Plus Three President Shares Expertise in Online List Growth and Acquisitions at 2005 Personal Democracy Forum Conference
Posted on 05/11/2005 @ 11:43 AM
Juan Proaño Offers Insights that Helped Customers Effectively Grow Lists Through Plus Three Systems
Plus Three LP, ("Plus Three" or the "Company"), a strategic marketing and technology company serving major U.S. political organizations and non-profit institutions, today announced that co-founder and President Juan Proaño will be participating in a panel discussion at the Personal Democracy Forum Conference in New York, NY. Proaño will take part in the discussion entitled, "Got Lists? How to Build Your Base Online," drawing on his success building world class databases for Plus Three customers and offering his best practices for building and managing powerful databases. Attendees at the 2005 Personal Democracy Forum Conference will be able to attend the panel on May 16 at 2:00 P.M. ET. For more information please contact Kelby Troutman at 781-487-4610 or ktroutman@racepointgroup.com.
"The low cost of Internet communications has drastically changed the way large and small organizations reach out to their constituents," said Juan Proaño co-founder and president of Plus Three. "Armed with an email database of 250,000 supporters, organizations are able to deliver a highly targeted direct response message to an audience larger than some national news networks get in any 30 minute increment. This is a tremendously powerful tool for organizations to leverage for both activism and fundraising. We look forward to sharing our experiences and developing best practices for effective online communications."
- Who: Juan M. Proaño, Co-founder and President of Plus Three
William Green, RightMarch.com
Tom Matzzie, MoveOn.org
Kathy Mitchell, Internet Advocacy Director, Consumers Union
Greg Nelson, CTSG - What: Panel discussion, "Got Lists? How to Build Your Base Online" Personal Democracy Forum Conference 2005
- When: Monday, May 16, 2005, from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m.
- Where: The Graduate Center, The City University of New York
http://www.personaldemocracy.com/conference
Plus Three Announces ARCOS 4.0
Posted on 03/21/2005 @ 10:49 AM
New Version of Flagship Product Builds on Democrat's Stunning Online Fundraising Successes in the 2004 Elections, Increasing Functionality and Ease-of-Use
Plus Three, LP ("Plus Three" or the "Company"), a strategic marketing and technology company serving major U.S. political organizations and non-profit institutions, today announced a significant upgrade to its ARCOS software solution. ARCOS 4.0, the Open Source platform built on Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl, greatly increases the functionality and ease-of-use from ARCOS 3.1 with a complete fundraising platform that incorporates the most advanced tools available in Web and email publishing and reporting. In addition, ARCOS enables users to easily conduct sophisticated database searches and build highly organized email lists. Plus Three customers feel comfortable knowing that the technology has proven it is capable of handling dramatic traffic surges and that redundancies built into the software ensure no donation is ever lost.
The ARCOS platform underlies one of the most successful fundraising efforts in U.S. history. In the 2004 presidential race, ARCOS transacted more than $185 million during the 2004 campaigns for a variety of progressive causes and platforms, and helped the DNC beat the RNC for the first time ever in fundraising.
"Over the past few years, we have seen the Web achieve its promise for online retailing, for interconnecting companies, and for delivering a total customer experience," said Geoffrey Bock, senior vice president at the Patricia Seybold Group. "Now, we are at a similar stage in its importance for constituency management-transforming the ways in which non-profits and political organizations operate in the digital age."
ARCOS is built using Open Source, the world's most flexible and scalable software. Using Open Source provides three key differentiators that the company's clients value above all else — reliability, scalability and security. Open Source is also free from onerous licensing fees, enabling ARCOS users to constantly maximize the value of their investment while substantially reducing the cost of every donation. Built on this industry-leading open source platform is a complete suite of solutions that allow organizations to more effectively communicate with their constituents. Features and Benefits
Among the standard features of ARCOS are constituent relationship management, email and link tracking, event management, social software and an online activism center. New features and benefits include:
- Reporting — Enhanced features enable users to easily create reports from fundraising campaigns in real time for increased visibility into the effectiveness of the campaign and which targeted groups are most receptive to particular messages.
- Enterprise Features — Ensures no dollar is ever lost with enterprise-class redundancy backup systems. The platform has undergone significant load tests ensuring its ability to receive and manage enormous traffic peaks.
- User Database — Greater flexibility and ease-of-use for users who wish to build lists, conduct searches and compile groups, removing the need for a technical specialist to interact with the database and reducing cost for ARCOS customers. In addition the database is the largest and fastest available in the industry.
