by Dan Sondhelm
RidgeWorth Investments announced today that it has enhanced its really simple syndication (RSS) offering to allow website visitors to bundle any of a range of its 53 RSS feeds into one manageable feed. The custom feed allows visitors to tailor the RidgeWorth information they receive to their specific needs and have it delivered to a place of their choosing.
"Our first step was to develop RSS feeds at the fund level, because we realize that these days advisors buy individual funds, not fund families," said David Craig, RidgeWorth's Director of Marketing. "We didn't want to bombard advisors with information about all 50 of our funds when they may only be interested in three or four. We also realize that there are many different websites that advisors need to visit. Although we'd love for them to visit our site from time to time, we're more than happy to send the information they need directly to them through the feeds."
In developing the initial feeds, Craig said that the end goal was to let advisors completely customize their experience by combining multiple topics of interest into one feed. "A retirement plan advisor, for instance, may be interested in information about our Mid-Cap Value Equity Fund, Total Return Bond Fund and Retirement Thought of the Week," said Craig. "Instead of subscribing to three different feeds, the advisor can build a custom feed that includes all three topics. Whenever anything hits our website related to those topics, it goes out in the feed." For funds, the feed includes daily prices, quarterly fact sheets, commentaries, shareholder reports and more.
The Custom RSS can be delivered in a range of ways, including standard RSS readers (iGoogle, Bloglines, etc.) and a browser "bookmarklet." Advisors with their own websites could also imbed the "Retirement Thought of the Week" on their own sites. Details for each can be found on the RidgeWorth Custom RSS feed webpage.
RidgeWorth has also developed a presentation that explains RSS and its benefits, for those who aren't currently using it. RidgeWorth believes that RSS is one small step to take to help manage the information overload on the web.
Do you have RSS feeds or are you thinking about providing them? Let me know.
Disclosure: RidgeWorth is a client of SunStar Strategic.
