was founded on delivering creative and powerful allowing for a more relevant and semantic user experience. Our
interactive solutions for theme and entertainment companies. features are set up to consider the vibrant data which exists in the
Though we have been working with associations since 2004, association database, the interests of each user, and the activities
our earlier years also include work for Disney, Universal Studios, conducted in the community. All together, MemberFuse offers
the Orlando Magic, the Pittsburgh Steelers and more. It’s this a tailored and on-demand experience for each individual user.
experience and commitment to building powerful user experiences Features like Content Alerts and Member Matching are just two
that allow us to bring creative and refreshing software to the examples of this relevance-based approach in our platform.
association industry. Our software is not only built with the latest
and greatest technology and architecture, but also designed with
the goal of meaningful, enjoyable, and intuitive user experiences. SF: How do you see your platform, MemberFuse, shaping the
association industry? How does it change “business as usual” at
SF: What’s your vision for the company? Where are you going? the operational level?
SR: NFi Studios is quickly becoming a technology leader in the SR: The association world has changed significantly and is
association industry. We do not qualify our leadership stance in continuing to rapidly evolve. Associations are no longer only
terms of the number of clients we have, but by the value we responsible for producing content, networking, and education.
deliver to each customer or partner. As technology continues to Today’s associations must assist the contributions and conversations
evolve and change, our clients know that we will lead them in the already taking place among their members. MemberFuse is set
right direction according to their needs. We help our clients stay up to allow the association to facilitate user-generated content,
relevant by applying new technology solutions to the changing membership benefits, and networking. It also aggregates external
strategic requirements of associations. content sources and integrates with other social networking sites
such as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. The MemberFuse platform is
configured for each association based on their needs, but the main
purpose remains the same: to empower your members to get the
most value of their membership, to reduce clutter, and to be an
on-demand source for member news and information. Our
powerful reporting and analytical tools allow staff to adjust efforts
based on the activity and engagement of their community, while
providing the communication tools necessary to effectively respond
to their audience.
4
C E O I N TERVIEW S

SF: What makes ThePort’s platform unique?
BC: Being a pioneer in this field has allowed ThePort to assemble
a customer list that is unrivalled. There is a reason that so many
large and well-respected organizations have decided to work with
ThePort. First and foremost, we deliver what we promise, and
that is not always the case in this new market. Many companies
talk a good game, but delivering the sophisticated solutions that
are needed to create online communities is much harder to do.
We also support our customers diligently and continue to offer
them new capability and functionality as it becomes available. We
Bo b Cramer, Th ePort N etwor k
also pride ourselves on being able to deliver solutions that fit the
requirements of organizations large and small.
SF: Tell us a bit about the history behind ThePort Network.
How did you get where you are now?
BC: Software development is in the core DNA of ThePort

Network. We were one of the first organizations to leverage
XML and over the years built one of the most powerful and
flexible white label social media platforms in the world. ThePort’s
hard-core development focus has allowed us to stay in front of a
rapidly changing industry while creating real products tailored for
associations that deliver true ROI and reliability.
“ ThePort’s hard-core development focus

has allowed us to stay in front of a rapidly
changing industry while creating real
products tailored for associations that
deliver true ROI and reliability. ”
BC: ThePort’s vision is to create a comprehensive social Three words ThePort CEO, Bob Cramer, uses to describe his
company? Leadership, integrated, reliable.
media platform that delivers tangible and measurable return on
investment for our customers. This means creating new ways for
associations to engage their membership and deliver real value
to members. Our goal is to create the most tailored platform
for associations that is also integrated with their association
management systems. With ThePort’s Social Media Solutions, we
can help members share news and resources online, create more
involvement in association events, and introduce new methods for
increasing non-dues revenue. We listen carefully to the needs of
the market and then deliver those specific solutions.
5
C E O I N TERVIEW S
CB: Quite simply, we want to be the hosted social networking,
scheduling and vendor community platform in use by every major
conference, tradeshow, festival and event in the world. We handle
the large, high-end events with our “managed service” and we’re
also getting ready to launch a “self service” option whereby smaller
events can set up their own sites without ever communicating with
our support staff.

C h ris Bucchere, SF: What makes The Social Collective’s platform unique?
T h e S ocial Collective
CB: We’re not in the business of loading up our product with
SF: Tell us a bit about the history behind The Social Collective. tons of features. Instead, we’re focused on the aspects of the
How did you get where you are now? software that address and solve real problems. Don’t know who
to meet at a conference? Import your Twitter and Facebook
CB: I’ve been running a consulting company for over six years friends and search for other attendees by city, state, industry, title,
now and about twice a year, we invest some of our bench time etc. Don’t know how to approach them? Send a quick online
and resources into building products. If the products don’t generate introduction using our Twitter-integrated messaging platform.
any traction, we drop them. If they do, we put more resources into Wondering how best to spend your time at an event? Build a
them. It’s very much a “strategy” of throwing lots of spaghetti at the customized schedule, view it on your smartphone (optimized)
fridge and seeing what sticks. or sync it to your calendaring software and device of choice.
Need to follow up with the great contacts you made? Download
The Social Collective came out of one of these experiments. We their vCards following the event. Need to attract and entice new
launched it at a 1000-person BEA conference in May of 2008 event sponsors? Use our “Fan Pages” to create living, breathing
to rave reviews and outstanding usage statistics. We knew we communities of interest around your sponsor’s products.
were on to something when we saw how well it was received.
I remember thinking that in five years, every conference will be Every feature ties back directly to a value add for the conference
running software like this. It’s just a question of who can get the organizer. Our argument is that—for the cost of taking out an ad
right product to market at the right time. in a newspaper—you can get social media credibility, generate
year-round buzz, increase registrations, get your attendees to talk
We went on to do a handful of other small events, but our real about you on social networks, and attract more and higher quality
breakout moment came when we launched My.SXSW on our sponsors.
platform in early February of 2009. SXSW, being on the bleeding
edge of technology, gave us the street cred we needed to approach
other events with confidence. We now have a very strong pipeline
and some real marquee customers using our software and telling
us that they’re getting more registrations, generating more buzz
“ Our argument is that—for the cost of
taking out an ad in a newspaper—you
and even saving money (on things like printing costs) by using our can get social media credibility, generate
hosted software.
year-round buzz, increase registrations, get
In the summer of 2009, LaunchBox Digital—a DC-based startup your attendees to talk about you on social
incubator—invested in us and provided the leadership and
guidance to attract other investors. Although we have not yet networks, and attract more and higher
made a formal announcement of our funding status, we’re making
significant progress toward a seed round and participating in
investor pitch days on the East and West coast in August.
quality sponsors. ”
6
C E O I N TERVIEW S
Chris Bucch ere, T he S ocial C ollective C ont’ d
“ Where we change the game is allowing

members to use the tools they already
love and the content they already have to
participate within your association in a way,
before Socious, they never could. ”
S cott Balt hazor , Socious
Part of that support is understanding where the market is going,
SF: Tell us a bit about the history behind Socious. How did you seeing future trends, and listening to what our clients’ needs
get where you are now? are—and bringing those ideas together with cutting edge
functionality. We were the first to seamlessly integrate third party
SB: Socious was started in 2002. Two of us were batting around social networking content into user profiles, we were the first to
the problem that large scale ERP (enterprise resource planning) have a full event system for chapters and subgroups, we were the
customers were having: how to find connections and solutions first with a mobile application, and we were the first with advocacy
to problems that we knew they all had. While there were user tracking tools. For our clients to stay ahead of the curve Socious
groups and associations out there, no one had developed a secure must stay ahead as well with industry-leading functionality and
place for them to share and network with each other over the support. We must continue to have “firsts.”
internet. We contacted one of the largest PeopleSoft associations
(the Higher Education User Group) knowing that due to their SF: What makes Socious’ platform unique?
“Higher Education” nature, they would gravitate towards this type
of social interaction. We built the first version of the software with SB: I think the main thing that makes our software unique is the
them and Socious was born. amount of functionality we offer in our software and the number
of ways that it can be configured. While each client may have
We then virally grew quickly as related groups heard about their similar needs, each client is unique in how they want to meet
success. We focused our development and support efforts on those needs—and Socious has functionality to make sure every
making the infinitely configurable tools we have today that fit the need is met. When you look at the depth of functionality in each
needs of any size/style of association or user group. of our modules, our difference shines through. Socious is not just a
social networking tool, but a powerful knowledge repository that
SF: What’s your vision for the company? Where are you going? considers how a busy member would engage with a site like this.
Our biggest advantage is that our developers have put all of this
SB: While Socious has always been a software company, we functionality in the software and still keep it easy to use.
are a service company at heart. While other companies may
“ Our
have more installations than us, our focus has always been
on understanding our customers goals and helping them utilize vision for the company is to offer
our tools to meet those goals—not just getting them running. Our
vision for the company is to offer unparalleled customer support unparalleled customer support to make
to make every one of our current (and future) clients as successful every one of our current (and future) clients
as they can be.
as successful as they can be. ”
7
C E O I N TERVIEW S
MS: Today, SusQtech is well-diversified into four divisions: Training,
Products, Solutions, and Support. All four divisions are growing, but
the Products Division is by far the fastest growing. Our roadmap to
2010 is already underway. We continue to invest in and
grow our Products Division, launching our third major product in
Q3, with guaranteed quarterly releases and many new products
on the horizon. We’re also gearing up for SharePoint 2010, which
will provide new features around social computing, collective
M i k e S tea d man , Sus Qtec h intelligence, and social search. Because MemberToMember
is 100% SharePoint, all new features will immediately
SF: Tell us a bit about the history behind SusQtech. become available upon launch. Long term, SusQtech will continue
How did you get where you are now? to combine our deep association experience with our technical
expertise in order to deliver quality training, products, solutions,
MS: SusQtech started in 1996 as an international, full service and support to our customers.
digital agency building and hosting large e-commerce and content-
rich websites. Our core solution has always been based on SusQtech only hires “lifelong learners.” These are the types
Microsoft’s Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform; of people who work all day on their computers solving complex,
which today is SharePoint. technical problems, then go home and immediately fire up a laptop
and surf the net to relax, learn, or just hang out online. This creates
In early 2005, we transformed SusQtech; deciding to focus a vibrant work environment filled with some really interesting,
exclusively on SharePoint solutions for Associations. We had often “passionate” discussions, and this passion creates a positive
been hand-selected by Microsoft to be their Association outcome because our solutions and products reflect real-world,
industry partner to help finalize and launch SharePoint 2007, current usability patterns.
and in the process became convinced that the industry’s long-
standing model of custom, proprietary, single-firm solutions SF: What makes the MemberToMember platform unique?
would soon change. We recognized that the platform
approach is a less expensive, more robust, and safer option MS: MemberToMember, unlike any other product on the market
for our customers. today, is based on an enterprise platform (SharePoint). This is
different than saying that it’s based on .NET or the popular LAMP
We’ve grown organically through the years, and today we are stack. These are tools, not platforms. SharePoint provides out-of-
proud to be 100% employee-owned with an active employee the-box capabilities that support core MemberToMember features,
stock ownership program (ESOP). The ESOP dynamic has really like security, document management, alerts, photo and video
transformed the way our employees think about their customers. libraries, colleagues, search, and analytics. More importantly, the
Everyone is a shareholder and has a vested interest in our SharePoint platform is both portable and extensible. This means
customers’ success, which translates to our success. flexibility to our customers. A community can easily move between
our
tier-1 SaaS offering to a third party hosting company,
“ SusQtech only hires “lifelong learners.” These

are the types of people who work all day on
like Rackspace, or even on-premise in the customer’s existing
infrastructure. The license itself is equally as flexible. We offer
both a one-time perpetual license with annual maintenance and a
their computers solving complex, technical quarterly license with free upgrades.
problems, then go home and immediately

fire up a laptop and surf the net to relax,
learn, or just hang out online. ” Interview continued on page 12
8
C EO I N TERV IEW S
Rob Wenger , Hig h er L ogic Cont’ d
“ Ionoften think too much emphasis is put

changing the “operations” of the staff
SF: If you could use just three adjectives to describe
Higher Logic, what would they be and why?
RW:
organization, and not enough is put on Experienced – The Higher Logic team has a wealth of
changing the “member experience” of experience in building web applications for associations. We have
the members.
” over 100 association clients and growing from which we have
learned and continue to learn so much more.
Engaged – Social media and social networking for associations

