Non-Profit Tech Blog

After he talked about Scorpio, Shaun Sullivan showed me what Blackbaud Direct Marketing and Blackbaud Enterprise CRM can do. Both products are blueprints for what we should be able to do with Raiser’s Edge in the future. Basically, it’s mashup time with Blackbaud. These newer products can pull from Guidestar, Thompson Financial and other sources on the Web to build a 360 degree profile of a potential donor.

Unlimited customizabilty is the biggest thing I saw during the demos of Blackbaud DM and Enterprise CRM. You can now build your own Key Performance Indicator (KPI) dashboards. You can even add and edit your own KPIs. And even better, you can create Yahoo! widgets to report those KPIs and can even use Blackbaud’s software to dynamically build a Yahoo! widget from a KPI. I did notice that there was no mention of Google’s widgets but I’m sure those will work for a future Raiser’s Edge too.

There’s now a “shell designer” so that your organization can now completely modify the UI in the new Blackbaud DM and Enterprise CRM products. You can change all the tab names and even add localization language. In fact, the metascripting language for the form designer is so extensive that Blackbaud built its own platform out of the language. That’s one way, I guess, to see if the language was worth having around. This is pretty similar to the way salesforce.com does things.

Also, there are APIs up and down the stack meaning that everything in the new Raiser’s Edge will be programmable at whatever layer of abstraction you want to be at. If you want to be “close to the metal”, you can be writing your SQL calls. You can also alter both internal and external Web services calls. There’s even a Ruby on Rails-like ability to do declarative database modeling with all the necessary configuration files done in YAML (sound familiar to you Rubyists, out there?). Blackbaud will now provide extensive database references and all their internal SQL stored procedures will be documented as well. And those of you using Visual Studio, will be given templates so you can make your own components for Blackbaud’s new software platform.

It’s a pretty intense reworking of what is available now for Blackbaud current incarnation of Raiser’s Edge. All this new technology is great but the ecosystem won’t take off unless people can create a clear and unimpeded revenue stream for their third party products. However, Blackbaud is still unsure how the monetization will work out for ISVs. This is the big IF that’s still missing and I really hope that Shaun Sullivan’s boss, Marc Chardon really tries to open up the financial side of the platform.