Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com.
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Higher Logic Thrive
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Higher Logic Thrive is a private community platform that empowers members, customers, support and product teams to create and manage meaningful, engaging online communities. The solution is designed to keep users coming back. They can find support, best practices, peer-to-peer connections, resources, events, and networking, all in one destination.
It's well-suited for helping you reinforce SEO for another site. It's OK for creating a real quick blog if you or a client needs something fast that does not demand a great visual design or a lot of visual content. If you want to create a super sharp-looking blog with a lot of visual content, WordPress will outperform Blogger by about 16 zillion to 1. Like, it's not even at all close. I would never use Blogger as my company's website. That would almost automatically consign your site to a very lonely existence.
Higher Logic works very well for our business purposes. We can very easily create new communities when we need to (and this is often!). Our association isn't as concerned with driving engagement, but the tools Higher Logic provides allows us to take a closer look at the engagement level of our committee members when needed
Higher Logic product managers are probably some of the best in the industry. They know their products and aren't pushy in trying to sell them to you. Don't get me wrong, they do try to sell you a product, but they understand that not everyone who is tasked with learning more is also a decision maker. That doesn't stop them from being professional and thorough in their demonstrations or explanation of fees.
Their technical support is top notch. Not only do they work to resolve issues, they also work with you to help you with non-issues. Our initial redesign was done by an agency that worked with HL directly to set up the new site. When I was tasked with a mini-redesign this year, HL technical support offered me a lot of insight on how to best do this using just my skills and HL.
They offer training on their platforms to ensure your success as an administrator. There is no cost and you can either go to their onsite two days "boot camp" or you can access a plethora of training videos and webinars through their online users' community.
Reporting is copious but you cannot build your own reports so you may have lots of information in several different reports and have to pick and choose across several to combine manually. Exporting functionality is there but there are some reports that are only a screen shot and you cannot export them.
I love the additional income and how great my blogs have turned out. It's given me ideas for others to build their blogs and has attained new clients for me. I make money using AdSense, how little or how much I want to make is up to me promoting my Blog.
They are a great company that offer great products - primarily their community. As they continue to grow and expand their offerings, I believe they will increase the number of products that offer and in turn grow their client base. We use their community, activity synch, and volunteer manager currently.
Blogger has a simple layout with descriptive instructions when you first sign up. It can be intimidating at first but is easy to learn through simple navigation and a little trial and error
The software is not that simple to use when you have to get volunteers involved in the content assembly process. The content management system that is native to Higher Logic could improve to make the task of training volunteers far easier. Given its simplicity, it is hard for the system to rival more developed websites that use advanced CMS software.
Google doesn't support anything that's free. Anything. Seriously, when was the last time you saw a help number for a free Google app where you could pick up a phone and get a credible voice on the other end. Unless you're actually paying Google for a service you don't exist.
Higher Logic's support is sub-par at best. It can be difficult to get in contact with anyone from the support team, and when you do, it seems as if they don't want to talk to you and don't even have the answers to your questions. Within the past few months, we've contacted them twice and both times have been very disappointing. The first time was to let them know there was an inconsistency between the analytics report and the heat map. They basically said that they already knew about the problem but didn't have any set plans to fix it because they were working on other "more important" things. The second time was for a conference call to go over some additional features that we wanted to implement. And the lady we spoke with seemed very disgusted to have to speak with us and then rushed us off the phone because she had another call.
Have a plan written out for yourself, you can always make changes as you go. It's more difficult to build a Blog if one doesn't even know what the Blog is going to be about. It's best to plan what your Blog is going to be about and what your audience is going to be and what you want to accomplish before you start building.
I've selected Blogger due to its simple user interface and open source feature. I can make my pages within a few minutes and add them to my website quickly, unlike other software, Iike Wix or WordPress, which is more advanced and requires pre-learning to make efficient use of them. With Blogger, I can start my blog building directly without any prior knowledge and coding.
We are just in the early stages of looking into HubSpot Service Hub to determine if it will be a viable replacement for Higher Logic Community. We have other uses for the ServiceHub so there is an appeal to have it be a "one stop shop" for us. The big question however is how it will stack up to Higher Logic for the online communities. Candidly, while Higher Logic may be tough to beat in this area, it is something we will be looking closely at in the next 12 months.
Before using Blogger, we were sending out information to agents via email and they would either delete them or just not find them. Now since we keep all the information in one place, it has cut down repetitive questions and has given our agents a voice as to what is working for them and what is not.
We don't have any hard numbers, but we have heard back from our agents that the blog posts help them and not have to rely on contacting support stuff as often to find answers to simple questions.
The only negative impact felt so far is with a few select agents leaving negative feedback to blog due to personal issues they have with policies within the company.
