Does your trade association struggle with its website? Does the information and resources get lost behind a chaotic and overwhelming user experience?
If this sounds like you, then Abe Dane and David Durand, Ph.D., can probably lend a hand.
Their company Tizra has been helping trade associations make their websites more user-friendly and accomplish their digital goals for nearly a decade.
Using a highly customizable platform created in-house, the Providence-based company assists associations with selling digital products, creating online archives, protecting content and automating and integrating their websites.
“Our solutions are for organizations that have very high-value content,” Abe Dane, co-founder and president of Tizra, told Rhode Island Inno. “This is for professionals. How to run a medical practice; how to do a Surgical procedure — content that is really helpful when you can search for it and can control access to it in precise ways.”
“We are constantly looking to help people get more value out of their content from consumption, from building an audience and generating revenue."
The company launched in 2006, initially focusing on professional and scholarly e-books, and quickly secured venture funding from the Slater Technology Fund. But shortly after, the landscape changed with the entrance of larger players like Apple and Amazon.
Tizra pivoted by helping associations deliver content and has since built a solid business by working for clients such as the American Medical Association, the American Dental Association and the Providence-based American Mathematical Society.
Dane said there are probably 50,000 to 100,000 organizations nationwide that fit into this category.
Tizra can offer associations the technology to control content by making one chapter available for sale, or maybe just first three pages of a document as a sample to potential customers.
The company’s technology also allows organizations to streamline their search capabilities on websites or mobile, especially when it comes to large, complex documents. Other solutions include limiting access to certain documents for certain types of people, licensing content and offering different pricing for different groups of people.
There are established players in the market, but Dane said he does not see comparable platforms when it comes to the content-agnostic and granular approach the company takes.
While the business has been doing well, Dane said Tizra is looking to get back to its roots and build up the business so it can scale at the speed of software.
Currently, Tizra works with its clients in a very intense, customer-facing manner, where it spends lots of time customizing its platform to meet a specific organization’s needs.
Now, Dane is looking to develop the platform so the deployment process can be more repeatable and allows customers that don’t want all of the customization to use it and tailor it on their own.
“We are really proud the platform can be customized so extensively, but that’s not the right thing for a lot of people and there are a lot of applications that are very broad and very relevant,” said Dane. “It doesn’t have to be someone who wants to pay for all of that up front customization and configuration.”
Dane said by standardizing the platform, he feels the company can reach a much broader market.
“We are constantly looking to help people get more value out of their content from consumption, from building an audience and generating revenue,” he said.
