Awa-iti OutReach ‪٤+‬

OutReach is a platform for organisations to improve the way they connect with their members. It is designed for organisations that need to keep their members informed, that need to understand how that information is distributed and consumed, and that also need to understand how their members respond to that content. Existing communications channels don’t address these needs. Email and websites are used extensively today, but don’t give the organisation a good view of how the members are interacting with that content, if at all. Some organisations have also turned to social media as another channel. While social media is very widespread, the actual platform the members are using can be very dependent on the demographic; younger users have different social media requirements to their parents, or even elder siblings. And, of course, the point of social media is to push advertising, and so users are swamped with unrelated content which can drown out the meaningful messages.
OutReach provides a social media-like platform that organisations can use to connect with their members. An organisation’s administrators can manage their user database, arrange their members into groups, or channels, and can then create messages, and push them to the members. The messages can include an action link to rich content, such as a live video conference or prerecorded video messages.
Where OutReach differs from social media is that the control of access is in the hands of the organisation rather than the users. A user must already belong to an organisation before they can access that organisation’s feed via OutReach. Also, users don’t interact with each other on OutReach. They can read content, respond to it, rate it, give feedback, even conduct surveys and voting, but it is a private communications channel between the organisation and the users.
The value users will see is a better communications experience with the organisations they are a member of. They would only sign up to OutReach to be connected to their organisations; there’s no other reason to do so. OutReach gives users the assurance of a more meaningful, timely, and clean communications channel. Of course, users can connect to as many organisations as they are a member of.