Constant Contact’s AppConnect and Mobile Application teams hosted an Open Platform-themed Innovation Jam July 10 and 11, 2014. It was open to any member of the Constant Contact team, and participants were encouraged to come up with cool new ideas by mashing up features, functionality, and coolness from different apps with open platforms. Read more about fostering Innovation at Constant Contact.

Getting things started

To help with the creative process, we enlisted our friends at Agendize, PayPal, Twilio, Mashery, and Mozilla. They very generously and enthusiastically made presentations sharing their thought leadership in the open platform space, and introduced their solutions and API platforms in tech talks prior to the event. During the event, Agendize, PayPal and Twilio sent product managers, solution engineers and developer evangelists to our San Francisco and Waltham sites.

InnoLoft plays host in Waltham

In Waltham, the jam was held in Constant Contact’s brand new SMB InnoLoft, home to our Innovation Team, as well as an incubator for a number of young startups. The InnoLoft gave those in the Waltham office a great space to collaborate and create during the jam.

Kicking it off

The Innovation Jam kicked off on Thursday morning with an inspiring   innovation talk by Luis Solis, President of Imaginatik plc, a global innovation software and consulting firm based in Boston, Massachusetts

Then the folks with project ideas went up and pitched them to the audience, and let them know what type of skills they needed to add to their team.. After the pitches teams formed, and for the next 24 hours they worked on building UI and conceptual mockups, working code, demo  scripts, and more.

Science fair, voting, and winners!

All this culminated in the Science Fair, where each team demonstrated their project. Crowd voting, and the panel of judging then determined winners for each of the 4 categories:

Winner for Best Coded Mashup

Best Coded Mashup category required that working code be a part of their demonstration. The winner was Project Flamingo, created by members of our San Francisco office, used PayPal’s API to give Constant Contact user a clear picture of campaigns ROI by linking point of sale (POS) data that showed sales results to campaign timeline .

Winner for Best No Code Mashup

Best No-Code Mashups demonstrated their concept using UI mockups, slide-ware, and other means without the need for working code. The winner was Engagement Agenda, created by members of our Loveland, CO office.  This project leveraged the Agendize API to demonstrate how an integrated appointment scheduling and tracking service can generate more revenue for Constant Contact customers.

Winner for Best Join My Mailing List Application

The winner for building a better JMML that makes Constant Contact users sing with joy was Fill Me In – a simple yet powerful sign up form that is fully customizable regarding branding and placement within a customer’s web site.

Winner for Crowd Favorite

The people vote for their favorite project after seeing all the great efforts in the Science Fair, and they voted for Constant Drop. The Constant Drop team integrated Drop Box and Constant Contact with the purpose of improving the Constant Contact user’s experience when adding content and media directly from their Drop Box account while creating campaign.

Measuring success

Here are some key performance indicators for you stat/metric types:

• 350 – more than Constant Contact employees voted for their Crowd Favorite
• 100 – more than 100 Constant Contact employees participated
• 28 – the number of project teams formed
• 26 – number of projects submitted for judging
• 11 – Our partners showed up in force, sending 11 great team members to 2 different sites
• 5 – the number of Constant Contact API partners that helped make this a success
• 4 – the number of winning projects!
• 3 – the number of Constant Contact sites involved

Learn more about life at Constant Contact here.