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.
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