Return on Investment

Benefits

The benefits to a franchise community won't be the same as the benefits to an architect or a supply chain operator. Yet, any reasonable mix of the following benefits will generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual savings for a typical stakeholder community:

Costs

The software is free. Our services cost money.

iPOV's costs are based on clients' service requirements. The following sections describe the major cost categories. However, these categories can be combined in different ways to support alternative community development scenarios.

Server Provisioning and Site Setup (required)

  • Provision server & backup system
  • Customize site graphics for target client community.

Server Hosting & Maintenance (required)

  • Perform backups, monitor performance, and security.
  • Install and test software upgrades, including releases from iPOV technology roadmap.

Community Technical Support (optional)

  • Maintain site-specific software customizations
  • 8am-5pm CT telephone support to community administrators
  • Email and forum support to community users

Community Development Services (optional)

iPOV can help clients to better understand community needs and to deploy more appropriate configurations, policies, tools, and training.

  • iPOV staff (or iPOV managed consultants) help the client configure the CCS to the community workflow and motivate, train and empower community members to participate effectively.

  • The graph shows the cost of Community Development declining over a 6 to 9 month period after launch.

  • The arrow shows outside development services falling for follow-on CCS communities.
iPOV charges for community development services at a negotiated hourly rate. iPOV estimates that it takes about 4 to 6 person-months of dedicated developer time to efficiently launch a major new community.

Continuing Community Management (optional)

Once the Community Development phase is completed, the site should settle into routine use. Rather than dedicating in-house staff, the client may want iPOV to continue to manage the site. For example:
  • Proactively police the site for out-of-date, misplaced or mislabeled content.
  • Work with stakeholders to improve organization and use.
  • Offer telephone, webinar and video training to users.

  • negotiable

Custom Software (optional)

If you want us to implement a specific innovation, we offer the following options:
  • If the feature is on iPOV's technology roadmap, you can wait until we get to it. However, we make no delivery promises until we actually issue the feature in a new release.
  • If you want us to develop a feature and keep it secret from other users, you can offer to fully! fund the development. If we agree (and that's not automatic), we'll fast track it and we won't share the code with anyone.
  • If you ask us to accelerate a feature on our roadmap, or if you want us to develop a specialized variant, we will ask you to fund at least part of the work and donate the resulting code to the common technology pool. Since we will ask our other clients to do the same with their ideas, everyone benefits when these features are added to future releases.