Beyond the technology, and building on that last point, we have
and non-profits is what we do. We are engaged with our clients,
just launched our Higher Logic User’s Group (HUG) which forms
partners, and peers with the sole purpose of making a better
a community of our clients and partners. Here, clients can interact
solution for all.
with one another, with our staff, and with our partners to share
ideas and experiences.
Inspired – We truly are inspired by our clients and by the

difference these ideas can bring to their membership. Knowledge
Finally, I think that our partner channel may be the biggest
is the key to success in everything. Making knowledge more
differentiator. We have a fantastic collection of partners that offer
accessible is the future of associations.
products and services that really complement our own. This is
a 2 + 2 = 5 situation where the result of our integration and
collaboration is really much more than the sum of its parts. This is a
big area of growth for us now and in the future.
SF: How do you see your platform shaping the association

industry? How does it change “business as usual” at the
operational level?
RW: I am not sure that I would say “our platform” will change
the association industry, but rather that the concepts it seeks to
turn into tools and initiatives—the changes in the way our clients
interact with their members and more importantly the way
members interact with one another—will change the industry. I
often think too much emphasis is put on changing the “operations”
of the staff organization, and not enough is put on changing the
“member experience” of the members.

The how? It is about facilitating networking and communication. Three adjectives Higher Logic CEO, Rob Wenger, uses to
It is about collecting the knowledge of the membership and describe his company? Experienced, engaged, and inspired.
making it more easily accessible to the industry. The day our client’s
community site is launched it won’t make a significant difference.
But a year or two later, when there are thousands of documents
online and rated, thousands of questions asked and answered, blogs
posted, groups formed, people networking, etc., the value to a new
member on the day they join will be huge.

The private social network—integrated with the AMS—for
the benefit of the members will help shape the future of the
association industry.

9
C E O I N TERVIEW S
sterling ra ph ael, N F I stud ios Cont’ d bo b cramer, t h e p ort network Cont’d
SF: If you could use just three adjectives to describe NFi, what SF: How do you see your platform shaping the association
would they be and why? industry? How does it change “business as usual” at the
operational level?
SR:
Creative – We focus on delivering powerful and intuitive user BC: The association industry can take their relationship with
experiences. No longer do associations have to settle for outdated members to new heights with the power of social media. They can
or boring technology. Our features are robust and modular. We do this cost-effectively and with great impact. By giving people who
distinguish ourselves with creativity, and pride ourselves on our share a passion or interest a place to congregate, exchange ideas,
response to customer feedback. It is possible for each of our and become thought leaders, associations can increase member
customers to have a completely different look and feel to their participation—and also develop new tools to drive revenue.
solution which maximizes their brand exposure and organizational
objectives.
“ Byor interest
Agile – NFi’s operations and product development approach is
agile. We release updates to our software several times a month giving people who share a passion
including new features, enhancements to current functionality,
and updated APIs/Integrations. Imagine how you could provide
a place to congregate,
feedback on our product development features and see results exchange ideas, and become thought
within weeks, or even days. Our clients can and do direct our
feature development and often see those suggested updates soon
leaders, associations can increase member
after their feedback was provided. participation—and also develop new tools
Social – We not only produce social technologies, we live and
use them. Our company is actively involved in the association
to drive revenue. ”
community, both with live events and online. We actively participate
within the association blogosphere, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook,
and more. This gives us the knowledge and organizational culture SF: If you could use just three words to describe ThePort, what
to effectively produce relevant tools for our clients, as well as the would they be and why?
community involvement to stay in tune with the association industry.
BC:
Leadership – ThePort is a clear market leader for associations
who want to deploy their own socially enabled communities.
Integrated – ThePort has built the most open platform in

the industry allowing us to link together with other association
management systems and databases to let appropriate
information flow where it is needed.
Reliable – ThePort has the most experience and most users of

any company in our space.

Three adjectives NFi Studios CEO, Sterling Raphael, uses to describe

his company? Creative, agile, and social.
10
C E O I N TERVIEW S
chris bucchere, the social collective Cont’d scott balthazor, socious Cont’d
“ We’re not in the business of loading up our

product with tons of features. Instead, we’re
focused on the aspects of the software that
address and solve real problems. ”
industry? How does it change “business as usual” at the
operational level?
CB: The tools we’re using have already been proven to work in
a social context—look at Facebook and Twitter—and in a business
context, e.g. LinkedIn. As I mentioned earlier, in five years, every Three adjectives Socious CEO, Scott Balthazor, uses to describe his
event is going to be using these tools. Those that don’t take the company? Powerful, seamless, and supported.
plunge will quickly become obsolete. If an association has outgrown
the free toolset and is looking for a “social media in a box” strategy, SF: How do you see your platform shaping the association
The Social Collective is a great choice. industry? How does it change “business as usual” at the
operational level?
SF: If you could use just three adjectives to describe The Social
Collective, what would they be and why? SB: Many associations look at social media as their outpost
strategy (how they use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc) and
CB: their private social network strategy (on their own site) as two
Exciting – Get the word out about your event and get people separate strategies. Our belief is that those two strategies need to
talking about you in social media. be one overall social media strategy and each of those functions
must compliment the other. Socious gives associations the tools
Cohesive – Transform your once-a-year face-to-face community to integrate content from their members’ outpost accounts and
into a buzzing hub of year-round marketing. repurpose it for use with the association. Your members already
have pictures on Flickr, updates on Twitter, profiles on LinkedIn and
Essential – Give your attendees the tools they need to make Facebook, and videos on YouTube. Don’t try to be a substitute
your conference a must-attend event. for these tools because your website never will be. Where we
change the game is allowing members to use the tools they already
love and the content they already have to participate within your
association in a way, before Socious, they never could.

SF: If you could use just three adjectives to describe Socious,
what would they be and why?
SB:
Powerful – Socious has the functionality to turn your website into
a destination.
Seamless – No matter if we are integrated with an AMS, LinkedIn,

YouTube or any other third party system, it is easy to share
information with the Socious system.
Supported – With Socious, you have a support team that is not

Three adjectives The Social Collective CEO, Chris Bucchere, uses to only there for you, but cares about your success.
describe his company? Exciting, cohesive, and essential.

11
C E O I N TERVIEW S
mike steadman, susqtech Cont’d
SF: If you could use just three adjectives to describe

MemberToMember what would they be and why?
MS:
Engaging – Our communities are designed to be visually
appealing and available 24/7 from any web platform or device,
including a brand new iPhone app launched this month. Members
can subscribe to virtually any element on the community through
alerts, and common sticky UI components like “rate this,” and
comments appear throughout the product.
Simple – This was the #1 design goal for end-users. We know

SharePoint is massive, so our “win” was to leverage its power
without compromising usability and simplicity at the end-user level.
Interoperable – Our suite of web-services-based API’s

continues to grow on an almost daily basis. We didn’t start at
zero—SharePoint comes with hundreds of API’s out of the box.
MemberToMember has successful integrations with every major
AMS on the market today.

Three adjectives SusQtech CEO, Mike Steadman, uses to describe his

company? Engaging, simple, and interoperable.
“ MemberToMember customers have

options. They can purchase one of
industry? How does it change “business as usual” at the thousands of inexpensive third party
operational level?
SharePoint Web-Parts and install it
MS: We acknowledge that all communities are different, and no themselves via the browser. They can
matter how they begin, all communities change and grow with each
member interaction. Market demands often force change, as users
find an open-source solution
expect their association community to quickly adopt new online on CodeProject.com or any of the
usability patterns.

thousands of SharePoint blogs. Or, if
Because of our platform approach, we can meet market they have the skills, they can build it
demands faster than our competition. This is best defined
by example: Let’s say community leaders need functionality
that provides a mashup using member location and maps.
themselves. ”
MemberToMember customers have options. They can
purchase one of thousands of inexpensive third party SharePoint
Web-Parts and install it themselves via the browser. They can
find an open-source solution on CodeProject.com or any of the
thousands of SharePoint blogs. Or, if they have the skills, they
can build it themselves. This flexibility means they can spend less
time thinking about technology and more time on engaging their
community members.

12
Features And Specifications
C
omparing features can be overwhelming. We’ve actually found that while many of the same features are available in
each platform, the way they are implemented can be quite different. That’s why these narrative descriptions of the
features—in the vendor’s own words—are so valuable.
We’ve also divided this analysis into sections to make it easier to follow. The first four sections have to do with what users
see and experience. The last three sections are behind-the-scenes details.
14 C onnecting People 34 Details for the T echies

When it comes to helping people connect, there are several It’s time to start checking behind-the-scenes and under the hood.
important features to consider. From the user perspective, nothing Prepare to unleash your inner geek with this list of the back-end
is more important than the individual profile. This is the ego piece features of each platform.
at work—everyone wants to look good in front of their peers.
Other important features in this section deal with how people make In this section: Code base, API, AMS Integration, Hosting,
connections individually and through groups, and how they stay Security/Permissions
connected through email notifications.
38 Behind-the-Scenes Marketing Tools
In this section: Individual Profile, Friending/Connections, Groups Marketing folks will appreciate these back-end features that enable
and Subgroups, Badges and Flair, Email Notification better branding, search optimization, measurement, and revenue
generation.
19 Putting People to Wor k
So what about the more functional elements—what we want our In this section: Branding and Style Sheets, Foreign Language Support,
members to actually DO while they are inside the community? How SEO, Flexibility of Design, Metrics, Advertising/Sponsorship
do these platforms handle blogs, wikis, document sharing, photos/
videos, and any functionality that enable content-creation and 44 Wor k ing Together
collaboration? So what’s it like to work with these guys? What’s their pricing model?
How long does it take to get the site up and running? What about
In this section: Blogs, Forums and Listservs, Polls and Surveys,Wikis, customer service? We collected the answers.
File Management, Media, Other Unique Stuff
In this section: Deployment Time Frame, Pricing, Customer
26 E nab ling Face-to -Face Events Service/Tech Support
Since face-to-face is so important for building community (including
online community!) we specifically asked each vendor about event
features they’ve integrated into their platform. The responses are
wide-ranging.
In this section: Events and Event Registration, Calendars
28 S atisf y ing the 1%ers

