37 Signals produces great web apps with simple, elegant designs. We use their Highrise contact manager, and their  Ta-Da Lists are as good as free, online to-do lists get (Populi's already great at contacts, and we’re incorporating To-Do’s in our next major release).

Freshbooks is an online invoicing application that promises “painless billing.” Our billing man, Mark Ackerman, testifies that Freshbooks makes his job easier and Populi more efficient as a company. (Populi Billing, of course, also features invoicing that's integrated with the rest of your college's information).

Mailchimp helps us manage our various mailing lists. It has good analytic tools and a really user-friendly interface. On your end, it makes subscribing and unsubscribing very simple. It's a mass-mailing tool that hates spam as much as the rest of us do, and we use it because we believe it will make your experience with our occasional mailings much more pleasant and useful (Populi Email's seamless integration with college contacts can certainly help you with your own mass-email campaigns).

Zendesk forms the basis of our online Customer Support system. Like Mailchimp, its user interface is simple and pleasant both on your end and our end. With its ticket system, help forums (fora for those Latin speakers out there), search, and other features, it gets you help with your issues with a pretty fast turnaround time. On our end, it helps our Customer Support guys be alert and responsive to your needs--and its reporting tools help us make our help content more useful to you.

We don't just like the software; we also appreciate the thought behind them--their whole approach to software design,  customer support, transparency, accessibility, simplicity... and honesty in how they market themselves. You can read more about the approach in 37 Signals' Getting Real, which, though aimed at software companies, nevertheless contains principles readily applicable to other spheres (like higher education). When Populi got started, we had a lot of these things in mind already, if only because they are not in evidence in today's college software market. It's somewhat encouraging and exonerating to find that there are already successful companies out there who adhere to what we consider some of our core tenets. Not only does this approach produce better software, it also lets us, as a company, get to be more human and approachable in how we present ourselves.

Not to mention our new blog, too...

We trust you’ll find the redesigned www.populiweb.com to be more informative, usable, and easier on the eyes than our previous website. If you haven't already poked around the site, here's a fast overview:

Populi’s big-picture lives in the About section. “We’re here to solve a problem,” we begin, and then we tell you, well, how Populi solves it. You’ll also find a brief corporate history.

You’ll find a lot of meat in the Tour section, which describes Populi’s approach and features, in addition to screenshots.

Of equal interest, probably, is our Pricing page, in which we tell you exactly what we charge without having us contact you with a sales pitch.

Contact lets you know how to get a hold of us, as a company and individually, and lets you sign up for a demo and/or the newsletter.

And, of course, this here Blog, which you’re reading. The Populi Blog will cover, of course, Populi—software updates, more about our company and people, support, other announcements—as well as software in general, the web in particular, higher education (especially small colleges), and some things of general interest. We intend to update it once or twice a week—and maybe more frequently, as time permits.

Thanks for checking in with us!