Tendenci – The Open Source AMS Blog
Community Blog for Open Source AMS Makers
Hi Tendenci Community! You can find all of your online Tendenci support in one spot! Read The Docs, Help Files, tutorials, the training videos, contact form, AMS community blog and vaporware wish list are all accessible from this one spot. Got a question about Tendenci AMS? Start here!
Are you keeping up with your members in several software tools that don’t always feel connected? Or are you using spreadsheets to keep everything straight? Managing Members is hard work – let Tendenci take care of the heavy lifting to help you manage, communicate with, and grow your members.
Tendenci gives you the flexiblity and ease of use to create an online membership management platform as unique as your association’s community.
Tendenci’s Membership Module allows your organization to manage member sign ups and renewals, member types and groups, search and find members, and set custom tiered permissions as needed – all online through your Tendenci website.
Read More About How Membership Management Can Streamline Your Process:
How do I delete members from my site?
How do I delete members from a corporate membership?
I have deleted a member but the member is still showing up – why?
Tendenci has been helping nonprofits and associations large and small manage their membership since 2001.
For more information please visit us online at www.Tendenci.com.
When Khliya Hamilin, led a conversation at NetSquared North, asking nonprofit groups, “How do you want to use technology to achieve your nonprofit’s goals?” conference goers said they were most interested in using technology to:
Tendenci’s open source content management software offers solutions in all these areas – some that are available to you on your site that you may not yet be taking advantage of!
Using photos and videos are a powerful way to tell your organization’s story by visually showing off the people and events of your organization.
Tendenci Open Source integrated system includes a complete digital media management package to organize, collect, and share photos, videos, and documents on your website securely and neatly.
Create a new event in minutes directly from your Tendenci website with our integrated events calendar module.
Add all the event details including location and directions, speaker bios, ticket pricing, images, sponsors on a single page online.
Color code your events by type on your Tendenci calendar to create a visual experience for site users
Tendenci Content Management Software (CMS) gives you the resources to manage and organize your website content without having to know HTML or other complicated programming tools.
Easily add and edit pages, articles, news, stories, photo albums, and more through the Tendenci web interface – helping you to engage both your internal users as well as online visitors.
Tendenci’s Membership Module allows you to manage member sign ups and renewals, member types and groups, search and find members, and set custom tiered permissions as needed – all online through your Tendenci website. Easily manage and engage your volunteers with built in newsletters!
Tendenci’s customizable permissions allow you to give access to different parts of the site to those who need it, when they need it.
Split up your administrator! Tendenci allows you to set up different members of your organization to receive notifications on activity that is pertinent to their work such as contact form notifications, event registration notifications, membership sign ups, and more.
Help your internal team and community using our built in help files system. Upload documents and pictures to share with your team and broader community.
Tendenci online Business Directories allow you to showcase your sponsors or preferred partners on your website. Business Directories can be organized by category and subcategory, and include graphic logos and search engine friendly descriptions and tags.
Business Directories can generate revenue for your organization or provide additional value to sponsors and partners.
Over 1.4 million users love Tendenci, and we hope that you’ll love it too! For more information visit Tendenci.com.
You talked – we listened! Generate newsletters and manage your email lists from within your Tendenci website using the customizable Newsletter module. Simple sign up forms, opt-in capabilities, automatically generated content and pre-designed templates make sending newsletters a breeze!
To prepare a Newsletter, choose a customized graphical template and specify what website content to include – recent News and/or Articles, Upcoming Events, Recent Photos, etc.
A click of a button pulls all of this content to the Newsletter with links back to your site for more information. Newsletters can be viewed and edited prior to sending so that you can add a personal touch. The first 10,000 newsletters sent each month are FREE!
Read more: How Do I Create A Newsletter?
Ready to send newsletters on the fly? Contact us at helpdesk.tendenci.com.
More Recently Added Help Files
Learn more about how to make the most of your Tendenci website!
When I joined the Tendenci team a year ago, I had just finished my PhD in Linguistics at Rice University. While I loved lecturing, researching, and expanding college students’ young minds, I felt like I wanted to do more outside the ivory tower. I had plenty of experience in public speaking, academic research, and formal writing, but I was pretty green when it came to the world of technology. Sure, I had done a bit of marketing for our graduate linguistics society and the Italian club. I even maintained a static HTML journal website throughout high school (before LiveJournal was a thing). But let’s be real–I didn’t even know how to clear my browser cache.
