One of our earliest Pearl Comments customers was a non-profit organization in Ann Arbor. They have about 15 paid staff and more than 40 volunteers. Many of the staff “own” a particular subset of pages on the organization’s public web site but do not have the expertise or time to maintain the pages themselves. Instead, one person (who also has other responsibilities) makes the changes for everyone else.
For example, the director of education is responsible for the development of new courses which the organization offers to the public. With Pearl Comments, she can include a description of the new course in a comment on the appropriate web page. Later she can check the status of the comment to see if the web site maintainer is aware of the request or perhaps see that the issue was already resolved.
It is easy for the web site maintainer to juggle her responsibilities. She uses Pearl Comments to view the outstanding requests, set the status to “In Progress” when she begins working on a change, and set the status to “Completed” when she finishes the request. Comments are closed (and no longer visible) once everyone is satisified with the changes. Pearl Comments also is used when additional discussion or clarification is needed.
Hundreds of comments later, this non-profit organization’s meetings are shorter and the public web site is better than ever. We’ve been told that more changes are made and everyone is happier with the quality of the web site since Pearl Comments became part of their process.