We also wanted to know about the really social, 2.0 features—the
community building stuff like tagging, rating and reviewing, and how
the platforms connect to outposts like Facebook or Twitter.
In this section: Mobile,Tagging, Site Search, Ratings/Reviews,

Easy Sharing with Outposts, Connection with Outposts, RSS
Clockwise from top left, Higher Logic,

Socious, MemberToMember (SusQtech),
MemberFuse (NFi Studios), The Social
Collective, and ThePort.
13
F eatures And Specifications
Connecting People
In this section: Individual Profile, Friending/Connections, Groups
and Subgroups, Badges and Flair, Email Notification
Indivi dual Profile (“My Profile”):
The profile may be used at both the individual and organization level. Users can specify their own preferences to
determine what pieces of information display on their profile. For each user, the system automatically puts together
a “network” based on the various criteria identified in the profile to suggest people with whom they should connect.
The profile also includes a blog, inbox, contact list and index of groups to which the user belongs.
MemberFuse features both individual member profiles and profiles for organizations within the community. Along
with info and photos, other users can post personal recommendations on your profile page. Our Member Matching
feature suggests potential contacts based on common characteristics from the individual profile.
ThePort profiles are designed to highlight what is unique about each user and highlight their activities in the
community. Profiles feature information such as member certifications, education and location, enabling members to
connect through these similar qualities. This information is also pre-populated in member profiles when integrated
with our partner association management systems.
Profiles also display users’ actions in their activity feeds, including when members make comments, join group or
create new friends. Member profiles also display each person’s Twitter activity. Activity feeds increase activity and
give members “something to do” when visiting the community. Finally, profiles have three tiers of privacy settings so
that users have complete control.
We support individual profiles for all conference attendees, speakers, organizers and sponsors. Beyond the traditional
contact info, you can share links to your site, blog, or the rest of your social media graph. Your profile will also show
your contacts, your groups, your event schedule, your public sent messages and other information. We auto-populate
as much information as possible into your profile from your conference registration so you never have to fill out the
same field more than once.
We can accommodate both group and user profiles with complete search functionality. Each member can have a
profile in the Socious system that can pull information from their profile in your AMS. We enable users to share
content from LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and other social networking sites right on their personal association
profile. Also, it’s easy to search for members and groups—we customize the user and group search on every site to
enable users to find others using the terminology and criteria unique to your organization and industry.
Individual profiles can include both personal and profession information. The community administrators can
decide how many fields they wish to include in the profile and which ones are required. Each field can have its
own security level (public, private, or colleagues). The profile also includes areas of interest which correspond to
the community’s taxonomy. This allows MemberToMember to target and personalize community content to each
individual user, as well as make colleague recommendations. Other information displayed in the member profile
includes blogs, images, groups to which the member belongs and colleagues in common.
14
Connecting People
Group profiles from SusQtech,

The Social Collective, and
Socious. (Left to right.)
Friending/connections – as ymmetrical (lik e T witter )

or symmetrical (lik e Faceboo k and L in k edIn)?
Symmetrical—when a user connects to a colleague, the colleague accepts the connection, and they show up in each
others list of contacts.
Invite any member to become a mutual contact, or find new friends through MemberFuse with a matching system
that brings together members with common interests. Coming soon we’re launching the ability to “Follow” or
“Subscribe” to a user’s activity (if not private).
Symmetrical – all users must approve new connections. However, users can choose to have their profiles public
(viewable by anyone), private (only viewable by connections) or completely private (viewable by invitation).
In The Social Collective we have taken on a Twitter-like following structure where you can follow as many people
as you like. Those people have the option to follow you back (or not). Without a two-way “mutual” connection, you
cannot exchange private messages. Also, having a mutual connection unlocks certain parts of your profile, including
your event schedule.
Socious does not have friending capabilities currently. We are evaluating the best way to use it for associations for a
future release.
The privileges associated with being a colleague are similar to LinkedIn. When receiving a colleague request, the
member can accept, ignore or request more information. Members do not need to be colleagues in order to send
messages to one another. Members can only invite an individual who is already colleague to join a group. Social
distance between members is displayed anytime another member is displayed on the site, again, similar to LinkedIn.
The site also recommends colleagues based on common colleagues, interests, groups and content.
15
Connecting People
Groups and su bgroups?
In our Directory 2.0 product, we call groups “communities.” Communities can be set up by invitation, pre-populated
from the AMS, or created ad hoc by members..Groups can be further limited by using the security model found
in your AMS to ensure that only individuals with the appropriate permissions may view, browse and interact with
the community. This allows an organization to set up public groups as well as private groups to support a variety of
recruitment and retention initiatives. All communities can feature discussion lists, a resource library, a calendar, and
their own website.
Collaborative Groups enhance your member value with niche networking and sharing. Both association and/or
member-created groups can also be used as department or project centers and auto-filled with members based on
your AMS fields. Set groups to public, private, or hidden to protect your information. All group pages include features
such as group announcements, discussions, wikis, resource/document sharing and much more! Our Sub-
Communities feature allows an association to have more than one community each with a separate design, Members,
Resource Libraries, Groups, and Organizations.
Groups and subgroups can be created by administrators, community members, or automatically created and
populated from data in your association management systems. With ThePort’s Social Object technology, community
administrators can even create their own custom groups such as chapters, committees, or businesses. These Social
Objects have unique fields and information. Any committees or chapters managed by your association management
system can also be created within the community.
All groups contain their own administrators, settings, permissions and members. Additionally, every group receives its
own events, photo and video gallery and invitations. Groups also feature custom profile questions.
Groups are a key component of any successful social network. The Social Collective allows the event organizer to
either control group creation or open it to members of the community.
Our ‘Community” pages are especially designed for committees, chapters, or special interest groups who need
a home within your online community. Each group can have static HTML pages to build out their own site, plus
their own members’ only area complete with forums/listservs, file library, Polls/Surveys, blogs, wikis, picture library,
calendaring, announcement lists and an event management and registration system. These community pages can have
their own administrators that can layout their pages the way they wish, or choose from predefined templates. They
can have external websites for their group, generated by our content management system. With Socious you can give
your groups and subgroups a website within your website.
Community Administrators determine whether members can create their own groups or if a moderator must
create. When groups are created the group owner decides if group content will be made public, allowing all site
users to view it, or private so that site users must be a group member to view the content. The group owner also
sets group registration to either auto approve or require approval. In auto approve, everyone who requests to join
the group is accepted. In require approval, the group owner approves or rejects the request to join. It is important to
note that architecturally, groups are SharePoint Sites, so group-level security, administration, and even interface design
(creative) may be applied to any group at any time by a Community Administrator.
16
Connecting People
Badges and Flair to add to a user profile and feed the ego?
Points for actions ? (li k e L in k edIn or Groupsite profile meter)
On the Directory 2.0, you can associate a social badge with users, as well as award virtual ribbons to individuals or
communities. The virtual ribbon is created from a tool that steps you through its creation, step-by-step. Connected
Community also includes an Engagement Center. Organizations can assign a point value to over 75 user actions
within the community site. Once determined, the points are automatically awarded based on user action and a social
badge of “Most Valuable Member” can be associated with certain individuals meeting set criteria.
Currently there is a recognition tag that can be placed on a member’s profile that staff can fill in for a specific
achievement or award to the member. This will display on the specific member’s profile when viewing. User Points
including a reputation engine is currently in development.
ThePort’s Badges & Points enable organizations to reward members within their online community. Badges can
be customizable and rewarded based on any specific activity users complete, and points can be rewarded on a
custom basis depending on what activities members participate in inside your community. Any organization can
also customize the look and graphics utilized for badges and points. Points can also be awarded to users for virtually
any action. The amount of points received for each action is fully customizable. Points, badges and activities can all
be aggregated to create unique member rankings within the community. All properties of badges and points can be
customized within the administration modules.
Not yet. Our user profiles have a lot of flair without badges and “flair.”
Socious gives users the ability to add badges to their user profile that links to their profiles on popular 3rd party social
networking systems such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, WordPress, Blogger and others.
If enabled by community administrators, users can add flair to their profile including certifications, links to public
social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter, and other accomplishments. MemberToMember customers can
request the inclusion of site standard flair as well.
17
Connecting People
This user profile from Higher Logic

features an Executive Committee
badge at the top right.
Email notification ?
Users of Connected Community receive a variety of different email notifications depending on what task is being
performed. Common emails include 1) Emails inviting an individual to connect or to join a group 2) Personal one-
to-one emails between members 3) Emails upon joining or leaving an eGroup, 4) Emails informing users of upcoming
events or news updates. Additionally, eGroups allows members to receive an email in their regular inbox as well as
within the social networking website. Receipt of emails in their Microsoft Exchange inbox or other email inbox is
based on preferences set by each individual user.
MemberFuse provides a full advanced email notification system for all areas in the community. Members, and even
Groups, can customize notifications to make sure they stay relevant and aren’t overwhelming. Our new digest version
aggregates all of the latest community activity into one HTML email.
Users can receive email notifications for practically any event that takes place in the community. These include: New
inbox messages, new friend requests, comments on blogs/photos/videos, event invitations, document uploads/changes
and forum replies. All notifications can be turned on/off by the user. Additionally, Activity Feeds are RSS-enabled so
that users can actively view these updates within their favorite RSS reader (Outlook, Google Reader.)
The Social Collective actively uses email notifications when you have received new messages, new follow
notifications, direct messages, changes in schedule, and many other actions. We also offer conference organizers the
ability to send mass emails via a templated mail-merge to segments of their conference attendees (or everybody).
The Socious system has a targeted email engine that can be used for notifying members about different things going
on within the organization. The system also has automatic email notifications that get triggered when new content
is added to specific areas of the system. In addition, committees, chapters, and sub groups can have their own
announcement list to manage communication to their members.
Individual users select the email alerts that they would like to receive. Email alerts are available down to a very
granular level such as a specific comment in a discussion thread, a new entry in someone’s blog or the addition of an
event to a calendar. Email alerts can be received in real-time, as a digest at the end of the day, or on a weekly basis.
18
PUTTING PEOPLE TO WORK

In this section: Blogs, Forums and Listservs, Polls and Surveys,
Wikis, File Management, Media, Other Unique Stuff
Blogs?
The Directory 2.0 profile automatically assigns users a blog, but organizations have the ability to decide whether or
not to utilize this feature. Blogs feature the ability to view/post your own blog, view the blogs of your contacts, as
well as view all blogs within the community. The blog tool features a full editor to allow you to easily input your post
and/or cut-and-paste. Each post has security around it to allow you to determine who is allowed to read your post
(public, members-only or your contacts) and who can make comments on your blog entry.
If you have an existing blog, through Wordpress, Blogspot or another blogging service, we can integrate it into your
MemberFuse site. Don’t have a blog? We create and customize a Wordpress blog that integrates seamlessly with
MemberFuse with both authentication, users, and content.
ThePort’s Blog Publisher is a WYSIWYG editor and enables publishers to embed photos and videos into their
blogs. Blog authors also maintain administrative and moderation control over comments to their blog posts. All
blogs can also be shared on other networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Users can also add new blog posts with
ThePort’s Mobile Blogging feature. Users can also import their own RSS feeds from platforms such as Blogger,
Wordpress, Twitter or Facebook.
We’ve consciously decided to stick to connecting people, and leave blog platforms to the many great commercial
and open source providers out there.
The Socious Blog Platform enables your organization to have site level, group level, and user blogs. Socious gives
you a full blogging platform with the ability to show images and video in the blog to give your members, groups,
and the organization a voice within your online
community. Since the Socious blogging platform
is integrated with our powerful security features,
creating external bogs, internal blogs, and
private blogs allows you to insure the right
people are getting out the appropriate messages
on your site. Our blogs have full comments and
rating systems and are fully searchable within the
sites’ search engine.
Upon joining the community and any time

thereafter, users have the ability to create
a blog which is linked to their profile.
Community administrators determine whether
blogs are automatically created or if they
must be approved prior to creation. The
OOTB blog templates contain a WYSIWYG
interface, the ability to upload images, rating,
commenting, even rating on the comments.
Community administrators can easily modify
the blog template using SharePoint Designer™,
a free tool from Microsoft. Blogs are categorized
within the site under “Most Recent Posts,”
“Highest Rated Posts,” “Highest Rated Blogs,”
and “Most Active Blogs.” The blog publishing tool for users of ThePort.
19

