Skip to content
Ramius ®
  • Request more information
  • See our industry applications

Our Approach

Many organizations seeking to launch online communities want to know how they can ensure rapid adoption and continued use of the technology by the community's target audience.

At Ramius®, we believe building successful online communities requires a disciplined approach to collaboration that is driven by a clearly defined purpose and audience.

We refer to our approach as an Online Collaboration Methodology (OCM) — the deliberate planning, use, growth and evaluation of collaboration networks (communities) to ensure rapid adoption and continual use.

On This Page:

Manage The Community Building Process

For years, a prominent strategy for building online communities involved a passive approach where collaboration "emerges" naturally with little or no deliberate facilitation. This approach seems to have translated into an assumption that little or no management of collaborative technology and processes is needed. However, this passive approach to online collaboration generally yields poor results.

Reasons for failure include:

  • Inadequate allocation of resources to build the community;
  • A lack of understanding of the community's context or purpose by its users; and
  • A tendency for people to abandon the habits and characteristics of effective communications in online settings.

These failures can be averted when organizations take a more project-managed, holistic approach to implementing their online communities. The key to success is to align community strategy and goals to the overall communications or business strategy of the organization. Community building then, becomes a deliberate and managed process.

Ramius' OCM is founded on the strategy of managed collaboration and is used to address two distinct business requirements for our clients:

  • Implementation of the online technology — including associated set-up and training — for a specified business application (i.e. a partner, working group or customer community)
  • Analysis of the business requirements, resources and processes needed to ensure the implementation meets the intended organizational goals

Using the OCM as a guide, Ramius' Professional Services team will work with you to create a strategic deployment plan for your online community. We will help you to identify and align work processes, milestones, roles and responsibilities to ensure rapid adoption and continual use of your CommunityZero environment by your target audience. We can even manage and administer your CommunityZero environment on your behalf.

Our Professional Services team is ready to assist you in building meaningful interactions with your target audience. Contact us today for more information.

Top of page

Why Online Communities?

Online communities are a form of social software that organizations can apply to a variety of business applications and settings for the purpose of creating a community — a virtual environment where participants can collectively share content and communicate with one another across geographies and time zones.

Consider the following:

  • Whether due to travel restrictions or geographically dispersed teams, more workers are working virtually. As a result, there is a need for effective online collaboration across locations, organizations and geographies.
  • An aging, more transient and more globalized workforce makes the management of knowledge a critical success factor for organizations. Knowledge capital must be formally captured or risk being lost.
  • As more people spend time on the Web for personal and professional reasons, businesses need to find new ways to connect with their customers, partners and other valued stakeholders than traditional marketing channels offer.

Online communities offer organizations a convenient way to engage their target audience in dialogue about ways to improve products and services. This feedback can guide product development, reduce support requests and increase brand loyalty.

Online communities also provide organizations the opportunity to fuel collaboration among workgroups and to document intellectual property (IP) in a way that can refine business processes and speed time-to-market.

Finally, online communities provide organizations the opportunity to extend business-to-business (B2B) engagement strategies by providing a secure, virtual space to exchange products, services and information.

At Ramius, we are dedicated to helping our clients meet their collaboration and community building initiatives by providing secure, scalable social software that can be applied to a variety of business applications. Whether you need to support communication with partners, customers, association members or another targeted audience, CommunityZero is a valuable online solution for enabling group communication.

Learn how CommunityZero can help your industry.

Top of page

Online Communities As SaaS

Ramius makes it easy for our clients to deploy online communities by delivering CommunityZero as software-as-a-service (SaaS). SaaS offers a simple and cost-effective way to ensure data back up and protection of your communities without the hassle of managing the site infrastructure yourself.

Traditional software applications often involve lengthy and complex deployments and require your organization to dedicate its IT staff and budgetary resources towards the maintenance of the onsite infrastructure.

Under the SaaS delivery model, Ramius hosts your CommunityZero environment on our world-class hosted infrastructure and manages all data backup, security and software updates on your behalf. This service significantly lowers your total cost of ownership (TCO) for deploying online communities because the maintenance of your CommunityZero environment is handled for you. Security risks are also dramatically reduced through the use of multiple redundant servers that protect your communities from system failures as well as the risk of downtime and lost data.

Since there is no software to download or install, you benefit from rapid deployment. As a result, you can quickly get your users online and actively collaborating knowing your communities are always accessible and always secure. And because CommunityZero is 100% Web-based, it can scale to support multiple communities with thousands of users.

Is the SaaS online community model right for you? Contact us today for more information.

Top of page