Let’s go through some recent developments that have occurred over at Kintera, Convio and MPower. It’s been a cascade of announcements all about the new platform strategies of what is rapidly developing into the Blackbaud and Convio camps.
Despite the self-imposed quiet period due to the acquisition of Kintera by Blackbaud, Kintera issued a press release on June 6th touting the ability to add custom entities (database tables) to Kintera and have them automatically exposed through the Kintera API. Yes, you can now develop unique third party apps in Kintera that have nothing to do with fundraising (even though everything has to do with fundraising).
A week later, on June 13th, MPower sends out their press release touting the appearance of MPower on Sourceforge under both a GPL v3 license or a license that allows you to develop code without sharing with the rest of your community (I call this the Ebenezer Scrooge license). That’s right you can download MPower off of Sourceforge the same way you can download many popular open source products.
And then yesterday, on the 17th, Convio issued their own press release, heck their own mini-website about a new CRM they’ve developed for nonprofits using Salesforce.com as the underlying platform.
It’s an impressive series of wins for those of you who signed the Integration Proclamation so many moons ago. Each of these developments are unqualfied wins for openness but as always, not all these wins are equal. In fact, they can be described as an open API, an open platform and open source.
The Open API: Kintera’s custom entities is mighty impressive but it does keep you locked to the Kintera platform. On the other hand, the automatic exposure of new tables through the existing Kintera API means that once you build a custom table in Kintera, other applications can see it through web services. This is a Good Thing. And it has some unusual implications as well… If this new feature set in the Kintera API survives the Blackbaud acquisition, we potentially have a new way to interact with Blackbaud data once Kintera is fully merged into the Blackbaud product set. It’s unknown if this feature will survive but let’s hope that this tiny window into Blackbaud isn’t automatically shut by the powers that be.
The Open Platform: Convio’s new offering on Force.com is another evolutionary step for the nonprofit world. Remember that Force.com is an open platform with great APIs but is NOT open source. Frankly, this level of openness is more than enough for many non-profits. It remains to be seen what exactly the pricing model is for this new product codenamed Aikido. As you know, I’m a big proponent of salesforce.com and its use for nonprofits but I’ve been a little disillusioned by the lack of fundraising logic in salesforce.com itself. If what Convio is offering this Fall erases those problems, I can see salesforce.com really penetrate the nonprofit sector even faster than it already has. This announcement seems to be directed at generating FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) with existing Kintera customers trying to decide whether or not to stay with Kintera or to move over to Convio. No pricing information or even a release date has been offered which I interpret as a FUD move on Convio’s part. Nevertheless, this is a welcome development for those of us simply looking for a SaaS platform that has better fundraising logic.
The Open Source: MPower Open is on Sourceforge. Repeat after me — MPower Open is on Sourceforge. And they have it under a GPL v3 license. You can’t ask for more. OK, you’re right, you CAN ask for me. MPower Open is written in .Net which isn’t exactly my cup of tea but for those nonprofits that are heavily standardized on Microsoft products (and most are) this isn’t really a barrier to entry. Hiring good .Net programmers is the barrier. On the other hand, if you’re not looking to modify MPower right now but might in the future, it’s still a viable option. Keep in mind that I haven’t done a thorough review of MPower so I’m just waiting until the hosted version is available for me to look at it. What’s great about MPower being on Sourceforge is that there are statistics available for the project. They’ve already had 86 downloads since they released five days ago. Next up: getting more community members willing to add code to the project.
A reader wrote this to me the other day:
Cannot understand the big deal about MPower. Right now ASI’s iMIS software has fundraising, segmentation, RFM analytics, a data warehouse, and email marketing that is far greater in scope than Convio….They have been doing this a while now so yeah, M Power is a developer’s dream and maybe nice for the resume, but why re-invent the wheel when sophisticated software already is in use?
Indeed, why re-invent the wheel? I think the reader is missing a couple of issues that are a result of looking at fundraising software within the silo of a fundraising department.
Firstly, there should be no more silos. You see, dear readers, there’s a problem when one assumes that fundraising logic only exists between the screen and keyboard of a data entry person caging checks or when someone is looking at a LYBUNT list for their next mail merge. What about your web site? Wouldn’t it be nice to have some fundraising logic there? Or if you want to integrate fundraising logic with your accounting data?
Secondly, you want leverage on your vendor. Openness not only gives you choices. It is about setting up a competitive marketplace where an existing contract coupled with proprietary software does not determine whether or not you stay with a vendor like Blackbaud or Convio. In other words, legalistic and technological strategies have been designed to keep us paying our vendors. That’s THEIR side of the game. We should try to break those bonds whenever possible.