Forums and listservs?
The Connected Community eGroups tool combines listserves and forums into one product. Both the email
messages (HTML format) and the online archives have a user-friendly interface. Users can be automatically
subscribed to lists based on the AMS, or can opt-in themselves. Users can decide between daily digest, real-time,
or mobile-formatted messages for each list, and they may format their own signature line. Users can even add and
tag attachments that are automatically archived in an associated Resource Library where the document can be
downloaded, commented upon, rated, forwarded, and saved to favorites. The online archive of discussions allows
users to view all messages based on threaded view, by date, by author, and by keyword searches. RSS subscriptions
are also available.
Every group, whether public or private, created on your MemberFuse site contains its own discussion forums,
resource library, group announcements, and wiki pages. Groups can be predetermined by data from your AMS, and
pre-set members to a Group based on committees, chapters, interests, etc. Group activity produces notification
emails to members, based on their notification settings creating a Listerv-type functionality. Users can receive
discussion notifications instantly or through daily or weekly digest emails.
ThePort’s Forums are a powerful way for members to create discussions and share information. Forums can be
public or private. Members can create topics, posts and comments. Forums updates are also delivered via email
or RSS to each member, transforming the forum into a Listserv. Members can also attach files to their forum posts,
send private messages within the forum and create their own custom signatures within the forum. Polling and
surveys are also available within forums. Forums can be created at the group level so that each group has its own
place for discussions.
We offer a more Twitter-like, short-form messaging system rather than a traditional forum.
The Socious forums and listservs are fully synchronized, meaning that you can take part in a discussion online as
well as from your email. Members can subscribe to a forum which allows them to participate in the discussion via
the listserv for that forum. Once subscribed to the forum, you can initiate a discussion, reply to discussions and
add attachments all without having to log in. You can choose to receive listserv emails immediately or in 4 different
digest versions. Our unique security process virtually eliminates spam and out of office notifications. Discussion
and attachments to discussions, including PDF documents, are fully searchable in the site wide search so that past
conversations can help future members.
Online forums or Discussion Boards are a standard feature in SharePoint. MemberToMember has an add-on, known
as WaveBoard which email enables the forums. Community administrators, or Group Owners can specify whether an
individual forum is “email enabled” or not, thus making that forum a listserv (or not). Members can choose to receive
forum entries in real-time as they occur, or in a digest format either daily or weekly. User can respond to them
directly through email or by going to the Web site.
20

Higher Logic’s resource library.
Polls and surveys?
The Connected Community product suite does not, itself, offer this but it is available through several of our strategic
partners including Informz, High Road Solutions, and Results Direct.
Right now users can “rate” resources in the Resource Library. We’re currently working on developing polling and
survey features for the MemberFuse platform. Keep an eye on our blog for updates!
ThePort Community members can create their own polls and surveys within ThePort’s forums. Polls can be
multiple choice, or yes/no questions. Administrators can also embed their own survey widgets within the community.
We support various polling/survey applications and we have a robust crowdsourcing module that allows the
organizers to get their communities participating in the “call for sessions” and other user-driven activities. Many of
the events we are assisting are opening up speaker slots, allowing members of their community to propose a session
they themselves would like to deliver, and then allowing attendees to vote on the sessions they want to hear.
In Socious, you can do both general polls/surveys that can be viewed and answered by everyone in the system, and
targeted polls/surveys only visible and answerable by certain members based on group affiliation, membership type,
or virtually any other criteria listed in their user profile. Our surveys can even be set up for voting in elections. Our
easy to use reporting tools allow you to see responses to date in a collated version or detailed format.
Polls, surveys, and voting are a feature included within the SharePoint platform. Additionally, thousands of additional
third party SharePoint ‘widgets’ or components may also be easily added by the community administrator.
MemberToMember also has Quick Poll add-on that provides graphically rich, instant online polls.
21

Wik is?
The Connected Community product suite includes a product called the Wiki Glossary that allows users to submit
terms/definitions into a centralized repository where the community can hone the definition through interactive
tools. The Glossary allows users to ask others for additional feedback/help and subscribe to the Glossary to receive
updates on industry terms and definitions. The Wiki Glossary can be set for access by the public or only to logged-in
members. Public viewing allows for increased organic search rankings.
Fully customizable wikis are a part of the groups module, allowing members with the proper permissions to add, edit,
and share information easily.
ThePort’s Communities are integrated with WetPaint wikis, which is the leading wiki platform in the industry.
WetPaint wikis feature 1-2-3 Simple Site Creation, Click and Type editing, Photo and Video Galleries, Discussion
Threads, Page Revision Tracking, Attachments, Widgets, Analytics and Email Alerts.
We’ve consciously decided to stick to connecting people, and leave wiki platforms to the many great commercial and
open source providers out there.
Socious enables your organization to have fully functional group level and site level wikis. Our wiki includes all
popular wiki syntax, a sandbox for users new to wiki to get acquainted with using a wiki and full history of pages
so you can always see how the page has progressed and who was a part of its’ collaboration. Our wikis can be
internally or externally available and are completely searchable in the search engine. Our rating and commenting
system for wikis allows the best content to be determined by members and easily found.
Wikis are available throughout the community both standalone and as part of Groups. Community administrators set
permissions to indicate which users can create or edit a Wiki entry.
22

File Management?
File management is handled in a variety of ways in Connected Community. Within the Microsites product, standard
content (HTML) can be stored within a virtual directory structure. File attachments (PDF, Word, Flash) can be
uploaded directly through the Microsite’s WYSIWYG editor and stored in a centralized Document Manager area.
Files (video, audio, Microsoft Office, PDF) can be uploaded into a Resource Library entry and tagged for archiving,
viewing and sharing in a Resource Library.
MemberFuse has a Resource Library Module that is available community-wide, or within a particular Collaborative
Group. The Resource Library allows staff or members to upload resources such as documents, videos, pictures, and
links. Each resource references the original author and contributor and includes the ability to comment or rate on
the content. The MemberFuse platform also supports Document/Resource Versioning (keeping track of changes over
time), Check-In/Check-Out functionality, and Sharing features.
ThePort communities contain full resource and document management libraries. Documents can be managed
by administrators, groups, chapters, events or individual users. Users are able to tag, rate and comment on all
documents. Users can also create their own folder structures to manage documents. Revision tracking is also
enabled to allow users to roll-back files to previous versions. All major document and media files are supported,
including Microsoft Office files. Recent document uploads are displayed within the community and user activity feeds.
We’ve consciously decided to stick to connecting people, and leave file management platforms to the many great
commercial and open source providers out there.
Organizations can have one central file library, and within it can be found both general member and private file
areas—the users’ security determines which files they can access. Any file type can be stored in our file library. Any
text based document, including PDF documents, has every word in the document cataloged for easy searching.
Socious also provides the ability to upload file sets, converting of files to PDF automatically, and cross categorizing
of files. Our file library also catalogs content outside of our system so your site can be a “one-stop-shop” for your
members looking for information.
Document management is a key function of the SharePoint platform. Users may upload documents to their individual
profiles, and apply security at the document level (me only, my colleagues (and me), or everyone.)Any type of file
including Microsoft Office documents, PDF, CAD/CAM, Multimedia or proprietary can be stored in a document
library. Documents can be checked out so that a read-only version is available when someone is editing the
document. Individuals and Groups can have document libraries with the Community administrator determining the
maximum available storage.
23

Media (photo/vi deo )?
Photos, videos, podcasts, and files of all kinds can be uploaded and stored in the Resource Library product. Video
can be streamed directly from the Resource Library. Our Image Scroller can be added to a Resource Library to
present images in a slideshow. Images in the Image Scroller can be hyperlinked to more information, making it a great
way to present exhibitor/sponsor images. Organizations can also automatically put a watermark to images or add a
short commercial to every video uploaded. . We also support the inclusion of Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, polls and forms
through user controls which source the content and display on a Microsites page.
Right now, photos, videos, and other media may be uploaded to the Resource Library. Those resources may be
shared openly, or protected by selective and private permissions. Coming soon…an interactive multimedia center
for streaming video, viewing slideshows, and downloading podcasts.
ThePort Community members can upload photos, videos, sound files and rich media into the community.
These media files can be stored at the group, chapter, committee or user level. All media files can be set as public
or private. Popular and recent videos can also be highlighted in featured models that help members view the
best content.
The Social Collective supports many forms of media. Our event pages, profiles, sponsor pages, and other pages
support images, embedding audio and video content, and other forms of rich media. In addition, our event pages
serve as aggregators, bringing down links to content from blogs, Google searches, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and
tweets from Twitter.
Socious enables an individual or group member to embed photos from Flickr or Picasa and YouTube videos to a
user profile or community page. Users can also directly upload their pictures to their personal or community media
center. This media center displays the pictures in a gallery or slideshow format on their user profile page or on their
community page. Video files can be directly uploaded to the site video library and streamed directly within the
site. Access to these videos can be limited to members that pay for access if you desire, which is great for webinar
recordings, for example.
Photos and images can be uploaded by registered users. Administrators are able to set limits on the amount / size of
data that can be uploaded.
24

Other U nique Stuff
Connected Community allows you to build as many communities as you would like and mix-and-match the products
to meet the needs of the community. You can create as many Microsites as you may need to best serve your
membership, complete with discussion lists, calendars, and resource libraries. . We also offer a full partner channel that
provides services and complementary products that are pre-integrated with Connected Community.
NFi has a suite of Event Technology solutions focused on creating collaboration and commerce before, during and
after your meeting or trade show. The NFi Studios ShowMatching product matches exhibitors and buyers around
compatible interests, and includes a meeting scheduler, show planner/itinerary, messaging, targeted advertising,
comprehensive reporting, and more. Other NFi products include PaperLess Events and Meeting Mosaic. In addition
to our solutions, we’re a full-service web design and development firm. If you can dream it, we can build it.
Two things: 1) ThePort’s Social Market 2.0 is an interactive supplier directory where businesses and sponsors can
create a presence within your community and interact with users. Featured listings within the directory can be sold
to businesses. Customers are creating as much as $50,000/month in new revenue. 2) ThePort’s Social Spaces enable
organizations to create their own custom groups around practically any object. For instance, members can join
actions, causes, committees, neighborhoods and businesses.
Crowdsourcing and the ability to turn an event into a User Generated Conference (or at least a portion of it to get
the crowd enticed and participating like never before) is a big advantage.
The Socious Issue Tracking module allows users to submit legislative, technical, or industry items to the organization
for resolution. The module is a perfect tool for groups that want to track and discuss issues that are pertinent to their
organization in an integrated, secure tool. Socious has a built-in CMS system that gives your organization the ability
to manage internal and external HTML web pages. Socious also allows you to configure your community and main
landing pages in infinite ways. The best thing about it, you need no HTML experience to configure a page within your
site, making it easy to have an engaging site with no technical experience.
Rather than list additional features/functionalities of MemberToMember, we would like to point out that ALL
SHAREPOINT features, web-parts, or widgets are 100% available for use with the MemberToMember community.
There are literally thousands of third party products available, many of them free and open-source.
25
ENABLING FACE-TO-FACE EVENTS

