Non-Profit Tech Blog

Scott Crowder is the incoming Kintera CTO. His hiring was announced on May 3rd, just months after the Grubers left Kintera so in very many respects, he’s the new guy. His job is both to inspire confidence within the staff that it can turn itself around after umpteen quarters of losses and ultimately, to REALLY turn the ship around.

As an ex-IT Director, my heart does go out to him. Turnarounds are tough but at the very least, it looks like there is serious impetus for Kintera. In fact, he was brought in right after Gruber left and I got the impression that the departure of old management was a serious factor in Mr. Crowder joining Kintera. I was unfortunately unable to provide you all with a .mp3 but I’ve been promised we might get to do that in future interviews with Mr. Crowder. What I have instead are impressions from a telephone interview I had with Mr. Crowder.

He’s been aware of Kintera in San Diego the last seven years and he believes that it’s the market leader. He knows that everybody knows that there’s new leadership in Kintera and that he’s really focused on making core systems that are what Kintera’s customers need. To do this, he’s going on a road show to start asking for suggestions from the customers. In fact, he’s very interested in solutions that would provide Kintera with a better way of connecting with their customers. I have one URL for him: ideas.salesforce.com.

They’re also building out a multimillion dollar data center which will allow for hot site failover. They’re using Savvis and Sungard and with Sungard, they’ve got two sites. One is in San Diego and the other is in Philadelphia. ‘

The major problem that Kintera is also trying to address is to improve customer satisfaction with Kintera’s products and services. However, these issues have been hashed and rehashed quite a bit. They’ve hired someone with “world-class” experience in dealing with these issues so let’s all cross our fingers, shall we?

What I really wanted to know was whether or not Kintera was going open platform. Of course, it’s too soon for Mr. Crowder to know about this. After all, he’s only been on the job for a short time and probably is in no shape to make anything close to an announcement. What I did get out of him was that the magic word “open” is in there and that the old if-it’s-not-Kintera-it’s-not-worth-doing DIS-integration mentality is not there anymore. The old leadership wanted to build everything in-house which of course meant really high development costs and mission creep in the programming teams.

As for widgets, it looks like Kintera is continuing with widgets on their own which is a shame because I really don’t believe that widgets should be developed at any of the CRM firms from what I can see. ChipIn does a much better job of building widgets than anyone and they’re more secure to boot. Let’s hope that Kintera truly adopts a big-tent philosophy with its open platform strategy so that the ChipIns of the world can develop great third-party addons to the Kintera ecosystem.

I’m sure that we’ll certainly get more serious information out of Kintera in the coming months. This is a hugely exciting time for the nonprofit CRM industry. The near-exponential adoption of salesforce.com in our sector has finally impacted Convio and Kintera and we’re finally seeing a response. The last holdout is Blackbaud — come on, Blackbaud, release the APIs of war!!! Or at least make us remove the vaporware label on Infinity.