Tallium Open Network Usecase - The Water Network

Tallium, as a highly configurable platform with API-based architecture is easily adapted to many particular use cases. If you are looking for a platform that will not be used solely in your organization, but will be open to people outside of it, in this post you will find out more about The Water Network and the way they configured Tallium to fit their use case.

Vishakha Rajput, COO of The Water Network agreed to share this information to help other Tallium users create a successful knowledge network.

Let us first start with a couple of sentences regarding The Water Network. The vision of The Water Network is to provide an innovative solution to the global water crisis by connecting the experiences of professionals around the world, and to provide digital workspaces for water initiatives. They are using Tallium as the platform to do this.

Today, The Water Network is the largest knowledge sharing platform and business exchange for the $620 billion water sector.

Have you used Tallium since the beginning?

Vishakha Rajput: Five years ago the platform was supported by the TallyFox Drupal Platform, but we needed certain advanced functionalities which were hard to predict at the beginning. When Tallium was just a concept, we became very interested as TallyFox started describing this new, API-based architecture open to integrations, as a completely configurable platform with many features and integrations. This got us excited, and we decided we should migrate to the new platform. And we did in 2015.

Now that you are using Tallium, and a lot of your content is user generated, which options are you using the most?

Vishakha Rajput: We can divide the content creation in two parts. The first part would be content created by the network manager and editors and the second part would be content created by members. For creating the content, managers and editors of The Water Network use articles mostly, because this is the best option for the sort of news we wish to share with people. When it comes to content created by members, they prefer using the quick post feature because it is really quick. You can join a group to ask anything, make a group post.

If you go to the network you can see that besides quick posts; questions, discussions and blogs are the next most used features because the network engages them to participate.

We measure our impact in terms of how we are helping the knowledge sharing process, and Q&A section is the best way to overview the knowledge flow from one professional to another. Till this date we have helped solve over 400 questions – which get replied within first 24 hours.

The second measure of our success is our ability to help significant water initiatives to operate more efficiently and scale their efforts like India’s Mission Ganga  and UNESCO- IHE’s initiative with Florida Earth Foundation.

Tallium’s Algorithm, SmartMatchPro^TM brings relevant information to you and illustrates it with a relevance percentage.  How has this helped The Water Network?

Vishakha Rajput: It is working marvelously. Take me for example, I was connected to 500 people over the last 5 years and since we transferred to Tallium in May 2015, I have received 50% more connection requests. Previously I was the one who initiated connection requests, but now I get requests from a lot of people relevant to me. That is one of the benefits we’ve been really experiencing on the new platform. And this experience is enhanced if people fill out their industry expertise section correctly or completely, which helps them connect professionals they are looking for and enables the contextual knowledge discovery, without the noise.

When people complete their profile industry expertise - The Water Network becomes a magical place for them.

Tallium is a very configurable platform, what functionalities have you enabled or disabled to fit the needs of your Network?

Vishakha Rajput: On The Water Network we are using most of the functionalities, but the communities within the network customize their configuration. Take for example India Water Week - They don’t have questions enabled, and they don’t have any groups because this community is all about the event. They prefer using discussions. If you go to the community you can see that it is a clean, plain and simple community, but very active.

At the same time, another community is completely different. Water Guardian Experts. It's a vibrant community with groups. They publish news using the article feature, they are starting engaging discussions and are basically using all the new functionalities to a great extent. Other clients can also choose which functions they want to use, rename it if they want to, if they want a group they can have it, if not, they don't have to, they just disable it.

Tallium is a platform that has an implemented business model. You are able to sell featured company profiles. What is your experience in this?

Vishakha Rajput: For The Water Network the interest in featured company profiles is huge. Right now we have high quality clients like Hach, Jain Irrigation Systems Limited, AquiSense Technologies, IDE and many more you can see on this link. This is great, but ultimately our scaleable business model  is to launch Premium Individual Memberships, offering additional benefits for those who pay a fee versus the free membership that we offer to all.

How did you setup your Taxonomy?

Vishakha Rajput: The Water Network’s taxonomy was created before we went live on the new Tallium platform. The creation of the “starter taxonomy” was done by us with help from a taxonomy consultant and water domain experts in the very beginning. We identified 18 main functional areas, and 3 to 5 activities within each, for a total of circa 200 terms. From there the professionals created terms that match their specific expertise. Today the Industry has mapped itself, and the existing taxonomy has circa 5000 terms.  When a new client comes along who want their own workspace hosted inside our network they can easily create their own content categories and add taxonomy terms specifically for their community.

Have you seen an increase in user engagement due to member rank option?

Vishakha Rajput: Yes of course. Take me for example, my profile is good, rank is good, people find me easily and want to get connected to me. When it comes to my experience about content shared by members, we’ve definitely seen an increase in people wanting to share their knowledge. Recently we've seen questions getting about 30 answers or more in the first 24 hours.

Tallium is proud to have a user friendly interface. How has this benefited The Water Network?

Vishakha Rajput: It is definitely easy to use. For example, people weren’t creating galleries before, now they are. I also feel that options regarding events are gaining on popularity. It’s interesting to see who's going to the event, e.g. your friends, or the person you want to get touch with etc.

Also we have to say that compared to the old platform, The Water Network is looking gorgeous. It is beautiful. Some may feel that there’s too much content on the homepage - but that is the beauty of it. If you go to the homepage you can see what exactly is going on inside The Water Network and find a way to engage. And ultimately that’s why you’re here.

At the end, we thanked Vishakha on her time and we invite you to go and join The Water Network. If you would like to find out more about Tallium, click here