Non-Profit Tech Blog

I never thought I’d say that but that’s what I’m hearing from my Kintera sources. Both the shrinking of Kintera’s workforce and the need to rethink Kintera’s place in the nonprofit space is spurring this development. That’s all I’m hearing so far… and the details have yet to be worked out. Those of you who have me as a Twitter friend (abenamer) are aware that I’m doing a phone interview with the incoming CTO of Kintera next week. This is certainly one of the topics I’d like to address during that call.

Everyone knows I’m a huge open API fan so this is what I think what Kintera ought to do with regard to an open platform to regain both market share and technical credibility in the space.

1. Publish the API — I can’t emphasize this enough
2. Have great documentation — encourage third parties to contribute
3. Use open source language examples — grow your developer base
4. Have great examples of mashups — Kintera to Joomla! anyone?
5. Promise to stay away from verticals developed on your platform — don’t eat your young (developers) and make sure they can make money

This would be a huge move if they do the above and do it well. It’s basically stolen straight out of the salesforce.com play book but who cares? It’s a great model for anyone looking to steal a march on Convio or Blackbaud while simultaneously defending themselves from salesforce.com. It could potentially undercut salesforce.com’s penetration into the non-profit sector because although salesforce.com is free, salesforce.com’s nonprofit template is certainly less than thrilling compared to the rich set of tools that Kintera currently has.