Looking back at 2019 in the past year, we want to take the opportunity to thank all our customers for a good collaboration and we look forward to an exciting 2020. It is very rewarding to work in the area of higher education and be able to follow closely how higher education institutions in the Nordic countries are constantly developing their work in external relations.
For us, 2019 was an intense and fun year in which the work of recent years in developing and implementing our new user interface and upgrading our modules is now really starting to yield results. We are now in the middle of the process of upgrading our alumni solution together with Lund University and will roll it out at the beginning of 2020.
When you look back in the rearview mirror and to sum up an entire year, you soon discover that it is an impossible task to do this year’s events justice in a short text. But I will still try and sum up 2019 and also take a look forward to 2020.
Mira is highly competitive with satisfied clients
Satisfied customers are the best proof that we to do the right things. We have always strived to deliver solutions that create value for our customers and which are easy to use. In order to be able to do this successfully, we have in recent years chosen to a path that we have not previously tried and have challenged ourselves in the process. It has been an exciting ride with several pitfalls along the way, but which now gives results both in terms of customer satisfaction and our competitiveness.
- We get 9 out of 10 in the ratings of our clients. We have done follow-up interviews with our new customers six to twelve months after launch and we have received 9 out of 10 in the question “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend this company’s product or services to a colleague”.
- Our product is very competitive in terms of price and functionality. Over the past four years, we have participated in five major tenders where there has been more than one tenderer. In all five cases, we have won the tender and our offer was the most economically advantageous tender.
We combine Software as a Service that is easy to set up and configure with the ability to be flexible and create unique solutions for the needs that are not covered by our standard functionality.
- Our clients stay with us. Today we work with 11 customers who have been with us for over ten years. Our clients are very important to us and we would like to extend a big thanks to everyone who has chosen to work with us and helped us develop our product with good ideas and feedback!
Highlights of 2019
During 2019 we have continuously worked on improving our system. The two largest projects of 2019 have been the release of out new email-communications module and the re-work of the alumni solution. The email module is now used by all our clients and we plan on finish the new alumni module in early 2020. Below are the most important releases for each month. In addition to this we have also done countless small tweaks and also a few bug fixes.
January
- Improved module for email communications
- Responsive templates that look great on any device
- Easily insert call-to action buttons, two-column sections,
- User friendly dynamic fields for email merge
- Filter recipients on whether they open and/or click in your email to send relevant follow up emails.
February
- Reuse previous email campaigns [ Email communications ]
March
- Improved add organization process, with support for importing data from Brunnösundsregistret.
- Dynamic tags – display any saved query as a tag in person profiles
April
- List saved queries in modern design
May
- Person profile in modern design
- Module based permissions
- Collaboration category based permissions for contact notes
June
- Support for deleting saved drafts for email campaigns
- Support for including personal direct login links to My Alumni Page in emails
November
- Editing email content templates (#44323)
December
- We have improved performance in some areas, e.g. listing of gifts in the Fundraising module, and when requesting a new password for internal users. [ FR ] [ CRM ]
For an overall list of new features and releases, check out our release notes list.
We have also published a series of useful FAQs in 2019. Below are some of the most recent ones and you can find all our guides and FAQs here
Next year will be exciting for us and the first big release of the year will be our new alumni solution that we are currently working on with Lund University. First step is to release it to Lund University and during the spring and then during 2020 replace the current alumni solution with the new solution. Advantages with the new solution is that it provides a smoother experience for the alumni and allows for several different registration forms to be active at the same time for one university. This allows for better faculty branding and in the future also synergies with other Mira registration forms such as event registration or donation forms. Other things related to alumni we are working on is a tool to allow for better interaction between alumni, a widget that allow our clients to measure alumni engagement and improvements to both our integrations with Ladok and FS (Felles Studentregister, the Norwegian student administrative system).
So, it will be an exciting year for alumni relations! But we are also improving our other modules and are among other things planning a release for our event module with some new features.
The thing I am looking forward most to is all the exciting meetings with higher education professionals I will have. A lot of interesting things are happening in the field of external relations for higher education in the Nordics right now and I plan on attending as many conferences as possible. Case Nordic in Helsinki is the first one out this spring and perhaps I will meet you there?