Needless to say, the learning curve was steep and grueling. Lucky for me coming straight out of academia, I was used to steep and grueling learning curves! I was quickly thrown into the world of website project management. I was meeting with clients, collecting DNS info, and making CSS changes.
Within a few months, I was put in charge the Programming Team. It became my responsibility to look after the product, ensuring feature updates responded to our clients’ requests and reported issues. I was crowned “client advocate” and a passion for user experience grew in me. One of the best parts of my job has been calling a client to let them know that we’ve implemented a feature they suggested or fixed a bug they uncovered. We love our clients here at Tendenci, and it was such an honor to foster such a unique relationship with them.
After a whirlwind of a year, I am moving on to my next adventure (or moving with the cheese, as one of our required New Guy readings goes). I’ll be combining my expertise in language and communication with my newly gained web marketing knowledge to step up as Marketing Manager for a local engineering solutions provider. Having been raised by an engineer who had a passion for precision and efficiency, I’m looking forward to working with folks of the same engineering mindset. Learning a whole new industry will be intense to say the least, but after all, one doesn’t go complete 6 years of doctoral study because they hate learning. 😉
At Tendenci, I’ve had the opportunity to work with the most brilliant developers and project managers in Houston. They’ve inspired me and guided me, and I’m so glad to call them my friends. Our clients are lucky to have such a caring, thoughtful team of Tendencians that work for them.
I’ll be working with the Tendenci software in my new position and for that, I am absolutely thrilled. I have an idea of what’s in store (don’t worry–I won’t leak any spoilers), but I am especially looking forward to see where Tendenci goes next.
When event organizers plan fundraising events, they meticulously plan out details regarding location, accommodations, logistics, and fundraising goals, but it’s also important to formulate a strategic plan for connecting with your online community.
This past Saturday, I gave a talk at the 2014 Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC), organized by the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN). I co-presented with Michael Wilson, CEO and Founder of Small World Labs, based in Austin, TX.
In my half, (viewable on SlideShare), I discussed basic tips and tricks to help event organizers make their fundraising events successful.
Three things to keep in mind to make sure your event participants come back year after year are:
One tangible takeaway for the audience was an event planning checklist for your online strategies. I thought it would be helpful to share it with the rest of the internet! Read on for a detailed explanation of each point. You can download a printable PDF from our website.
Mobile Optimization
According to Mashable, 17.4% of all online traffic is mobile. If your site isn’t mobile optimized, your event could be missing out on a possible avenue of promotion. Additionally, if participants can’t access basic information about parking and registration on their mobile device, they’ll be less likely to participate again next year.
Template Emails
If you have participant teams fundraising for your event, give them tools to make their jobs easier. Did you know that 64% of participants don’t know that they should be raising funds? Creating email templates for team leaders is a great way to make fundraising easier for everyone involved!
Share Last Year’s Highlights
Past events can be an ill-used marketing medium. Don’t be afraid to resurrect last year’s stories to remind people how great this year is going to be.
Share Personal Stories
If your event had beneficiaries, then tell their story. People like to hear about the real people. Show your audience that you’re real and so are the people you’ve affected!
#Hashtag It!
Both Twitter and Facebook use hashtags (#) to aggregate data and content. Establish a hashtag for your event and begin using it to keep track of all your event data and content. That way, you can search for it and event attendees can participate by “hashtagging” posts during your event.
Pre-Generate Content
Organizing your content ahead of time can really free up your time on event day. As speakers, giveaways, or certain events are locked in, pre-write content about them that you can save and share during the event for increased engagement and exposure.
Continue Sharing
As you continue preparing for your event, continue sharing speaker announcements, past anecdotes, and news. Don’t forget to continue sharing highlights and personal stories. It’s always a good idea to link folks back to your website so they stay engaged with your organization.
Schedule Your Content
Remember that pre-generated content you’ve been sitting on? Now’s the time to use it. Create a schedule for sharing all those wonderful words online and then put someone in charge of that said sharing.
Photography
Designate, volun-tell, or hire someone to be in charge of photography and create a shot list to document the event. Use photos in your promotional materials and on your website to tell your organization’s story!
Share Everything!
Just because the event is here doesn’t mean your job is over. Keep using your hashtag and make sure you share announcements and event updates or changes.
Engage, Respond, Act
When people are using your hashtag and talking about your event, you need to be involved. Show that what people are saying is important by responding to what they say. Come up with a plan for how you will respond to social media–both negative and positive feedback need responses!
