Technology plays a critical role in managing the advocate marketing organization. Today, most marketers manage advocate activity using applications like spreadsheets and personal email. Some organizations can identify and engage a handful of advocates in a manual fashion, but have no process and no underlying technology in place to manage a larger number of advocates in a systematic way.

A technology platform will allow the Advocate Marketing Manager to organize, consistently communicate with, and mobilize hundreds or thousands of advocates. Neither a spreadsheet nor even a CRM application has the right functionality to support this process.

There are a handful of core requirements to focus on when evaluating technology options:

• A home for the advocates - A web portal for the advocates to sign in to find the latest "asks", stay up-to-date and track their status.
• The right advocate experience - There are psychological principles at work
  in the act of advocacy. Program members need to be engaged, challenged and entertained when answering the call for help. They need instant gratification and recognition for their efforts. They may be seeking status through their advocacy. Advocate marketing platforms keep these principles in play to ensure high engagement and task completion.
• Basic campaign management - A communication system that makes it easy to ask the right advocate segments for help on the right kind of campaigns.
• Advocate marketing management - An application that is used by the advocate marketing team to manage advocates, asks and recognition.
• Advocate segmentation - Certain campaigns and "asks" may only be appropriate for a specific segment of your advocates. Segmentation allows you to group and manage advocates by their persona.
• Reporting - Dashboards and reports that provide visibility into advocate activity and program effectiveness.

In addition to these, there are a couple of more advanced requirements that you may consider:

• Gamification - The ability to ascribe points, badges and other rewards to the various "asks" that advocates can earn over time. Point totals may be presented in a leaderboard or can be used to create various status levels that advocates can attain. Gamification has been proven to increase and maintain advocate engagement.
• Social interactions - Allowing advocates to see that other advocates are participating in campaigns, and to interact with other advocates and their social network at large while participating in campaigns, provides a more enjoyable and engaging experience, encourages networking among your advocates, and amplifies the reach of your advocate marketing program as a whole.
• Rewards fulfillment - The application tracks the delivery of rewards based on advocate achievement levels.
• CRM integration - Advocate activities should be kept in the main customer records of a CRM system for the rest of the organization to leverage.

When evaluating advocate marketing technologies, keep this checklist handy as you do your research on what each platform has to offer:

• An advocate home/portal
• High-quality advocate experience
• Basic campaign management
• Advocate marketing management
• Reporting
• Gamification
• Rewards fulfillment
• CRM integration