There are many cloud-based services available for small businesses and not-for-profit organisations these days to enable features on their existing websites or use them as standalone through their independent websites.

Three particular services that we suggest to many of our clients and prospective clients are SurveyMonkey, MailChimp and EventBrite. In this article, we thought it would be worthwhile discussing these services, some of the available plans and information that may be of interest.

  • SurveyMonkey: SurveyMonkey, as the name suggests, enables organisations to create surveys to send out for their respondents to complete. Here at CyberGuru, we recently used SurveyMonkey for our Client Survey. There are several plans available. The Basic plan provides 10 questions with up to 100 responses along with standard email support at no cost. However, additional plans, including Select, Gold and Platinum extend the number of responses and questions and provides additional features including survey builders, customisation and branding.

 

  • MailChimp: MailChimp provides the ability for organisations to send email newsletters. CyberGuru uses MailChimp to distribute our monthly CyberGuru Newsletter. Along with sending reports and tracking, the Entrepreneur plan toup to 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers per month for free. Other plans include Growing business plan which allows up to 50,000 subscribers and the High volume sender plan is for more than 50,000 subscribers.

 

  • EventBrite: EventBrite enables organisations to create free events enables event registration and ticket distribution available at no cost. Whilst CyberGuru does not use this service currently, we have clients successfully using this for their functions and events. EventBrite charges 2.5% of the ticket value plus $0.99 per ticket in $US.

SurveyMonkey, MailChimp and EventBrite don’t require too much technical ability and can be set up easily, and these services can easily integrate with many payment gateways and other cloud-based services as well. If we can be of any assistance in implementing these for your small business and not-for-profit organisation, please feel free to contact us.

* EventBrite isn’t a kind of chimp or monkey but we had to think of a title!