When you manage a group of people, it’s important for everyone to have a convenient way to keep in touch.  Email is great, but it’s not an efficient way to handle conversations between groups of people. Convos provides an easy, low-cost solution for keeping your team connected.

Via email, we interviewed Convos’ Chief Operations Officer, Matt Trush, to a learn a little more about what Convos offers.

Q) What makes Convos stand out from the competition?

“User experience – Convos offers a rich, ad-free interface that was built with Adobe Flex. This allows users to create, manage, and interact with their groups in any browser with the look and feel of desktop software.”

“Dedicated, group-branded platform – Every group has their own group-branded login page (i.e. http://yourgroup.convos.com), private email address (i.e. yourgroup@convos.com), and customizable web application.”

“Comprehensive feature set for group management and communications – Every group comes with simple modules for messaging, scheduling events with RSVP, collecting feedback, assigning tasks, sharing information in pages, organizing files and photos, and enabling a member directory.”

“Flexible subgroups – Every group can utilize subgroups to segment their members into teams, committees, regions, etc. Subgroups contain all of the same modules as the main group and members can be added to subgroups in seconds.”

“Price – Convos offers powerful, enterprise-like tools at a price that’s affordable for organizations, associations, and small businesses.”

“Service – Our team is passionate about helping groups achieve success. We are always available to our customers to answer questions, help them start their groups, and give them ideas on ways they can leverage Convos for their organization.”

Q. What are your plans for Convos? Will you be adding any additional features in the future?

“Convos is always being improved and our development approach allows us to release enhancements every few weeks. We have plans for new features including the ability to collect payments from members, integrating simple group collaboration tools, and releasing an API so developers can integrate with the Convos platform. We constantly look to group leaders to help us understand the challenges they face and how we can help them overcome those challenges with Convos. We’re exploring ways to make group content more manageable, such as having information easily move between groups, modules, and outside services so activities and workflow can be streamlined.”

Q.What was the biggest obstacle you faced when you were developing Convos?

“Saying “no” to adding new features before releasing it to the public. As we were developing, we had a long list of features and requirements that was constantly being added to. When we launched, we held off on non-essential features with the goal of delivering a simpler, more solid product. We found that it was better to release a basic version of the platform and add to it based on the feedback we received from group leaders.”

Q. What inspired the creation of Convos?

“The idea for Convos grew out of an ongoing frustration with the tools available to member-based organizations. The free tools didn’t offer flexibility and comprehensive features. The premium tools were expensive and often overly complex. We wanted a solution that adapts more easily to different types of organizations rather than organizations having to adapt to the solutions.  This involves not only appealing to leaders’ needs for control and effectiveness but also the members’ needs for convenience and simplicity. We built Convos to fill the gap in the market by building a flexible, affordable tool that gave organizations powerful, easy-to-use tools to help facilitate group operations and draw more interaction from members. Having managed and participated in groups that used web-based tools, we focused on designing a faster tool that delivered a familiar, desktop software experience in any browser.”

Q. How can Convos help business owners?

“Convos is used by a variety of groups including small businesses, professional associations, local organizations, non-profits and departments within larger companies. We give these groups a flexible way to centralize their communication and collaboration activities across the groups of people they have relationships with. With subgroups, organizations can easily segment their membership into smaller, more focused groups (project teams, regions, clients, vendors, committees, and departments) and allow them to communicate, plan and share effectively. Regardless of the type of group, we built Convos as a simple, powerful tool that promotes participation. We focus on making it easy for both administrators to distribute and organize information and for members to stay current and participating.”

Convos is definitely easy to use. It only took a few minutes to set up an account. The user interface is clean and simple, easy to interact with.  Of course, there are lots of apps that offer similar functionality.  However, with a fully functional free plan and paid plans ranging from $5.95 to $100 per month, Convos does offer a good value for the price. You can use it to share files, assign tasks, and schedule events for your team.

Everything’s customizable to reflect your company’s brand, and Convos streamlines electronic group communication by aggregating members’ responses to feedback questions, responses to event invitations, etc. Messages sent to members are forwarded by email, and members can respond simply by hitting “reply.” However, an additional chat option might make Convos more useful for teams that are spread out and need an easy way to communicate in real time.

All in all, Convos is a useful management tool for a great price.  What do you think of it?

Our Rating of Convos

Tags: Business

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