In the last year, organizations have experienced no shortage of challenges, with the words “unprecedented,” “pivot,” and “remote-first” pouring from every communication. Helping workforces adjust to remote work and virtual collaboration is difficult in any industry, but especially for one like Silverchair’s, where co-location, over-the-shoulder reviews, and daily stand-ups are a key part of our ways of working.
And yet …
2020 proved to be an incredibly productive year for Silverchair, with teams building out numerous enhancements, launching entirely new products, and upgrading key platform tools.
Among these achievements was Silverchair Composer, a market-leading new authoring product that allows publishers to bring even more of their content into a single user experience. Using Composer, publishers can more widely, easily, and cost-effectively experiment with content types while maintaining the perks of an omni-platform solution, uniting their content within one database to benefit from shared search capabilities. In a video blog, Product Strategist Hannah Heckner offered more context on the creation of the product, and what comes next: “Launches are by no means the end of the story for our products here, so we already have a roadmap of ideas that we want to bring onto Composer as we have publishers adopt it.”
In addition to this new tool, teams were able to dramatically upgrade Radiate 2.0, Silverchair’s downstream deposit tool. The tool now enables publishers to monitor and analyze the success of downstream deposits, set up new feeds, and access robust reporting in a user-friendly dashboard. This reduces costs for clients to set up and administer deposits and empowers them to resolve deposit issues, as well as create dynamic reports to analyze deposit frequency, status, and volume. We also made significant progress on Silverchair Analytics, which launches this spring and is Silverchair’s new streaming analytics solution. Silverchair Analytics offers a data visualization dashboard and access to real-time data captured from publisher sites, traditional canned reports, and the ability to create customized reports to meet unique reporting needs.
As Chief Product and Customer Success Officer Will Schweitzer put it, “Silverchair has been hard at work engaging clients on their needs and opportunities, building tools and functionality, and testing products with users, so it’s exciting to be able to share these developments more broadly. Our goal is to help our publishing community to pivot, experiment, and grow quickly and with low costs. These products and tools are a key part of that vision.”
But Silverchair’s innovation and expansion even went beyond the Silverchair platform in 2020. Silverchair’s New Product Development team researched, built, and launched an entirely new sister company,Hum—an association intelligence platform that unifies technology systems and tracks digital interactions across an entire organization. Associations and publishers alike have long struggled with customizing content for different segments of their membership and audience. Hum brings together an association or society’s digital systems (website, email marketing, audience and learning management systems, etc.), connecting them in order to provide deeper knowledge of individual users, readers, and learners. This helps publishers deliver better engagement and personalized experiences, boosting recruitment and retention efforts. Though separate from the Silverchair platform, Hum of course integrates with it. With Hum, Silverchair aims to serve an even wider system of needs for our publishers, for societies, and for associations.
2021 is shaping up to be an equally productive year, though hopefully it will include more of the in-person collaboration we’re used to by the end of the year (read more about our recent Remote Work Survey here). In the meantime, we’re grateful for Zoom/Teams/Slack/Airtable as spaces to map our ongoing growth.
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