Steve MacLaughlin wrote me today about giving trends for users of Blackbaud’s Internet solutions. It’s the kind of data I’d love to see released more often so that we could better understand how online fundraising was being affected by macroeconomic trends. Here’s an interesting finding:

Organizations had steady growth in their online giving through the first and second quarters of 2008. There was a slight decrease in online giving during the third quarter of the year, specifically the month of August. The final months of the year saw online giving rebound leading up to the typical end-of-year giving spikes. December and June were the two largest months for online giving.

My only wish is that more vendors were more transparent about the data they were collecting for their donors. It’s not impossible for Convio, Blackbaud, Salesforce Foundation, JustGiving, Network for Good and FirstGiving to produce charts that showed fluctuations in giving in real-time. This would serve as a great way for nonprofit development directors to measure their organization’s progress against a nominal index (short of Giving USA’s yearly figures). It would be trivial to create a Giving Index out of the information that Steve mentions in his post. Come on Steve and Blackbaud, give me a chart and I promise I’ll shut up about it. As usual, you can file this under nonprofit transparency

eTapestry, a division of Blackbaud Inc. (Nasdaq: BLKB), announced the launch of a partnership with Daryl Upsall Consulting International to offer eTapestry’s Spanish-language version of its on demand fundraising software in Spain. Kicking off this partnership, eTapestry and Daryl Upsall Consulting International (DUCI) will be hosting a free seminar on Nov. 11, demonstrating how nonprofits can use technology to meet their fundraising needs. This half-day event will take place at DUCI, c/ Caleruega 67 in Madrid 28033, Spain. The seminar will be held from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.

Ok, it’s not really Raiser’s Edge, it’s eTapestry en Español. I wish I knew more about how Spanish nonprofits could use eTapestry but I don’t. I also don’t know much about Daryl Upsall Consulting International except that they seemed to be hiring for positions related to an eTapestry rollout at Idealist in October. What is interesting is that Blackbaud seems willing to have someone other than themselves be responsible for the rollout. Any readers care to fill in here?

UPDATE (11/10/2008): Andrew Mosawi from Blackbaud just sent me an e-mail and filled me in. Thanks, Andrew! :

Spain is a really exciting market for fundraising as it is growing so quickly, with many of the large international NGO’s having a presence here.

We chose to partner with Daryl Upsall Consulting International, DUCI, (www.darylupsall.com) as they are an extremely well respected firm in Spain providing a range of services from Telephone and Face to Face donor acquisition to recruitment services (hence the jobs listed in Idealist). They have a great presence in the market and understand the specific needs of Spanish nonprofits which is why the partnership made so much sense.

Using eTapestry in Spain also made perfect sense as its SaaS nature made it more appealing to Spanish clients as well as being a much simpler way for us to deploy internationally. We have spent a significant amount of time working with DUCI to localize eTapestry for the Spanish market and we continue to work closely with them (we have a team here in Madrid at the moment) as we rollout the solution.

Andrew also gave me a screenshot! eTapestry en Espanol, here it is:

Captions
You can manage all the site captions here. For instance, instead of naming users of your social network friends, you can name them Fellows or Advocates or whatever your nonprofit needs them to be named. I prefer to call them “Great Old Ones of Cthulhu”. Your mileage may vary.

Preferences
This is a user management page. I like the friendly URL idea. This means users can pick an easy URL to distribute to their friends instead of something horribly difficult to remember.

Administration
This shows basic statistics of your social network. My guess is that this is the piece most likely to be made more robust over time as it gives you aggregate statistics that can be further borken down into detail reports. I can imagine all sorts of charts and graphcs here.

Accounts Administration
Typical user admin screen for the admin to lock/unlock/reset passwords.

Group Administration
Same as Admin-Accounts but for groups.

Groups
This is the interface that users use to manage their group interactions. It seems more like an e-mail list more than a group but I’m sure this will be built out too.

Group Administration
This is how a group manager administers the group. Fairly similar to the way Facebook manages groups.

Editor
This seems to be the admin screen for superusers on the network. Ten bucks to the first person who is a “user networking manager” that uses LordBritish as a username.

Shaun Sullivan parodied himself as Locutus of Borg. This was in response to a half-joking comment I made about Blackbaud’s tendency to gobble up the competition.

Well, at least Shaun can have a good laugh about it. I don’t know about the rest of the industry (hehe).

