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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