- Email Publishing — Enhances the ability of users to organize and distribute email lists by a variety of factors including campaign, region, age and other demographic information. The email publishing features have also been integrated into the Web publishing tools making it significantly easier for users to up to two million emails per hour.
- Web Publishing — Enhanced permissioning and work flows are built in for easy maintenance. The industry's only customizable contributor pages and tell-a-friend pages are also included.
Availability
For pricing and availability, contact Plus Three at (866) 945-4889.
Plus Three is the leading provider of online marketing and fundraising services to large member organizations such as advocacy, non-profit, unions and political groups. Since its inception, the Company has been tapped by leading Democratic organizations and candidates to support their election efforts with highly targeted online campaigns. Online fundraising took on added significance during the recent Presidential Election, as candidates capitalized on the medium to build widespread communities and attract donations. Through its reliance on Open Source software, Plus Three is able to reduce the cost of each dollar raised, maximizing the value of every donation.
"As technology use continues to spread throughout large member organizations, such as political parties, unions and non-profits, demand is surging for our platform," said Plus Three President and co-founder Juan Proaño. "ARCOS meets the critical need of these organizations to regularly interact with their member bases helping to ensure activism and participation. The strength of our solution enables users to easily and quickly create targeted campaigns, and distribute them quickly without concern for the delivery of the message or for the resulting spike in traffic and donations. To ensure the effectiveness of each campaign, we've added real-time monitoring allowing users to track donations as they come in to see what campaigns, messages and individual links, donors respond to most."
Plus Three President Shares Expertise in Online Fundraising at 2005 Politics Online Conference
Posted on 03/03/2005 @ 11:23 AM
Juan Proaño Offers Insights that Helped Customers Raise Over $185 Million Through Plus Three Systems
Plus Three, LP ("Plus Three" or the "Company"), a strategic marketing and technology company serving major U.S. political organizations and non-profit institutions, today announced that co-founder and President Juan Proaño and will be participating in a panel discussion at the Politics Online Conference in Washington DC. Proaño will take part in the discussion entitled, "The Internet Cash-Cow: Fundraising Online." Attendees at the 2005 Politics Online Conference will be able to attend the panel on March 11 at 10:45 A.M. ET.
"The Internet is changing the way organizations raise money. Since the start of 2004, more than $185 million has been raised online in support of progressive campaigns and causes through systems Plus Three developed," said Juan Proaño co-founder and President of Plus Three. "Our extensive work throughout the 2004 Presidential elections sets us apart as the online fundraising experts. Through our work we have the deepest understanding of what organizations must do to help ensure a successful online fundraising campaign. We look forward to sharing our experiences and discussing how issue-advocacy and non-profit groups can maximize their online experiences."
- Who: Juan M. Proaño, co-founder and president of Plus Three
Tom Matzzie, MoveOn.org
Anne Lewis, deputy executive director for the DSCC
Chuck DeFeo (moderator), eCampaign manager, Bush-Cheney '04 - What: Panel discussion, "The Internet Cash-Cow: Fundraising Online"
- When: Friday, March 11, 2005, from 10:45 to 11:45 a.m.
- Where: Politics Online Conference 2005
The George Washington University's Marvin Center, Washington D.C.
www.ipdi.org/politicsonline
A Lesson in Open Source
eWeek
Feb 28, 2005
For the 150,000 members of the United Federation of Teachers, paper forms, phone calls and hours spent standing in line are no longer current events; instead, they are consigned to the history books.
Made up of current and retired New York City public school teachers and the largest union local in the world, the UFT is the sole bargaining agent for most of the nonsupervisory educators that work in the New York City public school system. It represents roughly 74,000 teachers and 17,000 classroom paraprofessionals, along with secretaries, guidance counselors, psychologists, social workers, nurses, adult education teachers and 32,000 retired members.
With 6,000 new teachers added to its membership every year and a desire to vastly increase its portfolio of member services, UFT's archaic paper-driven business methods and static, noninteractive Web site simply couldn't keep up.
Amid a three-phase design and deployment campaign, new services offered by the UFT range from Web-based course enrollment, which replaces a mail-in paper form, to health care benefits from the UFT Welfare Fund. According to UFT President Randi Weingarten, the fund has provided upward of $1 billion in benefits to union members over its 30-year history. Breaking news, pension and financial services, updated salary schedules, and tax advice are also being betterprovided to educators thanks to the new online environment.
