Well, I knew it would happen sooner or later but Blackbaud has finally done it. They’re starting to do what was once possible only by hiring a team of developers and spending a large sum of money with version 5.5 of Blackbaud NetCommunity (BBNC). What is it I’m talking about? The wholesale merging of social networking with your fundraising tool. BBNC developer Tim Wolf gave me a tour of BBNC last week.
It’s a difficult topic to wrap your head around if you’re not used to looking at analytics tools and you don’t understand the basics of data aggregation and its eventual power as a fundraising tool. However, imagine merging social networking analytics tools like the kind you find when you run a Facebook Fan Page with the data from Raiser’s Edge. This allows for the dream of Total Information Awareness that the US Government proposed in its war on terror now applied to your organization’s fundraising efforts. Sound scary? Not really. This is an opt-in approach to learning all about your online constituents. Here are the basics:
- You can now create a social network on your BBNC site. The functionality is modeled more on Facebook than it is on Myspace. It’s dedicated to the creation of a walled garden of data for your nonprofit’s use. This means that your org will have total and complete control of constituent data on your site.
- The integration tools are more directed at Facebook users at this moment in that it can integrate with your Facebook friends list and drive invites to join your network to them in an attempt at a viral spread of the network through existing Facebook networks.
- Most importantly, that social network can engage in a two-way data transfer between itself and Raiser’s Edge.
Things that still need to be built out include the business intelligence reporting tools that would allow you to do deep data mining of your users once the social network has run for some time. I suspect that Blackbaud will probably have these tools up once you have the requisite data to do so.
Social media activist Beth Kanter raised this issue quite a bit. Those of you who remember her campaign last year on Causes’ contest run in December may have remembered her frenzied Twittering which not only exhorted us to action but also bemoaned the lack of reporting tools for Causes and the lack of reasonable fundraising logic.
BBNC proposes to solve all of that by including fundraising business logic already baked into Raiser’s Edge and merging it with the BBNC social networking application. Because of the opt-in nature of a social networking application, you can gather more data about a constituent’s demographic profile but also build a profile based on resulting user activity. You would have a sense of the social graph of your constituents but more importantly you will eventually be able to find the supernodes in your social network and more rapidly incorporate those supernodes into your social media campaigns.
One side effect of BBNC is that it will retard adoption of third-party social networks by hundreds of nonprofits. At the same time, this should hopefully force developers at Change.org, zazengo, ammado, justmeans, Razoo, Bring Light and a host of other networks to reconsider the kind of tools that they will make available to their users. Many of these networks tend to see their value proposition in terms of the badge-like nature of their network in a user’s profile. This just results in a rather simplistic me-too effect as users join the cause du jour. Simply saying that you’re part of a nonprofit’s constituent base has very little bottom line effect for a nonprofit. When advocates for nonprofit participation in social media ask nonprofits to join in on Causes, they are in effect asking a nonprofit to make an entrepreneurial move into a space where they may have little expertise on staff and with little expectation of a monetary return. Worse, with existing nonprofit social networks (or Facebook), you will not have enough tools to help you understand if there is ANY monetary return at all. This explains the relatively tepid responses of nonprofits to most nonprofit social networking applications. BBNC does a lot to restore the balance by asking nonprofits to instead build on their constituents already in their Raiser’s Edge database and by using the already existing skill sets many nonprofit staff members have in Raiser’s Edge.
Of course, there are several questions. For those nonprofits using BBNC and hoping to use the social networking features, this is also an entrepreneurial move. BBNC currently allows for a fairly complete customization and redesign of its tools to more closely match your existing website’s look and feel. A rollout of a BBNC social network will have redesign and marketing costs associated with it. This can be substantial.
Will the users show up? And if so, can your organization provide enough content to allow the users to more adequately participate in your mission? If users can’t show a badge illustrating their relationship to your organization on a third-party social network like Facebook, will that be an inherent limitation to their activity on your network? Is this better suited to organizations with a strong advocacy appeal so that non-monetary asks can be accumulated in some form of soft credit? Tons of questions here, I’m sure you can make up your own. Then again, these are more interesting questions to ask and have answered than the ones nonprofits have been faced with for the last couple of years in regards to their social networking strategy.
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Our org is in a unique position in that we are part way through developing a custom-built community and have over 1400 alumni signed up. Migrating to BBNc would be a dream proposition for us since the registered members have been requesting many of these features.
@Peter: Yeah I bet, keep us updated as you go through with it. I’m curious as to whether or not you will create custom reports either through RE or through a SQL Server tool. User uptake is also interesting. 1400 alumni signed up? Is this before or after the launch?
How does the NetCommunity social networking feature stack up against that offered by Convio? Are there significant differences?
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I’d be interested in a showdown myself. I’m working on a Kintera/Convio showdown right now but it’ll take a while before it gets out.
Sounds like a lot of duplication of effort.
I’d still rather live in a world where BB and social networks could exchange data through open APIs and I wouldn’t have to sign up for another social network if I want to connect with other supports of an organization.
@Jacob: Ok, that’s a world we want but not the world we’ve got. There are a ton of nonprofits out there using Blackbaud products and for the foreseeable future, Blackbaud will not be adopting an open API for Raiser’s Edge. The lack of an open API has not hurt Blackbaud’s bottom line though. We’ll have to wait for MPower Open to achieve a breakthrough to force Blackbaud to reconsider this stance. A certain three-letter acronym that starts with S and ends with L comes to mind.
