UPDATE: This is now a four-part series instead of two. The next installment will appear on 2/18/2009.

Hat tip to Sonny Cloward for suggesting that nonprofits should have a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs when it came to implementing nonprofit technology. It was in response to Tweets I made last month stating that social media has been oversold to nonprofits and that they really needed to concentrate on their Web site first.  I’m going to circle back to my thinking on social media in the second part of this article.  However, it’s high time that a Maslovian hierarchy of nonprofit technology is written for  someone who is looking to improve their small (under $5 million in revenue) nonprofit.

Think of this as a hierarchy of things your nonprofit should probably have in place before you can get to doing social media. There’s no doubt that each level represents a moving part that may require a nonprofit’s focus from time to time. That’s the nature of how nonprofits work. However, for the small nonprofit still spinning up their operations, it’s best to approach this pyramid from the bottom up as you really cannot move towards social media without everything else working. 

Mission

You know your mission statement? Remember that ratty old thing written on your first grant application but then promptly forgotten after it was submitted? You really need to have that pasted next to your monitor when you do your IT initiatives. It will allow you and your staff to ask:   “Are my efforts helping the mission? And by how much?” A focus on metrics-driven management is essential for getting your nonprofit’s technology to work right. Basically, if you have a great mission statement and follow through with measuring your progress towards it,  it should reduce the need to keep re-aligning your IT assets to your nonprofit.

This means you have to have goals and metrics in place. If you find it difficult to have a goal in place, at the very least start to measure your results somehow. Frankly, a good mission statement that has realizable and measurable goals is probably more important than every other layer in this pyramid. Not picking a goal will just have your nonprofit steering aimlessly through the sometimes murky waters of technology. You may not even know how unrealistic your goal is until you start getting feedback about your efforts. However, that’s OK. Failure IS an option. Steering blindly? Not so much.

People

Nothing works without people. This means hiring savvy computer using staff and getting people on your board who know things about technology. Be aware that “computer people” come in all different stripes and it may be difficult to judge a person’s value from the outset. Generally speaking, I just look at previous projects they worked on. That seems to be the best predictor for understanding whether a person will work towards your mission statement and be a good fit with your nonprofit’s culture. 

Your very first IT hire will be by necessity a jack of all trades. Unfortunately, “jack of all trades” is NOT a job title in the IT field. I suggest that the most bang for your buck will be hiring someone whose main expertise is programming. Programming requires some computer science background and you can be somewhat assured that that person can adequately morph their knowledge base to whatever IT task is at hand. That is, it’s harder for a network admin to become a good programmer than vice versa. Don’t get me wrong — I respect network admins a lot but when discussing a $5 million nonprofit, many of the issues will not be whether or not some huge router needs to be configured but whether or not the website is up and running and fully configured to take advantage of whatever fundraising and ecommerce APIs are out there. That’s right, making money for a nonprofit is mostly a programmer’s job, NOT a system administrator’s. A good programmer will, almost by default, be able to help you with online fundraising because they will understand how your fundraising program can work and customize reports for your development staff. A system administrator will not be able to do that without a lot of ad-hoc learning.

By the way, for all you techies out there, I predict nonprofit data centers will shrink in size as more cloud computing initiatives and SaaS software get built. This means that nonprofits will hire less system administrators and more programmers in an attempt to make IT less of a cost center and more of a revenue generator.

Beware: Many people pass themselves off as technical but are actually people who have managed technical people or only worked with technical people. Look through their resumes and see if they ever held a front-line position as a programmer or a database administrator. If they’ve moved up, that’s even better (proof they’re not totally socially incompetent) but make sure they’ve done front-line work.

If you’re a small nonprofit, managerial types or “analysts” are NOT going to help you as much as having people who can actually program software or administer a network. Higher-level management may be useful later if you have or plan to have substantial IT programs and assets but if you’re small and your nonprofit doesn’t have a specific IT component to its mission, it’s better to have people who actually can do the work since you won’t have the money to carry out the highfalutin’ concepts of your IT “manager”. 

Network

Please see my article on building networks for small nonprofits. Basically, make sure you build an IT network that takes advantage of very low desktop and laptop prices, good support contracts, and redundant Internet connections. A lightweight network will give you more flexibility in the long run as no one (definitely not me) can really predict what will come down the pike. Don’t build something that paints you into a corner in terms of technology. This generally means using stuff that works on a well-known industry standard. It also means not heavily relying on any one vendor to take care of you.

Diversify your IT investments whenever possible. Keep trying out new vendors until you find ones that have the service levels and skill sets that you need. At least in NYC, there are some incredibly good consultants and firms out there but you’ll never know if you don’t seek to improve the service levels you get from your current vendors.

This network will form the basis of all your IT efforts afterwards. Unlike your Web site, CRM or social media efforts, this is where you’ll have to be the most effective with your dollars. Network uptime, security and backups are absolutely key in this part of the pyramid. The network, because of all the documents and other media in it, represents the sum total of the intellectual property of your nonprofit. It’s the vault that contains all your work. Treat it as such.

I’ll post the second part of this article fairly soon. I still have to get my thoughts together on social media but suffice it to say, ROI and metrics will be considered when discussing social media.

