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Open Text Helps The Stelter Company Engage Customers and Collaborate with Peers Online

Open Text [1]Waterloo’s Open Text Corporation [1] has announced that Idaho-based The Stelter Company [2] is now using Open Text Social Communities to foster communities and encourage collaboration and communication with its clients.

The Stelter Company takes a leading role in marketing communications to help more than 2,600 charities with campaigns that identify, educate, and motivate donors to make planned gifts. As part of its communication management strategy, Stelter distributes information using a variety of old and new media, such as direct mail and email newsletters, while managing the gift-planning content of more than 1,200 charity websites.

In order to better assist its clients and in an effort to reach a more tech-savvy audience, Stelter increased the number of channels it uses to communicate its clients’ messages and develop its expertise in online communication. In 2010, the company established Bestow [3], a community space for those who have a passion for nonprofit fundraising. Its efforts to embrace social media Stelter faced several challenges, including its limited marketing resources and a lack of social media expertise. Its clients faced similar difficulty adapting to new digital media.

To resolve this, Stelter approached Open Text to implement Open Text Social Communities, a social media platform that offers social portals and communities through drop-in, easy-to-configure portlets.

“We approached Open Text to use the Open Text Social Communities product, which we essentially implemented pretty much out of the box. It was implemented by the Open Text Professional Services team, which for us was just a real turnkey and simple process,” said Bev Hutney, Director of Innovation and Research at The Stelter Company. “The new community has provided the company with an opportunity to enhance its social networking, demonstrate its lead in innovation, and exchange communications with other professionals in the industry.”

With Open Text Social Communities, Bestow now has blogs, ratings, commenting, and tagging features, enabling employees to engage with customers and collaborate with peers to increase their own visibility online. Stelter also uses Open Text Campaign Management to keep in touch with clients and create a more social community that better targets their area of interest.

Bestow also has different areas of focus that help to encourage participation from different members of the industry as a community. The ‘Inbox,’ enables subject matter experts from both the company and outside sources to share their knowledge through weekly blogs. ‘Insight,’ offers Stelter a place to disseminate its research and the research of others, demonstrating the company’s central position in the industry and through which the company hopes to grow its client base and its reputation as an industry expert and thought leader. The ‘Ideas’ section encourages communication with customers by providing them with a space to contribute their own ideas. Finally, the ‘Innovation’ section offers an area to introduce prototypes, pilot projects, case studies and so forth. Users can upload and share many different types of content, from documents, to PowerPoint ® presentations, to video.

“The Stelter Company is an innovative organization that recognized the need to offer more social media capabilities in order to create and maintain strong relationships with clients,” said Lubor Ptacek, Vice President of Product Marketing for Open Text. “With Open Text Social Communities, Stelter is now able to offer clients a more engaging experience online, helping them to collaborate with their donors and enhance their non-profit fundraising programs.”