Events and event registration as a social object?
Connected Community will include the Event Manager (eM) product [General Availability: October 2009] that
allows for components to offer event registration at the local level in an easy and economical manner. eM allows
components to set up their own events with details and conflict resolution rules, pricing, member requirements, and
fee collection for event registrations via PayPal.
We have an Event Registration module that displays a list of current and archived events (often populated by the
AMS). Members may create Events that allow users to RSVP, with guest and ticketing options. Association staff can
highlight important company or sponsor events at the top of the page by marking them “Featured”. All Events and
reservations update right back into the association’s AMS.
ThePort enables organizers to create and manage their own events within the online community. Conference
organizers can also create session modules for their events that feature presenters, attendees, session videos
comments activity and session material downloads. Session presenters can also administer their own session pages
for each event. Events and sessions can also be instantly shared with AddThis to networks such as Facebook and
Twitter to drive event attendance. Session attendees can also register to attend individual sessions and leave
comments for other attendees and presenters. All events also appear in the community’s event calendar. Events also
feature activity feeds to alert community members when changes or updates are made to an event.
For associations managing events with their association management system, ThePort can automatically create events,
sessions and attendees based upon event registrations stored in your association management system.
Our platform was designed to support events and event-centric organizations. We’ve been used by some of the
biggest and best events around, including SXSW, The National Arts Festival of South Africa and Oracle OpenWorld.
We integrate with many commercial registration providers and also provide our own event registration module.
Once attendees are granted access to our system, they can submit and vote for proposals for speaking slots, browse
and search for people, add/remove people from their networks, import their friends from Twitter, Facebook and Ning,
download contact information, browse, build and export personalized event schedules, send messages to people, join
groups, take part in polls and surveys and interact with sponsors.
Socious gives your organization, and all of your chapters, and sub groups, a full speaker management, , event
management and online registration system. Our system manages all of your tracks, session, and room scheduling,
and allows users to create their own agenda online. Users at the conference can search the agenda right from
their mobile phone through our mobile application. Our event email engine sends out marketing emails as well as
automated notification emails. Our online registration system integrates with our member database or your AMS. We
have credit card and invoicing features that make it easy for your members to pay by credit card (all major merchant
accounts are compatible), check, or have their organization pay for them. Each user can access their past registrations
from their user profile and a very robust reporting engine helps you mine the event information from all events
across all of your groups quickly and easily.
You can schedule and promote events as well as create registration forms.
26
ENABLING FACE-TO-FACE EVENTS

Calendars?
Connected Community offers the Event Calendar product that provides communities with a graphical and list view
of events. The calendar can organize events by type, location, and by community name. Users can add events to
calendars, and each community can feature its own local calendar that can be rolled up into one Master Calendar.
The Master Calendar includes search options to view events at a local level (e.g. chapter or section).
Currently, calendar features are present in our Events module. Users can toggle the Calendar in day, week, month or
year views. Users can also add one or more events to their own Calendar (Outlook, iCal, Google, etc…). Even more
extensive calendar features are in the works.
ThePort’s Calendars contain any event that you have created or signed up to attend. There is also a public events
calendar that contains information for all upcoming community events. Users can also search event calendars to find
new events.
Through our highly social Scheduling Module, users can personalize their event schedules, get recommendations, and
see where their mutual connections are going. Users can also define private engagements and non-official sessions
on the fly. Users can sync their iCal, gCal and Outlook calendar, and get alerts of any important changes to specific
events. Soon, users will be able to embed their schedule as a widget on their blog or website, and have schedule
updates posted to Facebook. We’re also working on a grid view to allow users to visualize schedule conflicts more
easily.
Socious has powerful calendaring functionality. Each sub group with your organization, as well as the organization
itself, has a calendar. The user’s calendar aggregates all of the events that particular user can access based on their
group affiliation and membership on one calendar for easy viewing. Attachments can be added to calendar events
and calendar event notifications can be sent out via email. Users can download calendar events to their Outlook
calendar.
Calendars are available in many places throughout the site including groups and events. Users can synchronize these
calendars with their Outlook calendar as well as sign up for email alerts when an event is added to a calendar or
modified.
An event page from NFi Studios, and the schedule

page from The Social Collective. (Left to right.)
27
Satisfying the 1%ers

In this section: Mobile, Tagging, Site Search, Ratings/Reviews,
Mobile?
eGroups include the option for mobile-formatted messages for each list. The Wiki Glossary and Resource Library
include the ability to rate, rank, review, comment and share content. Microsites includes the ability to pull in posts
from Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.
Mobile browsing templates are available. Community notifications via SMS is optional. iPhone and Blackberry
applications are in development.
We have a Mobile Blogging feature that enables community members to submit blog posts via their mobile phones.
We are also enabling partners to build smartphone-specific interfaces through ThePort’s Open APIs.
We also have full mobile functionality on next-gen devices and SMS support for non smart-phones. Often someone
can’t lug around their laptop through a conference or event, but they certainly have their phone with them.
We have a mobile event application that links to our events system and enables attendees to view the events agenda
and search for sessions based on presenter, session name, time slot, track, and more.
We have a brand new iPhone app launched this month. Users can provide links to their external sites (Facebook,
Twitter, etc.) on their individual profile.
SusQtech’s brand new iPhone app for MemberToMember.
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Tagging ?
Connected Community features a centralized tagging structure that allows for tags to be created and used across the
various products of the suite. Tag structures include setting up the tag group name and then specifying tags contained
within the group. Users can tag blogs, eGroup posts, Resource Library entries (content such as documents, videos,
podcasts, PowerPoint, etc), Wiki Glossary entries (e.g. terms, definitions), Calendar event entries, and Communities.
Each tag group created will be included in the overall search of the site to allow users to search across all products
based on tags.
There is a tagging ability available for use with Groups, Resources, and other content sources. MemberFuse has a full
tagging taxonomy inherent in the platform, so each new feature released will contain powerful search and browsing
capabilities.
Any piece of content within the community can be tagged. Users can then search all content by tags and also view
tag clouds of particular types of contents (blogs, events, photos, videos).
Content that can be tagged includes profiles, events, groups, photos, businesses, campaigns, blogs, photos and videos.
Adding tags to every object in our system is on our roadmap, though not currently available.
Users can add keywords to content to be found in tag clouds within the site. Socious goes a step further and
catalogs every word in files, forums, forum attachments, news, issues,wikis, and blogs so we are not just hoping the
poster tagged the content correctly—we allow members to search the content itself. Blogs and wikis can be tagged
with a classification. This allows users to find all blogs that pertain to a particular subject. This is very helpful as your
blogging community grows.
Tagging is possible through both site-defined meta-tags as well as user generated “folksonomy” tags. Site-defined tags
are easily administered through a Taxonomy Administration tool. Tags can be applied to any content element within
MemberToMember including Blogs, Documents, Wiki entries, Group and Events.
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Search results from ThePort.
Site Search?
Yes! The site search allows you to search by file type, keyword, tags, and library. The various other products include
targeted searches to find emails, people, groups and content topics.
MemberFuse includes a site-wide search that searches through all members, groups, organizations, and resources, as
well as the public website if the system is integrated. “Plugins” can also be developed to hook the search functionality
into any existing source of data.
ThePort’s communities feature global-site search that enables searching of virtually any object or field. This includes
searching users, groups, events, files, forums, photos and videos. Users can then filter searches according to date, tags,
and popularity. ThePort can also extend its search functionality to search customers’ entire websites.
Yes, site search is fully integrated and powered by Xapian.
Our search not only keys on titles, descriptions and metadata but also catalogs every word in many content areas
of the site.The Socious system can search across every word in forum discussions as well as any attachments added
to the discussion, every word in text based documents (including .PDF) in the file library, across all blogs, wiki pages,
news stories, issue and issue comments, as well as additional information in titles and descriptions. Information can
be searched on by time frame, word or word phrase, posting group, or by category/topic. Once content is in the
Socious system it is very easy to find. Users can also easily search for other users and groups within our system
based on virtually any field within their profile that the member is willing to share with other members.
MemberToMember site search not only searches across the entire social networking site (profiles, discussions, events,
Wikis, Blogs, Documents) but can also search the main website and any other sites or databases that you wish to
include.
30

Ratings/R eviews?
Ratings can be input on Resource Library entries, your contact list, and Wiki Glossary entries. A formula can be added
to adjust how ratings are weighted when displaying the cumulative community total.
Each Resource has the ability to be rated, based on the permissions set by the association.
Members can rate any community content on a 5-star scale or offer thumbs up/down. We are also releasing the
ability for community members to “like” another members’ status update. Ratings and reviews for content can be
utilized to rank community members and content.
Integration with UserVoice is on our roadmap.
Socious has both a 5 star rating system and commenting within our software. We even allow for external
viewing, commenting and rating of blogs and wikis. This enables you to make the Executive Directors blog, for
example, available to members as well as available to anyone on the internet. Our external commenting and rating
uses Captia functionality to restrict spamming of comments.
Ratings and reviews are available for all content components including blogs, wikis, discussions and articles. You can
even rate and comment on comments.
Eas y sharing between users and to popular outposts

li ke Twitter , Faceboo k , L in k edIn?
Yes, you can forward/share/rate content within the Resource Library product.
The ShareThis button, which enables sharing through email, webmail, and popular social networking sites, is integrated
into the MemberFuse platform. This may be turned on or off based on specific association needs.
ThePort’s communities are enabled with AddThis so that users can share content with their networks on Facebook,
Twitter, MySpace, Digg, etc. This is true one-click sharing that allows users to post community content to practically
any social-network in existence.
Community members can also display their Twitter updates within their profiles.
We have built-in support for cross-posting to Facebook and Twitter.
Through our integrated sharing functionality members can share certain content within our system via email, webmail
and on 54 sharing sites helping you maximize the reach of your content.
MemberToMember Community administrators can enable sharing through email, and social networking sites like
Digg, del.icio.us, FaceBook, Twitter and many more.
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Connection with outposts? Closed/open integration ?
Connected Community is built on a provider model that allows it to easily connect with AMS or similar systems
through web services. This allows Connected Community to integrate with LMS,CMS, CRM, email marketing and
AMS systems.
MemberFuse has recently released extensive Facebook integration via Facebook Connect. We also support Twitter,
Flickr, and YouTube integration. LinkedIn integration is coming soon. And in addition to integrating with all leading AMS
solutions, MemberFuse integrates with most CMS, LMS, and CRM solutions.
ThePort has the tightest integration with association management systems available today. ThePort provides Single
Sign On, Profile Sharing and automatic data transfers between the community and AMS. This means that anything
managed by your AMS, such as committees, chapters, certifications, events or purchases can automatically be shared
and socially-enabled within the community.