"With our growing membership, the time to rethink the delivery of services and information could wait no longer," said Joe Vigilante, the UFT's director of information services. "With all of our data on [an IBM] legacy AS/400, we needed to get that information directly into the hands of the people who needed it most, our members."
To improve service while managing costs, Vigilante's team chose a complete opensource solution with multiprocessor, rack-mounted ProLiant DL servers from Hewlett-Packard Co. running Red Hat Inc.'s Enterprise Linux operating system. There isn't a new server running Solaris or Unix in sight, although an IBM iSeries (formerly AS/400) remains. The only Microsoft Corp. software in use at UFT is the Office suite of productivity applications and one legacy Exchange Server for e-mail.
It's close to the typical evolutionary pattern, according to Jeffrey Hewitt, an analyst with Gartner Inc., in Stamford, Conn. "These are new applications and sometimes represent additional horsepower added in parallel to existing systems," Hewitt said. According to his research, 22 percent of companies polled are deploying open-source systems not to replace older technology but to deploy new applications.
Regardless of the strategy, Linux is earning high marks not just as a technical solution but as a financial one that results in immediate and significant cost advantages.
"The Linux open-source route provided us with a way to avoid license fees and learn from a vast community of developers and users with issues similar to ours," said Vigilante.
That's a theme that's echoed in disparate users, from off-the-leading-edge, paper-based organizations such as the UFT to nextgeneration Web-based startups. For example, Feedster Inc., a San Francisco search engine and syndicator of XML Web content, would never have gotten off the ground if not for the savings achieved by implementing Linux.
"It didn't make sense to us or our investors to pay huge Windows and [Sun Microsystems Inc.] Solaris license fees and buy expensive support contracts," said Feedster CEO Scott Rafer.
"And for the price of a single Oracle license, we got the top-tier MySQL product, direct access to the people who developed it, and a worldwide community ready to help anytime."
Those licenses were nearly a showstopper. With its entire operation — and its lawyers — based in New York, the UFT refused to sign contracts whose terms would be governed by the laws of any other state. Red Hat, for example, is based in North Carolina. "For large enterprise corporations, this isn't a problem," said Vigilante. "But as a labor union, we were ready to walk away if vendors would not change their terms for us." Change them they did.
Site Control
A significant challenge faced by UFT was maintaining high Web site availability after migrating hosting and operations from a third-party service provider to UFT's own network. Outsourced in 1997 to offload management chores — a skill that did not yet exist at UFT — the site offered only static, nontransactional general content. Updating the site with important news for its members often took hours, which is typical when management is performed by a third party with many different customers and priorities.
All Web services now operate from redundant servers installed on-site. Page templates were designed using Macromedia Inc.'s Dreamweaver, according to Bill Stamatis, UFT's Web content manager. Running Red Hat Linux, the Web servers also host Krang, an advanced opensource content management and Web publishing system.
With 6,000 new teachers added to its membership every year and a desire to vastly increase its portfolio of member services, UFT's archaic paper-driven business methods and static, noninteractive Web site simply couldn't keep up.
Krang provides a story and media-editing environment, letting Perl programmers customize it to control the data entered in its content editor as well as the way templates and content are brought together to build output. Krang supports the Red Hat, Debian and Gentoo versions of Linux; the Fedora Project, and FreeBSD. With Krang handling content management, the content itself resides in a MySQL database from Sweden's MySQL AB. Web pages are served by Apache Software Foundation's Apache HTTP Server.
"We're not a [24-by-7] startshop, so we needed to plan, build and test a redundant environment with automated failover to accommodate any outage," said UFT's Vigilante. Working with Plus Three LP, a technology provider specializing in solutions for labor unions, based in New York, UFT established a notification system that alerts key personnel of any Web outage and initiates automated failover to the backup servers. "We hope never to use it," Vigilante added.
Choice of Platforms
In moving away from its static Web site and paper-based system of membership services, UFT and Plus Three crafted a three-phase approach. The key to success, according to Deirdre Hannigan, Plus Three's vice president of client services, was to move cautiously and maintain tight budgetary control.
"Phase 1 was homework, learning their processes and analyzing the current technology environment," said Hannigan. "In Phase 2, we installed hardware and the Krang content management platform to relaunch the Web site. We're now in Phase 3, bringing member services, health care and teacher resources online."
UFT chose Red Hat Linux, based on recommendations from both IBM and Plus Three. In contrast, Feedster followed a different path, deploying Novell Inc.'s SuSE Linux on some servers and Gentoo Linux from the Gentoo Foundation Inc. on others.
