Andar Content Management
Guest post by: Rick Collins, Columbus OH
I attended both of these sessions hoping to learn a little more about Andar’s content management system, how people were using it and whether it’s something I should push for in our United Way. I was surprised to learn that Metro United Way (Louisville, KY) is moving their public website to Andar’s CMS very soon.
Having your public website through the Andar CMS is very interesting in that everything is in the one database, integrated and you can view constituent’s searching habits which gives you insight on their interests (something we aren’t really able to do today).
There are some disadvantages of course in the flexibility, user interface and needing more of the Andar modules to get the full functionality, but it’s a very interesting concept and I’ll be very interested to see Metro UW’s site when it is live.
Another cool thing the public website on CMS could do is tailor content based on the user’s profile; for example, if Andar knows I’m interested in early child education, when I go on the website, it could publish a “web portlet” that references some information about early child education. Another example is it could display Tocqueville information for those that are in the Tocqueville warehouse (or any warehouse you specify).
In terms of the email marketing side, I was very interested in learning more considering we are using Constant Contact for our newsletters and emails due to the simple user interface rather than utilizing html. I learned that you can create articles, add an interest and interest rating to the article, include some tracking parameters in the articles, then send out an email about different topics (3 links to education, income and health).
By utilizing the interest and interest rating, when a constituent clicks on the education link, it will track back to Andar and you now gain insight into their interests based on which links they click on in an email. This goes much deeper than simply tracking open and click through rates, but now we’re learning which articles are being viewed by which constituents. I also learned that they have a new (at least new to me) html editor in Andar that makes it easier for those of us html dummies. Very useful information.
Follow the Andar Users Group conference on Twitter by searching for the hashtag #upic.