We don’t accept vendor lock-in in many aspects of our daily life and we shouldn’t accept it at the very heart of nonprofit line of business applications, fundraising tools. It’s a fundamental obligation on the part of IT directors to constantly push for openness of architecture in both hardware and software purchases. This doesn’t necessarily mean you stop buying Microsoft. Instead, you help foster a marketplace where Microsoft feels COMPELLED to compete with open source vendors to provide you with the best bang for your buck. Notice the quick number of revisions to Internet Explorer the minute Firefox hit 15% of browser market share. And in the same way, this doesn’t mean you move from iMIS or Blackbaud or Convio tomorrow. Hey, over 70% of computers still use IE to browse the Web. However, it’s clear that the changing marketplace and concerted action by nonprofits have engendered a new environment where there is now more choice than ever before. And our choices shouldn’t be dictated to us by vendors who say that their application can’t do what we want it to do.
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The consulting firm we work with “showed” us Convio’s product yesterday. I don’t think it is Kintera that should have the FUD or who they are targeting. It’s the folks in SC. No maintenance fees, no hardware to buy and take care of, free APIs, and much, much less expensive – plus they introduced us to a developer who told us he could build the add on we want for managing beds in about a week. We’re going to try to get in their program. If so we’ll share more, if we can. It was very impressive for something so new.
I think that I have seen this movie before. Internet company gets a big head, decides to go ahead and build their own CRM, and then they try to go public. All the while they are losing money and key staff members start leaving the place. They have a shoot out and a car chase in a crowded SAAS alley, and end up having to sell everything for pennies when the landlord comes knocking. I won’t spoil the ending, but I think you know where this is going. But everyone wants to believe the great marketing and buzz about that movie before they have even seen it. They should stick to what they know.
Um, which of the companies Allan mentioned is “building its own CRM”? Salesforce? MPower?
[...] always insightful friend, Allan Benamer, just wrote a great post on his Nonprofittechblog.org about the new wave of openness in nonprofit [...]
Convio is building a new CRM on top of Salesforce. Think of it as a deeper and tighter integration of their currently existing connector. You should definitely take a look at the recent blog posting by Gene Austin (or his marketing people) for more information.
Thanks, Allan. Sometimes it’s hard to keep it all straight.
@Kim Robertson — awww, don’t be a hater! Ok ok you can be one. I understand how people have been burned by previous experiences but I’d like to think that the environment surrounding many of our past choices wasn’t conducive to picking great software. Flash back to 2002 and you would see closed, proprietary CRM and donor management solutions that were wildly expensive. You literally couldn’t pick software that was open and on a SaaS platform and allowed you to work with web services. And no, this isn’t a plea to buy Convio but despite my previous brushes with Convio (I seem to be on their list of persona non grata — shrug), I still think they did a Good Thing by Aikido. Of course, you don’t get points for just saying you did something, the product actually has to roll out. We’ll just have to watch and see what happens in the fall.
[...] Benamer has a great post which gives an overview of all the fun stuff that’s happening in the nonprofit technology space these [...]
Allan – Good post! It has been a great ride, watching the vendors open their kimonos. I really feel like you hit the nail on the head when you said:
“This doesn’t necessarily mean you stop buying Microsoft. Instead, you help foster a marketplace where Microsoft feels COMPELLED to compete with open source vendors to provide you with the best bang for your buck.”
These open-oriented solutions encourage the innovation that really challenges the status quo. Or disrupts the market, if you’re feeling business 2.0.
[...] 19, 2008 Allen Benamer has a great post up right now about open platforms, APIs, and free fundraising software – and how [...]
Well, I think we should wait and see what Convio actually *delivers* with Aikido before trotting out the huzzahs. Announcing things is easy; releasing software is harder, and as we all know, the devil is truly in the details.
That said, the tide is clearly running strongly in the direction of greater openness at all levels, and that is indeed a Good Thing. I expect continuing rapid innovation and disruption ahead, though, and we should be honest about how uncomfortable that will be for our sector, which often struggles with change management.
I actually got to see a demo of Aikido, and I must say, it’s pretty impressive. I’m not a fundraising software guru, but I can say that it has everything a small-medium sized org would need for sure – and, it’s built on force.com, so you can add other apps too, which is pretty amazing.
No, it’s not open source – and of course for many, the SaaS model is a bit tangential to FOSS – you are paying, really, for the service. (Of course, in my dream world, everyone who wrote an app for app exchange would open source it, but I’m no holding my breath or stomping my feet – I am a realist, after all.) But the openness of force.com is great, and it’s a major step forward for nonprofits as far as I am concerned. And it’s great for them to have more choice – and more and more of the choices are open in one way or another.