ThePort also pulls user Twitter updates into their profile, and members can publish any information to
Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, etc using ThePort’s AddThis Widget. Community members can also chat with
their Facebook friends using Facebook Connect. ThePort will soon enable status updates within each community that
can also be pushed to Facebook and Twitter as well.
Our messaging interface is a close replica of Twitter (for inter-community use or for those who aren’t Twitter users)
and also a full Twitter client. That means that posting in our messaging platform will seamlessly re-post on your Twitter
account. Making changes to your schedule and certain other actions will trigger posts to the Facebook wall and/or
Twitter, depending on your settings. We also support content aggregation from outpots and friend-matching from
Facebook, Twitter, and Ning. Gmail, IM, LinkedIn and other forms of friend-matching are on our roadmap.
Socious provides Single Sign On and integration to most AMS systems and even legacy databases. We are an open
system that currently supports the easy sharing of content from outposts such as Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Picasa
and Flickr.
MemberToMember can be easily and seamlessly integrated with any AMS, CRM , LMS or CMS solutions. Additional
integration with third party sites such as FaceBook Connect, Twitter and other sites can be provided upon request.
The Social Collective has a Twitter-like

interface and close integration through
Facebook Connect and the Twitter API.
32

R S S enab led? Where and how? Widgets (to pus h out and pull in content )?
Yes, RSS can be found throughout the Connected Community suite to allow users to be updated. RSS is offered for
each Resource Library, for each discussion list, Wiki Glossary, and blog author. A user control that allows for the pull
and display of RSS feeds from external sites can also be placed within any of the page layouts to allow for the display
of external sites’ content. For example, you could include a section called “News Updates” that pulls from CNN.com
to your community homepage.
Content Alerts and the Feed Center are two powerful, yet simple modules that syndicate RSS Feeds and distribute
content to users based on their profile interests. Widgets are available to integrate RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, Flickr
photos and many other avenues of content. This makes it easy to import and export information from your
association websites and databases.
Forums, Activity Feeds, Photos, Blogs, Events and Groups are all RSS-enabled. ThePort can also display updates from
the community in XML-powered widgets on any web page.
All messaging and schedule items are RSS enabled.
The Socious system is fully RSS enabled. A user can subscribe to the RSS feed for specific content they want to be
notified about in the News Network, Blogs, Forums, File Library and Wikis. RSS feeds can be set-up as full HTML
content or teaser. Socious can also pull in RSS feeds so your site can be updated with content from other sites you
find interesting.
Administrators can choose to RSS enable any and all content on the site.
33
DETAILS FOR THE TECHIES

In this section: Code base, API, AMS Integration, Hosting, Security/Permissions
Coded? (.PHP, .NET, etc)
ASP.NET (Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server 2005)
The platform is built using Apache, MySQL and PHP. MemberFuse uses an industry standard Model View Controller
(MVC) design pattern, providing a clear separation of business logic and presentation.
Microsoft .NET, MS SQL Server, Lucene Search, Open Architecture
Ruby on Rails (Apache, Phusion Passenger, Linux)
Linux, Apache, MySQL and php
.NET (Sharepoint)
API? Open or closed?
Open API
Open API, with access granted to clients and authorized partners and developers.
Open API. We’ll gladly provide you and your partners API access to your community! (REST/SOAP/JSON)
Open API
Closed API
Open API
34

Does it integrate with AMS’s? Real-time or as ynchronous ?
Currently, 15 pre-built integrations exist which represents all of the major AMS makers and associated product
lines. It has both real-time and asynchronous to allow for an optimized performance. When a user signs into the
community site, his/her profile data is automatically pulled over from the AMS to populate the Higher Logic database
(or update it as appropriate). An asynchronous sync occurs each night at a scheduled time to bring over new groups
and people (e.g. if Chile was newly set up as a section in the AMS, it will be shown on the Higher Logic side following
the nightly sync).
Yes! MemberFuse integrates with your AMS. Based on the specific association’s AMS and their licensing, both real-
time and asynchronous options are available. If implemented with synchronization, syncs can be scheduled to run
automatically at set intervals, or may be synched manually at anytime. MemberFuse integrates real-time through
Webservices and SOAP calls through a robust API.
Yes – ThePort integrates with the leading association management systems, including Avectra netFORUM and

TMA Personify & TIMMS. Data is shared in real-time – any time a user signs into the community or updates their
information, this information is instantly shared between systems.
Additionally, ThePort has the deepest integration with association management systems in the industry. ThePort
enables Single Sign On, Member Profile Sharing and the sharing of any information managed by an AMS, including
events, committees, chapters, certifications and purchases. The sharing of data between the AMS and community
creates waves of activity and participation among members.
Not yet, however this is on our roadmap for an upcoming release and we are able to do a custom integration if
necessary.
Socious integrates with all major AMS systems and relational databases. We can link both real-time and
asynchronously, depending on the desire of the client and the AMS we are integrated with. We also have a complete
membership database that can link to your existing AMS system, or be run as a standalone system.
Integrates with AMS, website, or other data sources in real-time. A multitude of integration options are available.
On one end of the spectrum there are many built-in RSS/XML web-parts that a non-technical Community
Administrator can configure, and on the other end is the Business Data Catalog™ (BDC), which is the SharePoint
engine for integration, offering integrated search, security-trimming, and read/write capabilities; all exposed through
a suite of BDC Web Parts™.
35

Administration panels from SusQtech

and NFi Studios. (Left to right.)
Hosting ? Servers ?
Connected Community is offered in a SaaS model and therefore, hosted at a central site. Images, documents,
stylesheets are hosted through Amazon EC2 with the base code residing with a managed service provider partner.
Connected Community runs on VMware-powered virtual servers (ESXi virtual infrastructure) on Dell hardware that
is co-located at a hosting facility in Arizona.
MemberFuse is a hosted Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution. The difference between PaaS and Software as a
Service (SaaS) is that our platform allows for application development and extensive modularity and portability of
features. All hosting fees are included in platform licensing. MemberFuse is hosted on a private cloud of servers to
allow for secure data yet provide hardware failover and scalability as traffic increases. Our hosting is managed by
a premium partnership with Rackspace, and our servers are redundant and backed up daily. Dedicated hosting is
available for Enterprise clients.
ThePort is a SaaS solution. Our servers are hosted in a best-in-class Tier-4 data center, which features multiple backup
locations, fully redundant power, HVAC, and temperature monitoring. Our uptime record is 99.9%. Unlike standard
datacenters such as RackSpace, Tier-IV datacenters have more than one power source and are “disaster-proof.”
The Social Collective is a fully hosted, SaaS solution on Mosso, the Rackspace Cloud.
Socious is offered as a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. For one monthly fee, we manage all software
maintenance, hardware, back-up of data and software upgrades. Our servers are managed and hosted at a secure
hosting facilty. Socious also has a published disaster and back-up policy and we include our Service Level Agreement
in every contract. For very large file libraries we host those files through Amazon S3. This allows us to infinitely scale
with you as your content grows.
MemberToMember is available in both a hosted SaaS solution or as a license that runs on the client’s hardware.
Again—this is based on SharePoint, which is to say that any MemberToMember implementation is portable.
Customers may move their platform from a SaaS model, to an internally hosted environment, to an external hosting
provider such as RackSpace. The number of servers required is dependent on the activity on the community site and
the required throughput, but most organizations will only need a single server.
36

Securit y/Permissions ?
Connected Community offers a robust security model that is typically dependent on the AMS (if integrated) or
on imported data (if standalone). Security and permissions are determined first based on good member standing
based on information in the AMS. Member types are typically read from the AMS and stored as security groups
on the Higher Logic side. Access rights to content, products, navigation items and discussion lists can be locked
down to security groups. Additionally, Connected Community includes the security levels of “Public”, “Member,” and
“Authenticated”.
MemberFuse has a fully customizable system for determining permissions. Any number of User Roles may be created,
with permissions within each role having a detailed level of control.
ThePort Security settings are defined by your community administrator. Every section of the community can be
defined as public, private, or hidden. Owners of groups, events, photos, video and other content can customize
security and permission levels for their content.
Yes. Our security and permissions settings offer flexibility.
Socious is built on a powerful security model that permeates all areas of the site. What a user can see and do is all
determined on the membership type of the user, the roles they have within the organization, their committee or
chapter or what special security override they may have been given. This security can be applied within Socious or
within the AMS system (if we are integrated). Administration rights can be given to staff or users for specific modules
or specific topics. This allows you to have central site administrators and support administrators that have admin
rights in specific areas of the site or over specific communities or groups.
MemberToMember has granular security trimming which only exposes those elements to which the member has
access. When integrated with an AMS user roles and permissions in MemberToMember can be determined by
settings within the AMS. When it is a standalone solution, user roles are defined by the site administrator and applied
by appointing users to security groups.
37
Behind-the-Scenes Marketing Tools

In this section: Branding and Style Sheets, Foreign Language Support,
SEO, Flexibility of Design, Metrics, Advertising/Sponsorship
Website marketing tools

from Higher Logic.
Bran ding and style sheets?
Subscriber organizations can choose from a pre-set selection of graphical “looks” for their community site, or may
dictate the look and feel of their community site to be built to specification (commonly called “white labeling”).
Stylesheets are typically dictated by the subscriber organization and applied across all content and Connected
Community products.
NFi Studios is at its core a creative-technology organization. We focus on delivering powerful user experience, based
on the association client. Each time we set up MemberFuse for a new client we create a new, custom branded
theme, just for them. Our creative team will be glad to match the styles of any existing association website to provide
a seamless look.
ThePort’s communities are white label and take on the look and feel of your existing website. This includes your site’s
header, footer, and CSS. ThePort utilizes your current CSS to integrate the look and feel of your community with
your existing website. Any and all elements of a community layout can be completely customized to meet customer
requirements. This includes customizing where content is placed on the page within your community.
Additionally, ThePort’s user-interface is designed, out of the box, to be user-friendly and drive activity in a social
networking community.
Yes. We work with your team to match The Social Collective’s interface exactly to that of your site (whitelabeling).
Most aspects of the Socious system can be tailored to the existing web branding of the organization. All color
schemes, layout, navigation, headers and graphics can be tailored to an organizations existing web branding and
terminology. Aspects of the organization’s style sheets can be incorporated into our site to make the user’s transition
from your external website into the Socious system as seamless as possible.
Customers can choose the level of branding they desire. Site structure is provided via the .NET standard Master
Page model, while all visual/style elements are controlled by Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Everything is customizable
using the free Microsoft tool, SharePoint Designer™.
38

Foreign L anguage Support?
Our Microsites product allows users to create websites in any language. Our other products have been built
with resource files and therefore can be translated to other languages and some communities have taken
advantage of this.
Foreign language support is available and configured on a per customer basis.
We provide full support for foreign languages within our community. Our platform supports Unicode Transformation
Format, which enables ThePort to display unique foreign-language characters.
We have support for foreign currency, date and number formats and we will develop support for foreign languages
on an as-needed basis.
Socious link menus and action buttons only support English. However, the drop down menus and any content
posted into any of our modules can be done in foreign languages.
Member to Member natively provides 100% Unicode support throughout the product. Further, SharePoint provides
37 free “language packs” which convert all administrative, search, help, menu, and content authoring screens to the
native language. Language packs also provide search word-stemming and word-breaking capabilities across the
product.
ThePort’s administration control panel features tools for marketers.
39

