I hope you had a restful and enjoyable holiday season and I would like to personally wish you a Happy New Year!
I’m pleased to share our latest product enhancements with you. These have been delivered alongside the larger product development efforts that Paul, our Founder and CEO, shared with you last month. We will have more details around those updates in the coming months!
In addition to this release news, I am also thrilled to report that Communico has just received two platinum awards, for our Attend and Reserve modules, in the 2022 LibraryWorks' Modern Library Awards. Please visit our website or follow us on social to learn more about this achievement.
Best,
Sioban
ATTEND
ENHANCEMENT: Additional Open Graph Tags
We've extended our Open Graph metadata support in Attend, to include more social media platforms. What’s an open graph (OG) tag you ask? OG tags allow for greater control and richer display of content that you share within a social media link. Thus, allowing for greater reach and engagement with your brand. Here is a helpful tutorial from Semrush.
RESERVE
ENHANCEMENT: Audit Trail
An audit trail is now in place for any changes applied to a reservation charge after a reservation has been made. This allows your team to view all changes that have been applied via a history log. For instance, today, you will now be able to see if a room fee or asset charge was changed, by who and when.
ENGAGE
ENHANCEMENT: Event Billing
Your customers now have the option to pay for events within the Engage App. Payment will be collected via a web browser and customers returned to their app once the process is complete. Ready to get started? You may create an event as you always do, and if you indicate the event is a “paid event,” the payment option will now show within Engage.
Don't forget. Our upcoming replacement to Engage, ‘Connect,’ will have seamless in-app payments standard!
ROAM
NEW FEATURE: Customer Notes
We're trying out a new feature within our Roam module. This is currently only available to partners on Sierra but let me know what you think, and we can add additional ILSs to the roadmap.
You can now view customer notes* within the Roam module. These are notes stored within your ILS and displayed within the customer account section of the Roam App. You may wish to use these to, for example, alert staff members that a customer is a frequently delinquent borrower, etc.
We have enabled two ‘categories’ of notes, to help you differentiate between critical and supplementary information. You may use one, both, or none.** .png?width=411&name=patron-account%20(1).png)
*content is “read-only” within Roam; if you would like to adjust the notes, changes will need to be applied within your ILS.
**You will need to let us know which fields you would like to view within Roam. Please reach out to the support team.
NEW TEAM MEMBERS
I’d like to take a moment to introduce you to three of our most recent Communico team members.
Sarah Pauling joins us as Communico’s new VP of Marketing. Sarah comes to Communico with over 20 years of marketing experience across brands such as Northeastern University, Examity, and PlatformQ Education. Sarah will be overseeing Communico’s brand management, PR, and product marketing.
Melinda Stanley is our newest Customer Success Manager. Melinda comes from a varied background working with customers across the private and public sectors. She’s also a summer reading program veteran and has been volunteering at libraries off and on since she was 13.
Dave Evans will be overseeing product management in the role of Product Owner. With more than 17 years of product management and digital strategy experience across the e-learning, publishing, and energy sectors, Dave is excited to jump right in; you may soon see him on some upcoming product demonstrations!
LANGUAGE UPDATE
Over the years, we have received thoughtful, and passionate, feedback around the appropriate terminology for the audiences we support. We recently met as a team and chose to adopt the following terms:- “patrons” will now be referred to as "customers"
- “administrators” will now be referred to as “staff"
- Communico clients will now be referred to as “partners”
In the coming days and weeks, you will start to see these terms incorporated across our platform and materials.
We’re gearing up for a busy event season. Team Communico is exhibiting at several conferences over the coming weeks and months. Please let us know if you will be in attendance at any of these events as we would love to connect with you!
LibLearnX | January 21 - 24
PLA | March 23 - 24
Computer in Libraries | March 29 – 31