Say Thank You
Use your online mediums, whatever they may be, to say publicly say thank you to all the volunteers, attendees, and various participants. Send personalized thank you notes to the speakers and participants. It’s a nice extra touch and they be flattered. It show that you put in extra time and that you actually care.
Share Your Photos
Sharing photos should be a two-pronged attack.
This way, you’ll share relevant content on social media and drive traffic to your site.
Share Your Content
If you have any photos, blogs, whitepapers, infographics etc. create a schedule for sharing those to continue exposure and keep people talking about what happened at your event.
Analyze, Analyze, Analyze
Use traffic tools to analyze traffic to all of your sites or online portals. You can use these free tools to ensure accurate results:
If these tools don’t cut it or aren’t for you, try one of these top 8 tools from Maximize Social Business.
Send a Survey
Gain insightful feedback from your event participants by sending out a survey. For example, if folks complain about the parking at your event, when it comes time to market your next event, fix the parking situation and let participants know that they helped to make the event better!
Plan Ahead
Use your newly-gleaned analytics to plan ahead for next year by maximizing your strengths and minimizing your areas of weakness.
You can download a formatted checklist of all these steps in PDF format at on our website.
You can view the slides from my half of the presentation at Tendenci’s slideshare.
We also have plenty of Nonprofit Marketing Resources on our website!
Millennials are important!
They’re a technology-rich, internet-laden demographic that has untapped potential, if you can figure out how to engage them.
Join Tendenci‘s Becky Leven, a proud Millennial, as she discusses The Power of Technology and The Millennial Generation, a 14NTC panel today at 3:30 EST/2:30 CST.
The panel features five other experts from nonprofit and tech companies. Speakers include:
These 6 experts will go into depth about how to leverage, engage and collaborate with Millennials. If you’re attending 14NTC, you can find the event details here.
Never fear! This talk will be livestreamed at 3:30 EST/2:30 CST so you won’t miss a thing.
Nothing can make sense of the tragedy that happened last night in downtown Austin during SXSW.
All of the facts aren’t known yet, but we do know that innocent lives were lost and many more were injured in the accident.
First and foremost, our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and their families.
The Austin American Statesman newspaper is providing details on their website as they become available:
http://www.statesman.com/news/news/local/reports-car-hit-pedestrians-outside-mohawk/nfB4z/
Join Sarah Worthy, Director of Product and Chief Experience Officer (CXO) at AuthorizedCV, a health IT startup in Houston, and Ed Schipul, CEO of Tendenci for their 2014 SXSW Interactive workshop: Open Source = Unemployed, & This ROCKS!
Worthy and Schipul will give their predictions about the effects of open source software/hardware on the economy and the implications it has for tech giants like Microsoft and Intel.
The workshop will take place on Tuesday, March 11 from 9:30am until 10:30am at the Courtyard Marriott on 300 E 4th Street.
To register, go to the workshop’s page. We hope to see you there, and don’t forget to hashtag! #sxsw #thisROCKS
Every year, the American Marketing Association (AMA) gives out the coveted Marketer of the Year Award to companies in 26 different categories. Ranging from the Performing Arts or Healthcare to Restaurants or Sports.
This year, YMCA Houston took home the overall AMA Houston Marketer of the Year Award for 2013.
A total of four Tendenci clients received awards for exceptional marketing in their fields. For 2013, the winners are:
YMCA of Greater HoustonFor more than 125 years, the Y has served the community through health and wellness programs for children and families.
The Y’s mission to “put Judeo-Christian principles into practice through programs that build healthy spirit, mind and body for all” is carried out through summer camps, community benefit programs and health initiatives.
Congrats on the AMA Houston Marketer of the Year Award for 2013!
T-Rex Engineering + ConstructionSince its creation in 2001, T-Rex has been a leading company in engineering and fabrication for the energy industry both in Houston and around the globe.
They offer equipment and services for offshore drilling for oil and gas and are a leader in EPC (engineering, procurement and construction) for the energy industry.
The Children’s Museum of Houston has been a fixture of Houston since 1980.
With more than 14 exhibits, Children’s Museum of Houston has dedicated itself to “transforming communities through innovative, child-centered learning” and currently sees more than 850,000 people annually through its doors.
Miller Outdoor TheatreMiller Outdoor Theatre is located on about 8 acres of land on Hermann Park.
Since 1923, it’s provided professional entertainment, free of charge, for the Houston community.
Performances range from modern dance or musicals to live jazz or classic films.
Congratulations again to all of our wonderful clients on their nominations and awards! To see more of our awesome clients, click here and read on.