Thanks for the great comments everyone — keep it up. I’m a big fan of Force.com and Convio’s Aikido but yes, we need to wait for the actual release. I wished Kintera had done this in order to get out from its doldrums. I think Convio realized that having data centers all over the place was having a terrible effect on the cost of provisioning a CRM. I would say the same thing about all platform CRMs. They should all be hosted on EC2 or in someone’s cloud (like Salesforce.com’s). Data centers ought to be treated like the commodities they are.
In general, like Michelle, I prefer FOSS over SaaS but will definitely take SaaS over your standard proprietary solution. In geekspeak, FOSS > SaaS > proprietary.
However, I do share Jon’s trepidation about the implementation. In geekspeak, released software > vaporware.
And thanks Holly for the kind comment on that paragraph. It seems to resonate with a lot of people. Those of you looking for more on this topic should read her post at the NTEN blog.
“Without deviation from the norm progress is not possible.” Frank Zappa – If nothing else Convio has listened to their customers and the market to deviate from the norm. We’ll all benefit from that leadership, the innovation it can inspire and the competition that comes with it.
Allan,
Thanks for the heads up about Convio. Aikido sounds intriguing but my question is this. After seeing the power of salesforce.com and getting licenses for free from their foundation I’m wondering who would be willing to fork over money to Convio for something they can customize themselves? Granted it’s going to require some time for us, but not being locked in to a vendor seems worth it to me. Salesforce.com has created an unbeatable deal for non-profits and Convio seems to be coming along for the ride too late. That being said, nonprofitforce still has a ways to go with respect to relationships.
@Alan Cole: Yes, I share many of your same questions. Would a nonprofit switch to Convio after seeing nonprofitforce? Who knows? I would love to see nonprofitforce develop and progress further despite the Convio alternative but that’s really up to Salesforce developers and for the Salesforce.com Foundation to provide the infrastructure to make that happen. However, this is what I mean by the FUD factor inherent in the early announcement of Aikido. It’s not in general release and we don’t know pricing. Obviously, many other questions have to be answered before we can answer these.
I think in general, despite the announcement, you can have a strategy where you start off with nonprofitforce and see if you have a need for Aikido later. It’s an interesting downmarket strategy. If you’re a tiny nonprofit — do salesforce.com with nonprofitforce. It’s free to use and if you don’t have any existing business processes, you’ll end up adopting Salesforce.com as your base set of processes. If you’ve got good execs who can project manage developers, by all means, work with it and shape the software to what your business processes will be later. However, all things being equal, it’s highly unlikely that nonprofit execs will create a unique business process that will confer competitive advantage in fundraising on their nonprofit. I believe even CRMs and CRM skillsets will be commoditized in the future and we’re seeing that process accelerate.
Allan,
Have to disagree with you here- even Salesforce acknowledges that ‘basic’ customizations for tiny organization cost thousands (this was in the recent article in Non Profit Times). Why? Because you have to reinvent the wheel at every turn.
I’d rather have ‘tiny’ non profits go with a proven solution from any of a dozen competitors- we live and breathe this stuff every day.
History repeats itself all the time. Remember The ‘Donation Switchboard’ in Microsoft Access? Or what about Ebase? Both have dissappeared.
Sorry to sound like a broken record. I’d love to show you what I think are the MAJOR differences and I also want to understand your point of view. Give me a call/email- we’ve chatted over the blog a few times and it’s probably time to meet, lol.
-Jon
Jon Biedermann
Vice President
DonorPerfect CRM Fundraising Software
http://www.donorperfect.com/dpoblog
jonb (at) donorperfect.com
Hey Jon, I think you raise some valid points. I’m not entirely averse to breaking down my Leaderboard recommendations to more adequately reflect the current donations database marketplace. I just want to make sure that any recommendations I make allow for maximum latitude on the part of nonprofits to move up and/or down market segments without losing data, i.e. openness is a must.
Like most – I’m intrigued at all of these options/offerings. Here’s what’s missing, though, in some of the pipe dreaming (at least from what my team is learning about implementing Salesforce.com: Nonprofits aren’t choosing (and maybe don’t need/can’t use) stock solutions. We’ve implemented Salesforce in simple and complex ways, we roll out an implementation that has many of the same configurations – but EVERY customer choses additional customizations.
I think that’s good. It helps with user adoption, helps them meet particular business needs (not general ones) and so on.