All this is very interesting ( coming from an Australian NFP CRM vendor Point of view ). It seems like its the whole of the US market hinges around Blackbaud vs Convio and what companies BB is buying and what technology they are canibalising. Is this truly the case.
@Poiter: Blackbaud does not have the majority of the market but we’ve never had industry figures for Blackbaud or Convio that can be independently verified. However, looking at income figures for Blackbaud suggests that they’ve got the upper hand for now. The really good news to all this is that there 1.2 million nonprofits in the US. I don’t think all the CRM vendors combined have even close to 3-4% penetration and I would wager lower. There’s still huge room to grow. With $280-300 billion in total funding per year, electronic fundraising both offline and online is still in its infancy.
@Iain McLaren: Hopefully, more screenshots will be up this week pending Blackbaud approval.
Actually, Covnio does have open APIs that any private label social networking vendor could integrate. So, non-profits could have all the functionality of a real social network and the integration that NetCommunity seems to promise. Here my catch with this approach my Blackbaud: they seem to be saying that integration with Raiser’s Edge is so valuable, but based on what I’ve seen so far, Wave does actually offer much for a person to do besides send private messages. Recording that activity in my Raiser’s Edge database is basically useless.
Sorry, I meant to say, “Wave does NOT offer much for a person to do besides send private messages.” I guess they also let you join or form a Group, but then again, what can the Group do besides send private messages?
@Hector: They’ve got a piece that allows you to pull in your Facebook contacts and spam them. This is to help pull in your existing social network into the nonprofit’s. As far as I’m concerned, all social networking ventures by a nonprofit are entrepreneurial. BBNC just seems to give you a different kind of measuring stick to gauge your efforts. If you’re looking at a single bottom line to measure your social networking output, BBNC really helps you do that because of its RE integration. Do I think that all social networking efforts should be measured this way? No. Ivan Boothe from Genocide Intervention Network has been very smart in his deployment of social networking assets to create non-monetary outputs. However, it may be that prior to BBNC’s Wave that you could ONLY measure by non-monetary effects. Measuring along a financial axis may be more “real” to nonprofit development directors so it may foster a second spurt of growth in adoption of social networking by nonprofits. That’s a good thing in my opinion.
Also, I don’t think recording social networking activity in RE is useless. I think it’s the base for a highly sophisticated set of reports that can allow you to pinpoint movers and shakers within your network. It’s not hard to imagine the kind of information awareness you will have once you can track user activity and match that to user behavior simply because you’ll have access to a much larger range of user activity. Who knows what kind of data nuggets you’ll be able to dig out of that social network?
@Poiter: BTW, here’s a little nugget from Blackbaud’s most recent 10-Q:
Blackbaud as big as they are has at most 1-1.5% of US market share. The 19,000 number refers to their total number of active customers and it’s not broken out by country but I’d say the vast majority of that 19,000 are US customers.
Alan, you missed both my points. Concerning the ability to record activity in Raiser’s Edge, I think this IS useful. My point was that Wave does not offer any kind of activity that is useful to track. What do I care if I know John Doe sent 5 private messages? I don’t know the nature of those messages. All I know is that John Doe sends a lot of messages. I don’t need integration with Raiser’s Edge to figure that out. As an administrator of my social network, I can see that already. Until Wave offers real social networking functionality like blogging and forums, I won’t learn much from a Wave social network.
Concerning Convio, I’m not talking about their Facebook Application. Convio has APIs that allow a social network vendor to integrate directly with Convio’s database. This means a non-profit could get the functionality I’m talking about in the first paragraph and the integration that Wave is also offering.
BTW, I’ve checked out the Convio facebook appliaction and you have it wrong. Anybody who adds the application has to explicitly choose to register with the organization. There is no spamming going on.
Do you know where I can check out a demo of Wave? Or alternatively, does anyone have screenshots of more information regards functionality?
Oh, when you say, “They’ve got a piece that allows you to pull in your Facebook contacts and spam them” you’re referring to Blackbaud. Gotcha!
@Hector: True, as of right now, BBNC 5.5 doesn’t have all the necessary bells and whistles of Facebook. (Shrug). It’s a first pass at social networking. My guess is that Blackbaud will reiterate on “Wave” and get it right. They do have the ability for users to set up groups, group admins, and private and group messaging as well as friending of course. Blogging and forums are not there yet but those two feature sets are not part of Facebook’s core either. I don’t even think you can really do blogging well within Facebook.
In other social networks, such as Ning, you can do all that. I’ve made earlier recommendations to start with Ning and experiment with it before going whole hog on a social networking initiative. On the other hand, if you’ve already got RE and BBNC, I don’t see how this isn’t a bad experiment at all. And your assertion that the data they’re tracking is useless just because other features aren’t present doesn’t seem to me to be a smart thing to say. Clearly, that data, as rudimentary as it would be, is a huge leap in understanding user behavior because you’re now marrying two previously disparate sets of data (fundraising with social networking user profiles and user activity). The benefits are unknown but the potential is huge there. It’s easy to pooh pooh that marriage but assuming that Blackbaud fleshes out the social networking piece and implements great reporting tools this could be a hell of an asset for Blackbaud-based nonprofits. It’s up to everyone outside the Blackbaud Cube to try to come up with something just as good based on a more open platform. I look forward to seeing that.
I think i would rather stick to my BB. creating your own social network now days is rather redundant if you ask me. I think you are battling with the big dogs.