A startup, Feedster had no legacy systems baggage-a rare luxury. UFT, with all its data residing on the AS/400, wasn't so lucky. IBM, however, offered what Vigilante considered a perfect solution, allowing the AS/400 to stay put while integrating it into the new open-source environment.
IBM's Toolbox for Java and JTOpen is a library of Java classes that can be used by Java applets, servlets and applications to access AS/400 or iSeries server data and resources. The toolbox provided everything that Plus Three and UFT needed to develop communications conduits and file access.
Digital Handshake
As part of its goal to foster educators' professional development, UFT's educational programs, in affiliation with local colleges and universities, offer a full spectrum of workshops and graduate level courses to some 10,000 members each year. In the third phase of the project, the Web site will be the place where teachers can learn about and register for these courses. And the union's nationally acclaimed Dial-A-Teacher program, in affiliation with the New York City Department of Education, offers homework assistance to more than 60,000 public school students and parents every year. The program uses the Web site as a starting point for matching students' needs with specific teachers; the goal is to make a wide range of content available in as many as 12 languages.
"The Web site averages 30,000 visits per month. But the average visit length went from 30 seconds to 5 minutes," said Stamatis. "Members are downloading materials and even reading online. And now that we post news daily, we've created a compelling reason for teachers to visit and stay."
In addition to being lightyears more efficient than the UFT's previous paper-bound methods, the union's new interactive Web presence also conveys a friendlier persona to the organization's 150,000 members.
"There's no way the president of a union organization of our size can do a traditional reach-out to its dues-paying membership," said Vigilante. "What we've tried to do is design the site and its services to provide an 'electronic handshake' to members. We're there all the time, and we've worked to provide immediate response or have the information they need just a click or two away."
The UFT, it seems, has learned its own lessons.
Plus Three Appoints Sam Tregar as Product Manager
Posted on 02/22/2005 @ 11:28 AM
Plus Three, LP ("Plus Three" or the "Company"), a strategic marketing and technology company serving major U.S. political organizations and non-profit institutions, today announced Sam Tregar has been named Product Manager. In this role, Tregar will be responsible for providing strategic direction and expertise to the development of ARCOS, the company's advanced Open Source technology platform used by political, non-profit and large member organizations. Tregar was the chief architect and developer of the Open Source content-management system Krang, and is a noted industry expert who has been published in trade publications and is the author of the book, "Writing Perl Modules for CPAN" (Apress, 2002).
"Plus Three's innovative work with Open Source and next generation platforms like the contextual Web, really captured my imagination and is my primary reason for joining the company," said Tregar. "I look forward to working with the company's outstanding programming team to show large organizations and companies they no longer have to compromise with proprietary systems that lack the power and flexibility to meet their needs. I am anxious to contribute to the company and ARCOS and expect we will have some exciting updates to announce for the platform soon."
Tregar brings an extensive programming background to Plus Three. Before joining the company, Tregar served as Lead Programmer for Trafficmac Inc., where he was responsible for driving the development of Trafficmac's next generation software and managing a team of programmers. Prior to working with Trafficmac Inc., Tregar was the Lead Programmer at the PIRT Group, a division of Primedia Inc. While at the PIRT group Tregar maintained the Bricolage Open Source content management system and lead the Krang development team. Krang has been a huge success for PIRT, lowering administrative costs and improving the online editorial process at hundreds of magazines.
"Like any company would be, we are excited to be able to add someone with Sam's programming expertise to our team," said Plus Three President Juan Proaño. "We have had tremendous success developing Open Source solutions for our customers, as evidenced by the online fundraising success of our clients in 2004 totaling $185 million dollars. In addition, our work with unions continues to accelerate and Sam's vision and expertise will prove invaluable as we grow our company and service offerings."
About ARCOS
The ARCOS software platform is built using Open Source, the world's most flexible and scalable software. Using Open Source provides three key differentiators that the company's clients value above all else — reliability, scalability and security. Open Source is also free from onerous licensing fees, enabling ARCOS users to constantly maximize the value of their investment while substantially reducing the cost of every donation. Built on this industry-leading open source platform is a complete suite of solutions that allow organizations to more effectively communicate with their constituents. The ARCOS platform is easy to integrate into legacy systems providing complete and reliable access to information and applications located on those systems. In addition, the Open Source platform enables unparalleled customization and enhancement.