Convio crows about the quick adoption of Common Ground today:

AUSTIN, TEXAS (January 15, 2009) — 

Convio, Inc. today announced the signing of more than 30 new clients for Common Ground™  since it became generally available in late September of 2008. Common Ground is the company’s innovative, web-based constituent relationship management (CRM) system for tracking all interactions with donors and other supporters. Built and delivered natively on salesforce.com’s Force.com Platform, the product leverages cloud computing to deliver database solutions designed for the needs of nonprofits. Common Ground easily integrates with other open systems including Convio’s online fundraising and marketing applications. The new clients include Youth Villages, Hill Country Ride for AIDS, Colorado Environmental Coalition, Homeless Prenatal Program, RESOLVE, Parent Project for Muscular Dystrophy and the Minnesota Red Ribbon Ride among others. 

Also, I asked Tad Druart, if I could say one thing in response to this release. Here it is:

“I TOLD YOU SO” 

Myself and others have been discussing the need in the nonprofit sector for precisely the kind of software Convio Common Ground is. We wanted state of the art open APIs yet we also wanted the business logic of a nonprofit CRM since most for-profit CRMs had the wrong language and inappropriate business models for a nonprofit. We’re getting there with Convio despite their early reluctance to believe in my and others’ understanding of the nonprofit sector. I can forgive the lack of an open source model right now but that’s the only major chink in their armor that I can see. (MPower Open — I hope you’re listening!)

While Convio was a little late to the SaaS/open API party, Convio has got a good shot at even more adoption this year as long as they can provide a clear path for people to adopt it given their current circumstances. In these tight economic times, it behooves people to really start looking at the Blackbaud fee structure and the requisite hardware and support necessary to keep Blackbaud software alive and running well. I would suggest that they might want a more flexible system like Common Ground which has very low internal IT maintenance costs.

Also, I would recommend all the other vendors to seriously consider the unique business relationship between Convio and an existing SaaS provider, Salesforce.com. It’s a seriously quick way to get into the game without incurring a high start-up cost. SaaS provisioning is no joke and requires pretty serious enterprise level IT work before you can even make a dime. Why bother creating  your own unique SaaS service? Why not just use someone else’s? This is what Convio did and it’s working out quite well for them. At the same time, the tie-in with Salesforce.com just makes them that much more believable. There are other SaaS companies out there and perhaps Donorperfect, GiftWorks and MPower Open could also create a tie-in with another Saas vendor.

CC: Our research showed us that 85% of the non-profits did not want hosted software, they wanted desktop software. We developed a platform that merged the power of the desktop with web services. That was back in 2002.

I’m actually a fan of GiftWorks and it works very well for nonprofits in the developing world that may not be able to use a SaaS solution such as salesforce.com because they don’t have dependable Internet connections. That said, for US nonprofits, I suspect they have reasonable Internet connectivity so I don’t usually recommend GiftWorks if a SaaS solution is otherwise available. The information that Charlie Crystle shared in the interview is obviously six years behind. Anybody care to take a stab at the question of what percentage of nonprofits would not want hosted software in 2009? My guess is that it’s down to 50% now.

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:

I’ll be experiencing the long-awaited MPower Open demo at 2 PM EST tomorrow and hopefully will have access to a sandbox version of their hosted edition soon. Do you have any questions about MPower Open that you would like me to ask the MPower folks? Please put them below in comments. Thanks.

It looks like Convio’s CEO, Gene Austin, had a talk with Fortune Magazine’s Jon Fortt. The most telling quote is here:

It’s not like Convio it trying to be the next Google (GOOG). The company has 335 employees, most of them in Austin, with satellite offices in Berkeley and Washington, D.C. Revenues for 2007 were a respectable $43.1 million, though there are no profits yet. In its most recent quarterly earnings report, the company posted revenue of $14.7 million, $1.3 million in operating cash flow, and a GAAP net loss of a little under $1 million. So the company seems to be on basically stable footing, though it certainly doesn’t have a lot of room for error.

Look to see that paragraph referenced a lot if Convio is pitching its products to you… As for the prospects of Convio returning to raise more capital via an IPO…

Austin says Convio will give an IPO another go when financial markets are more stable (”not up 200, down 200?), the U.S. economy has settled down, and software-as-a-service companies are getting healthy valuations. Of course, that might not take too long – but it will almost certainly be more than a year.

Personally, I would love for more nonprofit CRM vendors to go public. It makes it easier for me to cover them because of the added transparency.

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!

According to the Austin American-Statesman, Convio bowed to the inevitable and withdrew its S-1 filing today:

Convio Inc. said it will withdraw its planned initial public offering Tuesday, nearly a year after it filed to raise about $86 million in an IPO.

“It’s still part of our future down the road, but right now, the markets really are in pretty bad shape,” said Gene Austin, chief executive of Austin-based Convio, which sells software and customer-management tools to nonprofit organizations.

Not really Convio’s fault, really, all hell has broken loose in the markets and a Convio IPO is merely collateral damage.

On the other hand:

Today, Convio reported revenue of $14.7 million in the second quarter, a 35 percent increase from the year-earlier quarter. The company lost $893,000, compared with a loss of $2.1 million in the second quarter of 2007.

If Convio can get on the positive side of the balance sheet, especially if Common Ground takes off, who knows? As for IPOs, ii’s been the worst time for tech IPOs since the early 1970s with ZERO tech IPOs being offered last quarter. That’s about as bad as it gets. Apparently, it’s a combination of cheaper startup costs allowing startups to not have to raise VC and the horrific economy that is leading to very few IPOs.

I would again suggest that Convio’s move to Salesforce.com is a great move in terms of driving down provisioning and set-up costs per seat. I just hope that they have the audacity to really embrace SaaS for the rest of Convio’s software line.

This also means that Convio is finally coming out of its quiet period. I’m still curious as to what they have to say about that lawsuit that emerged in April for that charged that they had allegedly violated a credit card reporting act.