FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 11, 2003 (Los Angeles, CA) - Wharton Alumni Team Unveils its New Portal Utilizing The Magnet Platform.
The new site offers Wharton grads a multitude of features and benefits, delivering a simple, streamlined, and value-oriented communication and interaction web hub.
At its core, The Magnet's technology delivers to the administrative staff a high degree of control over all types of maintenance tasks. In particular, the processes of content creation, membership tracking, event management, and other tedious day-to-day tasks are now mostly automated and/or distributed among the team. Before adopting The Magnet, the Wharton Club of Southern California website required the Webmaster's time and intervention for most tasks. Now the Webmaster job is divided among several of the chapter's staff and volunteers, none of whom have--or need--more than minimal background in web design.
"[Membership management] used to involve a lot of paperwork and time. An alumni club's focus should be on planning great events and fostering networking, not on managing paperwork. With our new site, our alumni now have the power to manage their own memberships and profiles--all online--whenever they want. This saves us a great deal of time."
"Even better, since our launch, we've had very few people contact us with problems. Most instances have been user error, and we've been able to resolve the situation quickly," says Meesh Joslyn, the club's administrator.
The new site offers many other administrative advantages, all contributing to a significant reduction in workload while supporting much more frequently updated content. "The site is perfect for non-technical types. Our site maintenance is now distributed across several club volunteers rather than just one. We're much more productive," adds Joslyn.
From its inception, The Magnet platform was designed with the alumni chapter and its participants in mind. The result, is a suite of tools that covers exactly what alumni chapters need with no "unnecessary extras" according to Kelly Messner, The Magnet's Product Manager.
"This focused approach yielded a solution that allows alumni chapters to do a lot without added complication. In turn, you see folks with no web-development background changing article images, modifying membership-based event access, and generating name-tags from automatically-generated events' RSVP lists within a few hours of working on the system. And the best part for me is, they actually enjoy it!" adds Messner.
Joslyn noted that "before notifying alumni about our new site, we had 200+ people register on the site and update their profiles. Our target is to double our paid membership by the end of Q2 2004, and we expect to do this without any trouble. We recently sold 180+ tickets for a single event through our site with no glitches. The system allows for tiered pricing, allocation, and ticket availability dates for members and non- members. This really helps us create value for our paid members."
