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.
- Publish the API — I can’t emphasize this enough
- Have great documentation — encourage third parties to contribute
- Use open source language examples — grow your developer base
- Have great examples of mashups — Kintera to Joomla! anyone?
- 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.
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This could signal a change that may help lead to a positive and significant shift in the market. I hope it is one of the steps that helps Kintera get back on solid ground. We need as much competition as possible in the npo apps space, but we want all of them to be more open and integrateable.
Dan
Yeah, I’m hopeful and excited that this might take off. Only time will tell though and turning around an organization is not easy. One sign that Kintera should take would be to sign the Integration Proclamation.
If anyone is interested, we’ve set up a listserv for discussion of Kintera Sphere products.
https://listserver.itd.umich.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=discuss-kintera
Hi Brian,
Don’t forget to keep marketing your e-mail list on this blog! I want you to help keep us posted about Kintera whenever possible.
Will do. If anyone reading these comments knows of Kintera customers who may be interested in participating in the listserv, please feel free to forward the link to them. The more involved in an open dialog the better.
I just found this blog!
We’re looking for an accounting system for our organization (NP).
We absolutely have to have an API.
Someone in another organization told me that Kintera’s new Fundware product uses “objacct” (?) technology and has a full open API.
Does anyone have any info on this. There’s nothing on their web site and the sales person I talked to at the company asked me to spell “API” three times!
The latest version of Kintera FundWare (v8.0) features a brand new architecture using .NET technology and offers open APIs, allowing complex customizations and integration with other products and systems. I hope this information helps in your search!