UPDATE (8/13/2008 11:15 EDT): The post seems to have been taken down. I can’t find it. Apparently, humor is fleeting over at Blackbaud Labs.

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.

Generally speaking, I would have to say that the smaller the company, the more that company’s blog stands out. It implies to me that an entrepreneurial ethos is still alive and kicking in those companies. One thing I do think that impedes the growth of all these blogs has to end: they don’t post enough. Frequency in posts is usually how people judge whether or not there is someone behind the helm of the blog and he or she isn’t asleep. Judging by some of the blogs that aren’t on the list, they’re definitely sleepwalking their way through Web Marketing 2.0.

Those of you looking to get on the next version of this list may want to either increase the personal nature of the blog or divulge more details or better yet, create more resources to be shared by tech workers on your blog.

Here’s a short countdown of the blogs I find enjoyable and worth reading i.e., not full of press-release type material:

Honorable Mention

A remarkably candid blog, this blog discusses industry developments and has talked a lot about Kintera and its subsequent purchase by Blackbaud.

#5

This is run by Steve Maclaughlin who is Director of Internet Solutions at Blackbaud. I guess it’s fitting that Steve has the best Blackbaud blog out there. Blackbaud has a ton of blogs nowadays but they tend to be the epitome of a corporate blog full of marketing speak and “user tips”. However, the Connections blog from Blackbaud is actually worth reading as it is perhaps the only place where you can get a sense of open platform/API efforts within the Blackbaud core (not eTapestry or Kintera).

#4

The CEO of Mpower Open, Randy McCabe, runs this blog and answers comments. He even posts a list of the books he’s reading. I wish more CRM CEOs would blog but we’ll get to the best example of CEO-blogging in a bit.

#3

This blog is run by Jon Biedermann who is a sometime commenter to this blog. In a way, I’m sad this blog doesn’t even have its own title. I think it has a heckuva lot of potential. Jon actually took the time to make a non-Donorperfect specific YouTube video answering nonprofit questions about whether or not they should have a CRM. One thing: Jon — try using lavaliere mics to improve sound quality. I think it’s good for the nptech community to recognize altruistic attempts like this by CRM vendors.

#2

This one is written by Gregory McHale, CEO & Founder of good2gether.You get to watch a nonprofit tech vendor start itself up on this blog. It’s both a smart marketing move and a template for would-be nonprofit tech entrepreneurs. Best post is “I was on the Acela with Wonder Woman!”

#1
Digging In
It’s something to know about Mission Research that they get mentioned twice in this list. This blog is run by Charlie Crystle, the founder of Mission Research. It’s an actual honest-to-goodness personal blog, full of personal asides and revelations about Charlie Crystle’s intellectual life. It’s way more personal than this blog and for that, I think I’m learning lessons on how to blog about nonprofit technology from Charlie Crystle. You learn that Charlie is a Democrat which in and of itself is a huge revelation as most nonprofit software executives stay away from overt political stances. I definitely didn’t know Charlie was willing to put up a million dollars to run for Senator in Pennsylvania. You go on with your bad self Charlie!

From the press release:

Blackbaud, Inc. (Nasdaq: BLKB), today unveiled a new release of Blackbaud® NetCommunity™ that includes major enhancements in both function and features. From improved site design features to enhanced web accessibility and a native social networking feature called “Wave,” it will provide nonprofits with an opportunity to further engage their constituents in the vital Internet channel. Additionally, the company unveiled a new set of NetCommunity Open Platform APIs for creating custom parts, integrated web services, and custom transactions.

Links to the new API are:

Blackbaud Labs docs to BBNC

There was a three-part release on Blackbaud’s Connections blog (not to be confused with Convio’s Connection Cafe).

Part I

Part II

Part III

The social networking piece is puzzling. You can now use BBNC to help you build a social network for your organization. They’re pushing out a lot of information about this. What’s truly puzzling is the social networking piece of the announcement. If you’re self-hosting BBNC, I think you may have to plan on beefing up your Internet connection before you implement social networking. Am I to assume that BBNC should really be hosted by Blackbaud?

Some caveats:

It’s all .NET. The APIs are not RESTful nor can they be consumed as SOAP Web Services (from what I can see). Also, you must own BBNC in order to use these APIs. Interesting fact: Blackbaud claims 600 clients for Blackbaud NetCommunity (BBNC). I think they’ve started getting more wins for BBNC lately although it’s going to be interesting to see how this will all match up with Kintera’s CMS as well.