Search Engine Optimization?
Connected Community is optimized for SEO in the following ways: 1) Master page includes metadata, keywords, and
descriptions 2) Content can be set to public view which can be indexed by SEO 3) URL paths are created using
document name that gets indexed by search engines. 4) Higher Logic offers a “search web service” to allow third
parties to include content on the community website.5) User controls exist to pull in content from third party sites
for display on the community website which increases the unique content that you have publicly available; thereby,
increasing your search rankings.
Through keyword placement, inbound links, and smart coding, NFi can help your member community maintain a
high rank on most search engines. Any content in the community can be made public to allow for search engine
“spidering”. Vanity URLs allow association staff and users to create more search-friendly website addresses.
All pages feature SEO-friendly URLs, meta tags, anchor text, and ALT tags. ThePort’s design templates are also built on
an SEO-friendly DIV structure. Communities also can display any RSS feeds, enabling communities to increase their
number of indexed pages.
Additionally, as the most important elements of SEO are links back to the community, ThePort works with clients on
their launch campaigns and provides online press releases to generate awareness for all of its clients.
We’re well designed for SEO using open event pages with proper titles, keywords, descriptions, etc.
The pages that are behind the login within the Socious system are considered private to the organization and not
searchable by search engines. However, many of the modules have external components such as making blogs, news,
and wikis externally available. In those cases any external page, as well as any page created by our CMS system and
made externally available, can be searched by search engines.
If the Community Administrator chooses to allow content to be exposed to search engines, MemberToMemberTM uses
search-engine-friendly URLs that enhance SEO. All content also utilizes meta-tags, taxonomy and folksonomy which
enhances the MemberToMember spidering by search engines.
40

F lex i b ility of design (moving modules around, pre -designed templates , etc . )
All of Connected Community is built on user controls that can be moved around and placed onto page layouts to
achieve a variety of designs. Subscriber organizations may move/add/edit their own navigation structure, content, and
product configurations to achieve the desired experience for their members. Connected Community comes pre-
configured so that you can only tweak what you need, or you can build your own layouts from scratch.
MemberFuse is completely modular in design. While most features already provide a significant amount of
configurability, each can be overridden to provide customized implementations if needed or desired. The theme
system is similar. You can start with the base platform templates and change only what you need, anywhere from just
your logo and colors to completely customized layouts.
ThePort features multiple user-friendly templates from which customers can choose for their community out of the
box. Templates can also be fully customizable as part of ThePort’s professional services. Any object or layout can
be fully customized according to a customer’s specifications. Customers can also gain complete access to the site’s
layout and CSS, and ThePort also provides site interface training to customers.
Yes, the site is quite flexible in how you design and lay out the various modules.
Recently released functionality allows organizations to lay out their main pages with information from within our site
or pull in content from other social networking sites. Customers can layout the page the way they want it to look.
Best of all, you need no HTML experience to change the layout of a page. Customers always have access to their
dedicated account manager that can help them if there are any issues, and there is no additional cost for that help.
Because the product is built on SharePoint, moving around elements is as simple as dragging and dropping SharePoint
Web Parts. In addition the Web parts that come with SharePoint and MemberToMember, thousands of Web parts
are available from providers around the world to customize the functionality of the site.
NFi Studios provides this

engagement dashboard for
marketers.
41

Metrics/measurement/re porting /analytics integration

(e.g. Web T rends/Google?)
Metrics may be obtained in a variety of places: 1) Each master page includes a place for the organization’s Google
Analytics code. 2) Each Microsite includes a built-in WebTrends-like graphic reporting tool. 3) The Resource Library
allows you to run reports to identify top contributors of user-generated content, document types and details, tags
used, search terms used, and document access history to identify who is looking at which documents. 4) The eGroup
product offers reports to show the number of posts to lists, number of subscriptions and length of subscriptions, and
the search logs for each eGroup. 5) The Engagement Center helps you identify your most valuable members based
on actual participation within the site.
In addition to full support of Google Analytics, MemberFuse also offers a comprehensive Community Reporting area,
with statistics on member activity, groups, resources, and much more. Reports can be viewed in spreadsheet format
or 3D graphs. Additional engagement metrics are soon to be released.
ThePort offers community reporting and analysis of community and member activity. Customers can also utilize
ThePort’s integration with WebTrends to analyze their community activity and traffic. ThePort can also add your own
analytics package (Google Analytics, Omniture) to the community.
We provide our own feature-by-feature reporting and integration with Google Analytics
for the basic metrics, e.g. PVs.
Socious has its own set of internal reporting and analytical tools that help administrators determine how the site
is being used and who is using it. Organizations can see who is subscribed to lists, who has joined as members of a
group, which files have been downloaded and what are the most downloaded files and accessed pages. You can see
who has participated in polls and survey as well as many more metrics to give you an idea of who is using your site
and what they are interested in. We also can integrate Google Analytics to any Socious site for groups that would like
that functionality.
In addition to the OOTB SharePoint Analytics (search analytics, user analytics, etc.), MemberToMember can easily
integrate with numerous analytics applications including WebTrends and Google Analytics.
Administrative tools from Socious,

including advertising options.
42

Advertising/sponsorship?
Advertising and sponsorship features exist in the Resource Library, eGroup, and Microsite products. 1) Advertisers
could sponsor a commercial added to all videos uploaded in a Resource Library. Advertisers could sponsor an entire
library or have one library just to house their own marketing material. 2) Each eGroup discussion lists feature a
banner ad in both the email and the archive. 3) Each Microsite master page may hold multiple banners ads that may
either connect to a URL or be linked to a pre-established banner ad service.
Targeted Advertising is placed throughout the MemberFuse site, allowing for non-dues revenue generation. Staff
can setup and manage multiple ad-campaigns as well as integrate with Google Ads. Additionally, Associations may
choose to allow sponsors to upgrade an organization profile with our advanced Premium Sponsor Profiles allowing
functionality such as product features, testimonials, user-discussions, and custom branding/themes.
Customers can place advertisements of practically any size anywhere within the community. Advertisements can be
placed on page areas based upon customer requirements. Ad performance, such as page views and clicks can also
be tracked.
ThePort also offers the industry’s only interactive supplier directory – Social Market 2.0. This enables customers to
sell space within this supplier directory to sponsors and also create featured listings. Businesses can then interact
with community members and create a social presence. Customers are generating more than $50,000/month with
Social Market 2.0.
Conference sponsors/exhibitors can set up Branded Fan Pages, their official brand “voice.” The sponsor/exhibitor can
then launch quick-burst competitions highlighting their products.
The Socious application includes an online vendor program. This allows vendors to have a limited view of the
information within the system in exchange for a subscription fee paid to the organization. Vendors can have their own
profile pages, forums, blogs and participate fully, or in a limited fashion based on the comfort level of the organization.
We have banner advertising and listserv taglines. You can also lump vendor benefits into packages, so you add a
vendor as a “Gold Vendor” to your system for example, and all of the users from that vendor will automatically
get the appropriate access. We have a vendor buyer’s guide which allows members to search for vendors based
on the services and products they provide. Socious also offers all services, vendor contracts, and marketing
materials necessary to help make our online vendor program a complete success.
Advertisements and sponsorships can be run throughout the site as well as on the forum messages. Ads can be
targeted to members based on their indicated interests.
43
WORKING TOGETHER
In this section: Deployment Time Frame, Pricing, Customer Service/Tech Support
Deployment time frame?
We view deployment in 3 phases: 1) Provisioning typically takes minutes for a new copy of the software to be
deployed onto a virtual server. 2) Configuration involves working with the your staff to review options and best
practices—this typically takes two weeks. 3) The rollout phase is your time to work with the tools to populate
content, input images, and create appropriate strategies to encourage member adoption of the tools. This is
completely up to the organization who can take as long as needed. A successful project typically runs 10-12 weeks.
NFi Studios conducts requirements gathering with each client to determine platform configuration, design, AMS
integration, training and an effective beta/launch strategy. This process typically takes 8 - 10 weeks but can be as quick
as 2 weeks.
ThePort works hand-in-hand with the customer during the consultation, design, implementation and launch phase.
ThePort’s consultants closely work with customers to determine the best mix of features for their community.
ThePort’s design and implementation team then works with customers to ensure that the community design and
setup is created specifically according to customer requirements. ThePort then helps customers develop a launch
strategy, provides best practices documents, and supports customers with press releases, blog posts and case studies.
We’ll even come to your conference to launch the community!
We can launch a community in less than 24 hours or take longer according to the customer’s unique requirements.
The site comes up in minutes but it takes 2-5 days to complete all the branding, setup and customizations.
Each Socious customer has a deployment manager that initially comes to your facility for one day and is your guide
during the entire implementation process. Each implementation is different, and your deployment manager will guide
you through the entire process and make suggestions on how to best set-up your system based on your needs and
best practices of other customers. Socious sets up your site for you and makes sure it is matching the vision you have
for your online community. Our implementations typically take 30-60 days, but can be done much quicker if desired.
During the entire process your deployment manager and account manager will be setting up the site based on your
specifications. Your account manager is involved so they know why your site was set-up the way it was to better
support you when the site is live.
Less than two weeks for our hosted model.
44
WORKING TOGETHER
Pricing ? (what it ’s based on , if there’s a set-up fee,

standalone option, licensing etc .)
The pricing model for Connected Community is based on the annual operating budget of the organization and
the number of products that the organization wishes to include in the subscription. Each product carries a fee that
is tiered to organization size. The right fee is determined and is multiplied by the number of modules to identify the
sum total of the subscription. A nominal set-up fee is typically included to cover single sign-on, provisioning, and hours
for advisor services.
There are different tiers of pricing depending on how many registered users are made active in the community.
There are also a variety of module packages including Standard and Premium. Some of the premium features include
Content Alerts, Member Matching, and the enhanced Resource Library.
ThePort is the only community provider that enables associations to choose from more than 30 features that
can be included in the community. Customers only pay for exactly the features they want. Our pricing begins
at $500/month.
One year contracts based on buckets of users, e.g. < 500, 501-1000, 1001-5000, 5001-10,000, 10,001-20,000,
20,001-50,000 and 50,001+
One-time set-up fee and a monthly fee. The set-up fee encompasses all aspects of setting up the organization’s Socious
site including AMS integration, security and site set-up, graphical design, go-live coaching, conversion of existing files and
listserv archives, etc. The monthly fee is an all-encompassing fee that includes unlimited access to the system and all
future upgrades and is based on the size of the organization and the modules they would like in their site.
Pricing for all but the enterprise site license is based on number of users and where the site is hosted. Set up fees
cover installation, branding, and integration, and are dependent on the customer’s requirements. Enterprise site
licensing is based on the number of servers being utilized.
45
WORKING TOGETHER
Customer service /tech su pport?
Higher Logic offers unlimited support ticketing to take questions on products and help subscriber organizations
troubleshoot/fix issues. The Higher Logic User Group (HUG) is another customer service tool that subscriber
organizations and members of subscriber organizations may use to access product training, materials, and discussion
lists. Service plans may be purchased from solution partners or Higher Logic for organizations that require additional
help or support.
NFi Studios takes pride in our ongoing partnership with our clients. NFi provides exceptional and timely support
and responses to customer needs. Each client is assigned an account manager, project manager, and business
representative. We provide regular business hour phone support and emergency 24/7. We also leverage Zendesk
ticketing systems, and have robust documentation, an online support forum, tutorials, and a helpful wiki.
Support is available during normal business hours. ThePort’s online ticket system is available 24/7, and most issues are
resolved within 24 hours. We respond within hours to email requests.
Phone and e-mail.
During implementation, Socious offers a dedicated deployment manager and a dedicated account manager. Your
dedicated account manager stays with your account as long as you are a customer with Socious. You can contact
your account manager as often as you would like and there is no additional fee for live support. All Socious
customers have access to the Socious Customer Support Center site, where clients can access the latest news
and information on the Socious tools and upcoming releases, help documentation, and overview documents. Site
administrators can participate in Socious Boot Camp, and a variety of regular webinars. Forums for each client enable
private communication with Socious, private archives of files related to their implementation and more.

