Non-Profit Tech Blog

A reader just gave me a tip from his inbox. It looks like GetActive is being bought by Convio. Has the CRM shakeout finally begun?

Oh man, there’s a possibility of fees being charged:

Will there be a fee to migrate?
A migration plan will be made available to all customers by March 30, 2007. Any costs associated with migration will be addressed in this plan.

Nothing like getting charged to move to an unintended vendor. Folks, if this isn’t enough reason to ask for an open API, I don’t know what is.

UPDATE: Beth is asking me to take a look at the ramifications. I don’t know if anything will change. There are still quite a few CRMs out there or CMS tools that have CRM-like capabilities. After all, GetActive didn’t exactly have a large install base with regard to the one million nonprofits in the US and UK. Frankly, I don’t see any kind of monopolistic activity forming any time soon. In fact, the largest corporation accused of monopoly status (i.e., Microsoft) doesn’t have significant nonprofit market share. There’s still plenty of competition and more new sales out there as nonprofits slowly adopt CRMs. However, added consolidation in the sector will probably expose nonprofits to the need for open APIs if only to act as a hedge against being the sorry customer of a vendor that ends up on the losing side of a merger.