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Laney Whitcanck, Co-Founder of Big Tent

Big Tent is a great example of where the possibilities of where Web 2.0 truly lie. Social connections drive our lives, from our families to our work relationships and the friendships that we carry into adulthood.

Carrying these relationships online has proven to be enjoyable and useful enough to spawn so-called networking sites of nearly every stripe, including a site for friends and family to share memories of deceased loved ones.

But where Big Tent, a website that provides management and organizational tools for offline communities like Scout troops and alumni groups, breaks ground, is by providing a social networking service with real business tools that assist individual groups with administrative tasks that can too often devour precious volunteer hours.

“It’s exciting to help these volunteer-powered groups achieve their mission,” said Big Tent CEO Donna Novitsky. “The more we can off-load these administrative processes the more they can focus on what their group is all about, whether it’s providing prom dresses or raising money for a homeless shelter. It’s fun to be able to help them with their cause.”

The site is currently in beta and will launch publicly in January. The site’s co-founder, Laney Whitcanck, who founded the non-profit, The Princess Project, in San Francisco, said that as offline groups have moved, and then grown, online, they have become more complex and harder to manage, which in turn endangers the group’s effectiveness.

“It becomes really overwhelming for the groups to manage all of these technologies,” she said. “So it threatens the sustainability of the group as well.”

Many groups are forced to use several different sites, Whitcanck said, such as PayPal, Yahoo, and others to accomplish communication, payment and management tasks. This leads to multiple email addresses, log-in and Web sites to keep track of. Email fatigue is a prevelant problem.

“We wanted it all under one roof,” she said. “Which is why we named it Big Tent.”

Among other tools, the San Francisco-based Big Tent’s platform provides manual processes to track dues and membership, an account management system, and a renewal process that tracks memberships. Web 2.0 features like photos, profiles and discussion groups engage group members and facilitates their online experience.

These types of duties can be overwhelming for growing groups whose members are busy adults with full lives, Novitsky said, a long-time former venture partner of Mohr, Davidow Ventures.

MDV funded the company’s first round of $2 million in May 2006. The company is currently raising another round, she said.

There are currently over 100 groups using Big Tent with 150 being the average size of the group, though some range as large as 1,000 members.

The basic service of Big Tent is free. The company plans to provide targeted advertisements to its users and is considering subscription services in the future.