Site Design was Team Effort by Schipul – The Web Marketing Company 
and Houston Zoo’s Marketing Department

HOUSTON, May 28, 2008 – Schipul – The Web Marketing Company (www.schipul.com), a Web marketing and Web design company based in Houston, is celebrating a pair of awards won by the Houston Zoo for its Web site. The Houston Chapter of the American Marketing Association awarded the Houston Zoo a Crystal Award in the Web site – Non–profit category. The Zoo’s Web site and overall Web marketing strategy was recognized with an additional Crystal Award in the Maverick category as a favorite of the judges.

A panel of eight judges, all marketing professionals from outside the Houston area, evaluated a record number of entries. They assessed the success of marketing initiatives based on the challenge, objectives, strategy and results.

Launched a year ago the Houston Zoo’s Web site, www.houstonzoo.org, was designed by Schipul in coordination with the Zoo’s Marketing Department. The site is powered by the Tendenci® (www.tendenci.com) Web marketing application, which is developed and marketed by Schipul.

“We are proud of our ongoing relationship with the Houston Zoo and especially happy that our efforts contributed to generating measurable results,” said Ed Schipul, president and chief executive officer with Schipul – The Web Marketing Company. “Getting a special recognition as a favorite of the judges says a great deal about the creativity of the thinking and quality of the execution.”

Attracting 1.5 million visitors each year and home to more than 4,500 animals in over 200 exhibits, the Houston Zoo encourages appreciation, knowledge, and care for the natural world. The Zoo’s Web site brings that world to life online through subtle animation that has a three-dimensional quality and creates a lush look and feel. The site incorporates interactive tools, such as podcasts, really simple syndication (RSS) feeds, online event registration and online membership sign-up, renewal and upgrade.

 

 

About Schipul - The Web Marketing Company

Tendenci's story is intertwined with Schipul - The Web Marketing Company. In 1997, Ed Schipul quit his fulltime job as a software consultant for a large petroleum corporation and started his own web marketing company. Armed with a Political Science degree from Texas A&M, a background in programming and a fascination with social trends, Ed and his wife Rachel Schipul - started building web sites that helped people communicate. Years of custom requests from his nonprofit clients led to the initial construction of Tendenci, a platform of tools that most organizations need, or could use, to increase both their communciation and revenue streams. Read more about Ed Schipul.

In 2004, Tendenci received its official name and was sold by Schipul to clients around the world, filling a need for affordable membership management and association website marketing software. Other membership software applications were either too costly, too technical or not robust enough to manage the complex transactions for membership management, email marketing, event management, and donations management. Tendenci was developed to solve these problems and provide a simpler, better, and cheaper solution.

In 2012, Tendenci was released as an open source AMS SaaS product to extend its reach even further, allowing developers around the world the ability to download and build on the Tendenci platform. In November 2013, Schipul officially changed its name to Tendenci to focus on the expansion of the software and the developer community. No clients were harmed in the making of this move - Schipul remains as a professional service division of Tendenci, assisting nonprofits with marketing design and effective web site strategies.