Support available via email and telephone, Monday-Friday from 8am-6pm.
Socious provides ongoing

education for customers.
46
Social F ish Analysis :
Putting the Awesome in “Awesomesauce”
E
ach of the six vendors included in this whitepaper have The Rockstars
something that we feel is especially unique and valuable. The Social Collective is a newer player in the
Here’s what we find is the “awesomesauce” for each one. association space, and clearly unique compared
Our analysis is based on our work with them, our experience using to the other vendors featured here because
their platforms or conversations with people who use their platforms, their platform is very specifically about adding a community layer
and most importantly (for us), our confidence in the people behind to conferences and events. But the fit is so perfect—for many
these products who are a part of our association family. associations their annual conference is their most valuable member
benefit and biggest revenue generator, not to mention the biggest
The Thought Leaders community energizer. We love the social scheduling, and the way
Higher Logic has earned their great each individual session can become a social object. We also love that
reputation in the association community attendees can create informal events. But the real awesomesauce is
through a focus on giving back, especially the close integration with Facebook and Twitter, which we feel is way
in terms of educating association executives on the business ahead of the curve, and essential for an audience that uses those
implications of social media. For years, they’ve been at every ASAE outposts extensively.
conference, as speakers and as exhibitors. They truly understand
the complexities of association management from both the data The Ringmasters
side and the people side. We love that their platform has evolved Socious has a great reputation for prioritizing
smartly by adding social features to the familiar—for example, the their top-notch customer service, and their
member directory and eGroups/listserves—making the transition platform is incredibly responsive to the many needs and wants of
for members painless. Also, their Microsites are fantastic for enabling the many different pieces within one organization. Their platform is a
chapters, special interest groups, and components of all kinds. feature-rich option for all kinds of chapters and components—even
including a fully featured event system that components can use
The Visionaries themselves. We especially like that their platform can stand alone for
NFi Studios brings a fresh perspective smaller associations without a separate AMS or CMS. Beyond these
to the association space. They are really features, we find they have a true
engaged, extremely interested in filling the deep understanding of the difference between homebase and
needs of their association clients, and they have an incredible eye for outpost strategy and how the two fit together—and they use that
the possibilities of the semantic web. Their Member Matching feature knowledge to create user-friendly, efficient, and interactive sites for
is an example of using data to deliver that relevant experience, their clients.
helping members connect with other members in various organic
and user-focused ways. They are infused in the social media world The SharePoint
too, constantly listening and learning from thought leaders on the Kung Fu Masters
subject so that NFi can anticipate where this technology is going. SusQtech listened and responded to the
They are big picture thinkers who are always looking to innovate association community, and their MemberToMember platform has
and enhance, and they have a fantastic team of developers and turned SharePoint into something that can now easily match other
designers to keep their platform in pace with their vision. social networking platforms. We’re incredibly impressed with how
this social platform uses all the good things about SharePoint, like
The Trailblazers its incredible taxonomy, document management, and thousands
ThePort has a fascinating 10-year history of “web-parts,” and minimizes the difficulties by changing the user
as pioneers in the media space, helping experience. We love the social distance feature a LinkedIn-like way
newspapers adapt their publishing model for the web. They are to show how far removed someone is from other colleagues—and
ahead of the curve in terms of advanced advertising scripts, SEO, and the addition of folksonomy/user generated tags.
analytics. Their Social Market 2.0, an interactive supplier directory, is a
truly awesome way to give vendors and suppliers a role within your
association community and bring in non-dues revenue. These guys
really understand social media—both technically, with their open
APIs and interactive widget functionality that pushes content from
their platform out to outposts like Facebook, and also strategically,
with their focus on social “actions” and their understanding of the
importance of defining social objects within your space.
47
N e x t Ste p s:
Contact Details, Example Sites, and References
S
o now, you have the basics on each of these vendors.
Hopefully, you also have a better idea of the types of
decisions you need to make in order to make the right
NFi Studios/MemberFuse
choice for your white label online community. Remember, all six
Sterling Raphael
vendors are always improving their platforms, and always working on
407.282.3121
the next release in order to keep up with the needs of the market.
sterling@nfistudios.com
Even with all this information, you’ll want to get their latest demo
http://twitter.com/nfistudios
when you are ready to investigate further.
http://www.nfistudios.com
Want more information? Here’s where to get it. We’ve included

Sample Sites
contact information, example sites you can look at, and a couple of
Contact NFi Studios for visitor log in info.
references of organizations they have worked with. Shoot an email to
http://ibat.org
individual vendors to get the contact information for their references.
http://sema.org
http://mpi.memberfuse.com
Client References
Contact NFi Studios for contact info.
Higher Logic
Specialty Equipment Market Association
Mark Lowry
Independent Bankers Association of Texas
202-360-4448
PICO National Network
mark@higherlogic.com
Meeting Professionals International
http://www.higherlogic.com
Virginia Association of REALTORS
Sample Sites
http://network.corenetglobal.org
http://www.ngoconnectafrica.org
http://www.phisigmasigma.org
ThePort Network
Aaron Biddar
Client References
678-391-7826
Contact Higher Logic for contact info.
aaron.biddar@theport.com
CoreNet Global
http://twitter.com/ThePortNetwork
NGO Connect
http://www.theport.com/blog.aspx (blog)
Phi Sigma Sigma
http://www.theport.com
Sample Sites
Republican National Committee
http://our.gop.com/
American Academy of Pediatrics
http://ypn.aap.org/
National Association of Elementary School Principals
http://principalspace.naesp.org/
Client References
Contact ThePort for contact info.
Restaurant Facility and Management Association
National Association of Elementary School Principles
48
N e x t Ste p s:
Contact Details, Example Sites, and References
SusQTech/MemberToMember
Jen Miller
The Social Collective 888-603-0304
Chris Bucchere sales@susqtech.com
415-516-3941 http://twitter.com/susqtech
info@thesocialcollective.com http://www.susqtech.com
http://twitter.com/nowgetsocial
http://blog.thesocialcollective.com (blog) Sample Sites
http://www.thesocialcollective.com http://www.TheSug.org
The Sharepoint Users Group
Sample Sites
http://my.sxsw.com http://collaborate.asaecenter.org
http://www.nationalartsfestival.co.za ASAE & The Center
http://converge.nadp.org
Client References
Client References Contact SusQTech for contact info.
Contact The Social Collective for contact info. ASAE & The Center
SXSW Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO)
NAFSA Women in Cable and Telecommunication
Converge
Socious http://www.socialfish.org
Paul Schneider
602-734-5353 Lindy Dreyer
pschneider@socious.com 202-741-9372
http://twitter.com/paulschneideraz lindy@socialfish.org
http://www.socious.com/paulschneider (blog) http://twitter.com/lindydreyer
http://www.socious.com
Sample Sites
http://www.pmihouston.org Maddie Grant, CAE
This external site was built using the Socious CMS system to manage 202-294-6148
their entire external website. The education section of this site links maddie@socialfish.org
to event data created behind the login and updates automatically. http://twitter.com/maddiegrant

http://www.heug.org
© 2009 SocialFish
This external site was built using the Socious CMS system to
manage their entire external website. Please share this and quote from it freely, just remember to link back
to this, the original source.
Client References The costs of writing, designing and producing this white paper were
Contact Socious for contact info. shared between SocialFish and all six vendors discussed here, in order to
be able to provide this as a free resource to the association community.
American Red Cross
After all, there is no charge for awesomesauce.
Destination Marketing Association International
Association of Collegiate Business Schools and Programs
49

SocialFish Online Community Vendor Analysis Whitepaper

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presents…

Six Online Community Vendors

2 A Note from the SocialFish

3 Rob Wenger, Higher Logic

13 Features and Specifications for Each Vendor

47 SocialFish Analysis: Putting the Awesome in "Awesomesauce"

48 Next Steps: Contact Details, Example Sites, and References

Share • www.socialfish.org ©2009 SocialFish •

Interview continued on page 9

“ Our clients can and do direct our

Interview continued on page 10

BC: Software development is in the core DNA of ThePort

“ ThePort’s hard-core development focus

“ Where we change the game is allowing

“ SusQtech only hires “lifelong learners.” These

problems, then go home and immediately

Rob Wenger , Hig h er L ogic Cont’ d

“ Ionoften think too much emphasis is put

Engaged – Social media and social networking for associations

SF: How do you see your platform shaping the association

sterling ra ph ael, N F I stud ios Cont’ d bo b cramer, t h e p ort network Cont’d

Integrated – ThePort has built the most open platform in

Reliable – ThePort has the most experience and most users of

Three adjectives NFi Studios CEO, Sterling Raphael, uses to describe

“ We’re not in the business of loading up our

Seamless – No matter if we are integrated with an AMS, LinkedIn,

Supported – With Socious, you have a support team that is not

mike steadman, susqtech Cont’d

SF: If you could use just three adjectives to describe

Simple – This was the #1 design goal for end-users. We know

Interoperable – Our suite of web-services-based API’s

Three adjectives SusQtech CEO, Mike Steadman, uses to describe his

“ MemberToMember customers have

14 C onnecting People 34 Details for the T echies

In this section: Events and Event Registration, Calendars

28 S atisf y ing the 1%ers

In this section: Mobile,Tagging, Site Search, Ratings/Reviews,

Clockwise from top left, Higher Logic,

Indivi dual Profile (“My Profile”):

Group profiles from SusQtech,

Friending/connections – as ymmetrical (lik e T witter )

Groups and su bgroups?

This user profile from Higher Logic

PUTTING PEOPLE TO WORK

Upon joining the community and any time

PUTTING PEOPLE TO WORK

Forums and listservs?

PUTTING PEOPLE TO WORK

Higher Logic’s resource library.

Polls and surveys?

PUTTING PEOPLE TO WORK

PUTTING PEOPLE TO WORK

PUTTING PEOPLE TO WORK

Media (photo/vi deo )?

PUTTING PEOPLE TO WORK

Other U nique Stuff

ENABLING FACE-TO-FACE EVENTS

Events and event registration as a social object?

ENABLING FACE-TO-FACE EVENTS

An event page from NFi Studios, and the schedule

Satisfying the 1%ers

SusQtech’s brand new iPhone app for MemberToMember.

Satisfying the 1%ers

Satisfying the 1%ers