Technology
Technology that encourages action and interaction
If your Web site and online presence are to reach their full potential, effective web design and innovative, sound technology need to be full partners in your success. BSD, unlike many companies that offer "Web design" or "Web strategy" services, provides a full complement of technology services in-house.
We are expert at helping you understand your online technology needs and responding to them efficiently and quickly, with a particular expertise in advocacy, fundraising, and social networking technologies -- and with solid experience in scaling to very large community sizes and transaction volumes.
The technology strategies and tactics that we deploy on your behalf are
strategies and tactics whose success we've proven over and over already
with dozens or hundreds of clients. Working this way is faster, safer, and more effective, because you get the benefit of our experience and the experience of other organizations similar to yours in developing and managing healthy and successful communities online.
The BSD Online Tools
The BSD Online Tools -- our comprehensive technology suite for online community development and management -- grew out of our experience in developing custom technology applications for the political and nonprofit markets. That experience led us to conclude that the needs of many such organizations would be served more efficiently, quickly, and cheaply by a standard set of tools, and so we set out to build one.
For small to medium-sized organizations, the BSD Online Tools can provide a complete online solution for community-building and constituent management. In the BSD Online Tools, we provide tightly linked tools for fundraising, communications, advocacy, and social networking, along with a constituent CRM database and versatile content management.
Our engineers are actively working to update and extend the BSD Online Tools as a result of market needs, so new features and modules are being developed all the time and released to our clients periodically as they become available -- such as the innovative TrueMatch technology that Barack Obama's Presidential campaign has used in 2007 and 2008 to supercharge matching contributions.
Custom technology development
If you have specific program needs that are not addressed in the BSD Online Tools, our engineers stand ready to meet them with custom development of technology channels or applications. Often, this involves integration between the BSD Online Tools and your existing financial or compliance databases or other legacy systems, but sometimes the development of a freestanding technology application is the best way to address a particular organizational challenge.
Hosting, support, and uptime
The BSD Online Tools are generally deployed a hosted application, meaning that your Web site, software, and data typically reside on our servers, not yours. This reduces complexity and improves reliability, especially if your organization is not in a position to take on a substantial new technology burden.
You'll find our systems engineers on duty 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to ensure that any technology glitches are addressed right when they occur. The occasional issues that arise are typically reported by our electronic monitoring network and responded to immediately, before anyone outside our network operations center is ever aware of them.
Our server and connectivity infrastructure is fault-tolerant and multiply redundant, ensuring that your Web site and all its functionality will continue to respond even if traffic spikes by orders of magnitude, e.g., when your organization is blessed with unanticipated national or global press coverage. We have successfully withstood the technological rigors of two U.S. Presidential campaign cycles, sustaining some of the heaviest traffic spikes in Internet history, without any significant negative impact on responsiveness.