When we first started, we envisioned Salesforce.com (but it could be ANY CRM as far as I’m concerned) that become less and less expensive, and became easier and easier to implement and adopt. A bit of that promise is coming true – but what I’m noticing is that the business needs of our customers are increasingly complex – and one size doesn’t fit all. I’m wary of vendors who are selling the “my software will do it all and you can customize it on your own” because I’m not seeing the truth in those statements yet.
But I’d be happy to be wrong!
@Patrick Shaw: I think the deepest question about Salesforce.com customization isn’t about whether or not nonprofits will have to customize but why they should. Are these customizations you’re seeing from your clients driving a competitive advantage (in terms of fundraising or level of service) or are they merely setting up a particular Salesforce.com instance to match idiosyncratic business processes?
My guess is that many nonprofits tend to use hosted software without looking at their business processes first. I’ve learned that there is a pretty vast gap between what an ED knows and what line staff knows about how things get done in an organization and I believe it’s this gap that causes a lot of the headaches in a deployment of ASP or SaaS software in a nonprofit.
In general, nonprofits in the social services sector almost never do best practices gathering or do formal knowledge sharing with near-peers in their sector. It’s kinda horrific and I think this ends up driving customization more than it ought to. It’s my dream that we finally get to the point that standardized business processes are made available to nonprofits in the sector and that program managers and their staff are made aware of it. Frankly, that’s partly why I started socialmarkets.org. It seems silly to me that a two nonprofits sharing the same base set of clients would have entirely different business logic handling them but that’s where we are now. One of the reasons I still like Salesforce.com is that I’m holding out the hope that a nonprofit would, in effect, adopt the business process of another more successful nonprofit by simply adopting the same CRM and ERP modules of that nonprofit.
Allan,
Some of what we’re seeing fits your description – but a lot doesn’t. For instance – a nonprofit school needed a complex way to track guardians – who can sign a medical release, who can pick a kid up after school, who can authorize a field trip -and that had to be flexible enough for up to 8 different adults!
Another project matches teen interns with nonprofits looking for help – so – a pretty complicated workflow regarding that application and matching process.
And another was around the avaialabiltiy of medical interpretors at local hospitals – with the interpreters being able to update their language skills and certs adn availability.
A lot of our customer that are leveraging the opportunity pipeline, though – I think that’s where there IS a lot of opportunity to standardize, share, re-use, clarify and codify best practice and more.
Let’s see. In the last year or so – almost ALL of our customers have pretty willingly gone through a planning process with us prior to implementation – and that has been terrific. Maybe not a full fledged business re-engineering process – but before we agree to move ahead – we’ve some a lot of work around exactly what those processes are now and what they should be.
Thanks for the speedy reply and for keeping this discussion moving. The combination of open and open source – and our ability to leverage those for nonprofits makes a compelling set of tools!
Thanks for your comments, Patrick.
Well, the kind of app development you’re seeing is legitimate then (at least in my eyes), although I suspect a sufficiently advanced nonprofit ERP system (which I don’t think exists yet) would eventually head in that direction. I don’t mind it if nonprofits do custom development specifically around processes that are core to their new initiatives and if they take the time to do some process engineering too. I do have objections only to coding yet another waiting room signup sheet application etc.
Are people adding salesforce because they needed to model a new business process in code and there was no existing software that did that? Or were they previously salesforce users who were taking a step up as it were in their usage of salesforce?
One thing: Is NPower going to make these modules available so that other nonprofits can benefit from this work and perhaps even improve upon it? That’s also the promise of salesforce too, no?
If anyone else here develops for non-profits, feel free to chime in. This is good stuff.
Allan,
Here’s what I find some funny – some of the stuff we’re coding MIGHT be the equivalent of the “waiting room sign up” list – but that’s only because we’re trying to get folks to embrace CRM as more than just a tool – I’d like it to be a way of doing business, a way of thinking, a way of engaging stakeholders to a deeper relationship. So – if that waiting room list can be handled in Salesforce and an agency can do away with an extra tool – we’re all in favor!
We do post any of our work that is ready. One of the challenges I face is knowing when to take a process or a procedure that we implemented for one agency, and turn it into something a tad more general – so it can be applicable to many. I find that we have to create it a couple of times before we know enough to make it more general.
For instance – we implemented a zip code lookup (enter the city, get the zip) and a legislative lookup (enter the address get the voting district) but have to figure out an easy way for another developer to find the proper array of info so they can plug it to make it work in say, New York!
Cheers,
Patrick
@Jon Biedermann:
Just to set the record straight, people continue to download ebase and we receive financial contributions from several new adopters a month. A new release is well along the development path. We’re small and all-volunteer, but apparently there’s still demand for our product and services.