I believe BBNC to be the most open part of Blackbaud’s core applications (discounting their acquisitions of eTapestry and Kintera here). This makes sense as opening up BBNC doesn’t expose Blackbaud to cannibalizing their sales revenue like it would if they opened up Raiser’s Edge. That is, with only 600 clients for BBNC, the exposure is minimum. I suppose that this is also a part of the internal culture shift at Blackbaud. If BBNC performs well, it might motivate them to consider opening the rest of their product line.

With any luck, we can get screenshots of a sample social networking application from Blackbaud…

Ok, maybe it was a kind of embarrassing article for Blackbaud but really, did Blackbaud/Timothy Chou have to pull the article and thus deprive us of the enjoyment of mentioning “Software as a Service” and Blackbaud in the same breath? I think a biography from Timothy would have sufficed, no?

I was just looking into Google’s Knol after reading a Techcrunch article about it. As you may know, Google’s Knol is Google’s version of Wikipedia but with Google Ads and money being driven to the writer of each article. If it sounds like the private sector is trying to replicate something a nonprofit is already doing, then you’re quite right. Regardless of the merits of Knol (I’m not sure it’s going to take off), I found something very interesting almost immediately.

I took a look at the article for software as a service and lo and behold, Timothy Chou, has written the article. If you’re not a Blackbaud nerd like I am, you wouldn’t know that the Timothy Chou who wrote the article was the Timothy Chou who is on Blackbaud’s Board of Directors. He writes:

You will have many choices. You can choose to sell Model 1 and Model 4, which is what Oracle did. You can choose to use Model 1 and Model 5, which is what Callidus Software did. You can choose to move completely to Model 6, which is what Concur did. You can choose to start out a new business in Model 6, which is what Salesforce.com did. You can choose to acquire Model 6 companies, and have some of your product line in Model 1 and some in Model 6, which is what Blackbaud did. [emphasis mine]

This may be another Timothy Chou but it’s highly unlikely that an article that talks about Software as a Service and basically namechecks Timothy Chou’s past business relations (he works for Oracle, shilled for Callidus and again, is on Blackbaud’s board) is not going to be written by him. Tim don’t hide — fill out that biography! An interesting note is that the article was originally published on 2/25/2008 which I guess means that the Kintera negotiations were probably already in the air during that time.

A Model 1 company is your traditional software business model. Model 6 is Software as a Service as we’ve seen it in salesforce.com. It’s a wide open clue if you know, not so much if you don’t that Timothy Chou seems to be referring to the purchase of Kintera here and the current state of Blackbaud’s software outside of that. I’m hoping for more Model 6 out of Blackbaud in the future.

Talk about trying to own a phrase that you don’t yet deserve! I suspect submission of other articles in the future from say, Tad Druart of Convio mentioning Aikido Convio Common Ground (yeah they changed the name so no more hillarious Google search mashups of nonprofits and pictures of guys doing Aikido (bow to your sensei!)) and how it’s a clear example of “computer technology” and “fundraising” at the same time.

What’s interesting here is that Knol is already being penetrated by corporate shills – indeed there is a wonderful article on Dr. Tom Lue by Tom Lue himself. Clearly, the age of Googling for yourself is being supplanted by getting an article on yourself ON Google. Watch out for my own entry on Knol entitled “Abe Namer: The Many Wonderful Disguises of Allan Benamer” under “Stuff”.

What’s next is that Blackbaud can finally blog about the acquisition. The most important in my mind is in regards to Kintera and Raiser’s Edge. Here’s the Q & A:

Will Blackbaud integrate the Kintera CMS (Sphere) to The Raiser’s Edge?
Yes. Blackbaud plans to develop an integration solution from Sphere to The Raiser’s Edge that is the best in the industry. Nonprofits place a high value on having a truly integrated solution combining online and offline interactions in a single database. This is one of our highest priorities now that the acquisition is complete and will be available before the end of the calendar year.

So there you go… no specifics as of yet. Again, the issue of having a roadmap from CRM vendors is raised. Send Steve MacLaughlin some questions. I suggest you send him scans of old Route 66 maps with suggested destinations such as “Open API” and “Open Platform”. And oh yeah, will the custom entities in the Kintera API survive the acquisition?