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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It will be great to know how that early adoption holds up. For the price point (I think it is about 100/person/month), I don't think this is an especially affordable model, particularly given that it doesn't look like you get access to any of the Convio online goodness.
So, is this essentially a new template built on top of Salesforce.com with a recurring monthly cost?
Why would someone not simply build the system to suit their needs or hire a Salesforce consultant to configure their system with all of the known best practices? This would only be a one time cost rather than an expensive recurring cost.
As a practice we have done over 130 Salesforce implementations and are one of the original four nonprofit partners. That said, we have reviewed Common Ground extensively with our consulting team, and this one of the most well formatted Salesforce configurations for the nonprofit space. The addition of visual force integration enhances the user interface; the use of the account to contact platform is intuitive; and the contact connector is excellent. At the end of the day, it is nice to see another option out there for a nonprofit looking for a reliable starting point with Salesforce. Considering the hours of development behind the product and the quality of work displayed I do not think the monthly subscription is a show stopper. Ultimately, Convio has done a tremendous job working on the Salesforce platform.
Tanner, Common Ground is not an add-on to Salesforce. It's a stand-alone offline donor database built on the same platform as Salesforce.com. Yes, a nonprofit can hire a consultant and build a lot of the same functionality, but I can tell you from experience you're talking tens of thousands of dollars. Also, Convio offers phone and email support on Common Ground, as well as continuous updates. A nonprofit can't get that on their own, and that's what you're paying for on a regular basis.
We're not using Common Ground because we've already been on the Salesforce.com platform for 2.5 years, and we're also a Convio customer. But if we were starting fresh now, with the same budget now as we had back then (which wasn't that much) we would definitely do it on Common Ground. It's really good.
I think this is a classic build vs. buy issue. Salesforce.com right out of the box definitely needs some work to get it up to speed. Common Ground is a short cut but you'll have to adopt its business logic. My assumption is that Common Ground uses Convio's existing experience with nonprofits to build in best-of-breed business practices into Common Ground. That doesn't mean your nonprofit will necessarily adopt those practices. There may be reasons not to go with industry-standard practices. For me, the interesting point here is that the market is giving nonprofits more choices as to how to use SaaS for their purposes. I think we can all agree that that's a Good Thing despite how we feel about Convio or Salesforce.com.
Yeah and did you see you have to pay for two seats min.? Wow.
I am a small business consultant who, from time to time, comes across issues related to non-profit web technology and I see that this industry's commercialization reaches somewhat disturbing levels. The web tech (systems & apps) providers tend to treat this industry as yet another vertical market to monopolize while a natural scenario, where a specialized tech provider could be itself also a non-profit, would make most of business sense here. It seems also that an available service oriented architecture (SOA) would be the best candidate for necessary customization on the individual org level. Certainly, a $200 per month, being an equivalent of 1-day per week at minimum wage, is not going to break a bank, it results in an obvious conflict of interest. I guess that the current health care industry "dilemma" comes to mind with its underlying question: how much profiting from a sickness can make somebody really care about a well-being.