Encore, an email platform to connect users with brands and supporters with nonprofits, was accepted into the next Acceleprise class and will be moving in May 20. The move coincides with a shift in the business model.
Encore is a B2B site that helps nonprofits and now for-profit businesses aggregate user-generated content to create better email newsletters. Encore organizes the content—photos, videos, inspiring stories, Tweets, and more, uploaded by volunteers and staff—into a searchable, taggable library. Explains cofounder James Li, "Marketers can tag content by type, product line, location…to repurpose [that content] for other marketing."
The inspiration for Encore, Li says, came from the nonprofit world of newsletters and repeated "asks" for funding. "Volunteers are the ones who experience [things] every day. Communication people sit at the desk. They don't have the experience. The quality [of publications] ends up suffering; communications people end up writing a vague story because they weren't there. So we figured, let's crowdsource the stories to capture the excitement" from the people who are on the ground.
Li says that nonprofits using customer stories on Encore have found a greater ROI (return on investment) and a greater click-through rate. "The industry average click-through rate on a nonprofit newsletter is 3 percent," Li says. "With Encore, it goes up to 15 percent."
Encore is no longer focusing solely on small and medium-size nonprofits. "We want to work with larger nonprofits; we're also looking to build relationships with brands as well," Li says. For example, Li is meeting with representatives from
sweetgreen to help turn the content generated by its users on Facebook and Twitter during its
sweetlife festival into something more.
Li says Encore is different from Storify because it works on the enterprise level. "Storify isn't for external sources," he says. "There are elements of Storify [in Encore], but [Storify] is about embedded tweets. We're about reusing other channels."
Encore was accepted into accelerator programs in D.C., New York and San Francisco, but ultimately decided to remain in the District (Li finishes up at Georgetown this weekend). "We chose Acceleprise because of [its] enterprise focus."