Local people supporting local businesses

Comoonity is an online platform designed to put small businesses in touch with local people. There are 2 main goals with Comoonity:

• Give residents a place to view all their small businesses in their community and what they have to offer

• Help small businesses with their marketing and connect with their nearby residents

The main tool Comoonity provides for small business is Comoonity Growth.

Grow your audience in your comoonity

Comoonity Growth was actually the first project I got from Comoonity. The application originally was meant to connect to all the businesses social media and would allow for pre written marketing content to be posted from the platform to their socials. This content would originally just be to get their customers to sign up to a mailing list and Comoonity would send the customers emails on their behalf. As things progressed, it became clear this model wasn't very scalable and with me onboard, they could do much more.

Growth now is used to manage their business page on the Comoonity app, refer customers to join Comoonity and send followers branded emails with templates provided. Analytics is also provided showing how much engagement they are getting from Comoonity, such as followers gained and clicks on both their call-to-actions and offers.

Users can manage more than one business at a time with an easy switch button located at the top of the screen, and (assuming you have the right permissions) can add other users to mange the business as well.

Building the first version

As mentioned, I originally built this to allow businesses to connect to all their socials and post provided content all from one place. Sadly the integrations have stopped working but are part of the 1.2.0 release of Comoonity.

The application could connect to a Facebook page, the page's connected Instagram account, a Twitter account and a LinkedIn account. Once connected, the user was able to post a link to their branded form to sign up to their mailing list.

The app also connected to Zoho, Comoonity's original CRM and would fetch all the users that signed up to follow the business and would show them in the applications customers page. See screenshot below:

By establishing a seamless connection, users gained the ability to effortlessly upload their offers to Zoho, a feature that Comoonity leveraged for their email communications. Furthermore, if users provided the number of sales and the corresponding revenue generated by each offer, Comoonity Growth utilized this data to generate insightful charts, visually illustrating the progressive growth experienced by the businesses. Another feature that will be added in future releases.

After the initial version was deployed, the idea of what Comoonity could become truly came to fruition. One key issue I pointed out is that users would have to sign up multiple times if they wanted to follow multiple businesses. Also, as the founder planned to start this by going town to town, they got the idea and planned to add a section to their website where they would manually add each comoonity and its businesses.

It became clear as time went on that this was not sustainable as there were other costs occurred with this version of Growth and Comoonity in general. It was also very time consuming for both Comoonity's staff and customers alike. And so the Comoonity App was brought into focus. It was only meant to be place to display all the businesses, but I suggested adding the follow button instead of each business having a form users have to fill out everytime and Comoonity grew from there.

At first, I adapted the current version of Growth to work with the app but as time went on, it became clear a remake was ideal. The cost of the infrastructure and potential benefits to remaking outweighed the cons after the social media integration broke. So I began remaking Comoonity Growth.

The New Version

The new version of Growth utilsied many improved features like SSO. Meaning if you logged in on the app, you were automatically logged in on Growth. Assuming of course you were on the same browser.

An important goal with this remake was to make it more cost effective and easier to maintain than the original. The original version required more AWS services to work which increased its cost to maintain, the new version more than halved the number of resources required. This also didn't rely on Zoho anymore and could store the offers and the business's followers on its own. Additionaly, the emails were sent to followers from Growth instead of Zoho whenever the user wanted to. But to keep things easy for the business using it, email templates were provided. At the time of writing this, only 2 templates were provided: A basic email & an Offer email. See screenshot below:

V1.1 will include the events and jobs email templates. We also plan to add other templates like:

• Newsletters

• Feedback or Survey

• Occasions (Christmas, Easter, Halloween etc)

• Marketing (Pride month, Black History Month etc)

• Birthday/Anniversary

There will likely be more to come which are more customisable as well.

The "Manage" page is used to update the content this business would show on the app such as: Name, description, logo, cover image, socials, contact details, open hours and call to actions. They would also select their comoonity and category.

Future Versions

Version 1.1.0 will allow the business to add their jobs they are hiring for and events they are hosting. This will then be displayed on the app. The email templates for each will also be added. I would also like to add a dark mode which is already exists on the app.

Version 1.2.0 will re-add the social media integration and expand upon it. The original feauture of posting the referral link will still exist along with other post templates similair to that of the email templates, like events, occasion etc.

Version 1.3.0 is at the time of writing this, the last planned out version of Growth which will feature a ChatGPT integration. This will specifically be used to generate the marketing content for the business's emails and social media posts rather than being done manually by someone at Comoonity. This both easier for Comoonity and quicker and more efficient for the businesses.

There are other features we'd like to add like more analytics to help the business growth in more ways than one. A hub section is being discussed to be added as Comoonity has several partners which offer aid to small businesses like affordable loans and business insurance.