As you may have guessed, I have seen the demo of Mpower Open and I was very pleased. So pleased, in fact, that it’s now on the Leaderboard. I’ve had to create a new category — Desktop Donor Management System as opposed to an Online Donor Management System which will be populated soon. For a long time, I’ve looked for a good system with the following criteria given to me by a lot of nonprofit users.
- Cheap to install
- I usually mean less than $500 to roll out.
- Effective
- Has the usual suite of donor management tools like a database and business rules regarding contacts management, etc
- No per seat licensing fees
- Can’t stress this enough as I think it’s a terrible model going forward for nonprofits. The real value of information is in its distribution throughout your organization. Buying a fancy donor management program that’s so expensive that it leaves you with one seat is a prescription for slow growth in the future. Just wait until you have to hire someone to cage your checks — you WILL cry on the seating issue.
I also added my own criteria:
- Open source
- This just lets you add your own extensions and to add cool little doodads. Also, it means that the system will grow in time as other developers add their doodads to the system. MPower Open has fully committed to open source both internally for their line of business apps that they use and for the app that they build. To that end, they’ll be adopting more open source tools like Jasper, an open-source business intelligence tool instead of Crystal Reports.
- Has a good support plan
- You can buy a support contract from Mpower Open.
- Lower TCO than existing systems
- More on this later but with only a support contract to pay for, it compares very well against Raiser’s Edge but not so well against GiftWorks.
- Uses known database backends
- This is a huge issue to me. I don’t want nonprofits to end up supporting some horrible version of CenturaSQL or worse DBase. Good candidates are: Foxpro, SQL Server, Oracle, mySQL for a backend.
- MPower Open uses SQL Server Express which is the free edition of SQL Server.
Here is a cavea. You need to know how to install SQL Server Express and have decent system administration chops to install. It’s not for the average user. In fact, the vast majority of people who have downloaded the application end up asking MPower Open for help.
Mpower Open is difficult to install because it’s an enterprise class application. With SQL Server as its backend, it’s designed for heavy multi-user usage just like Raiser’s Edge. My guess is that it’s also easy to host in a Terminal Server environment allowing for third-parties to enter data even though they’re outside your firewall.
Is MPower Open a Raiser’s Edge-killer? No, not yet. Could it be? Yes. Raiser’s Edge is costing nonprofits an arm and a leg right now in terms of licensing fees. If MPower Open’s developer community takes off, Blackbaud will be very hard pressed to match the firepower of a large developer community. The dual pressure of higher licensing fees plus a more desirable feature list with MPower may persuade nonprofit CTOs and CIOs of the need to move to an open source platform just like they have with CMSes.
MPower Open has all the usual donor management tools. There’s enough firepower in the package to handle 80% of what Raiser’s Edge does now. That’s MORE than enough for nonprofits to consider MPower Open before they look at Raiser’s Edge. Here are a couple of screenshots:
Gift Entry screen shot from Mpower Open
Add Account screen for MPower Open
If you’d like more screenshots from the system itself, I’ll be more than happy to accomodate you. Just place your requests in the comments below. For more information on MPower Open, check out my earlier podcast. Josiah Ritchie also has blogged about MPower Open.
(3 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5)
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Thank you for doing this review. I am not sure that “enterprise class application” and SQL Server Express go hand in hand. Database size limit is 4 GB and performance goes down the tubes with more than a few concurrent users. I have seen this first hand with other apps. That is why it is free I guess. Is this available as saas? I agree with the per seat licensing complaint. That is a way of the past. Any more details on pricing? It cannot be just a support fee and most people buy that anyway. Who sets up the system and what does that cost? Is Mpower the only people that can set it up? Having used Raisers Edge at two previous nonprofits I do find it a stretch that Mpower has 80% of the functionality. The screens only seem to confirm that they have copied 80% of the tabs. Have you ever actually used Raisers Edge? I am just wondering how you are basing the comparison. Thank you again.
@Jim Jacobson: Yes, I’ve used Raiser’s Edge. As I’ve said before on the blog, I helped purchase it in 2002 so I used RE and maintained it between 2002 and 2006. I also know the basic usage patterns of most development people when they use it. The use cases are generally speaking, limited, in that they tend to revolve around data entry and some reporting clustered mostly around mail merges and LYBUNT/SYBUNT reports. It’s unlikely that most development folks are going to get deep down into the data without their IT director helping them. I think the lack of formal training in data analysis for nonprofit managers is the problem. Have you taken a look at what they teach nonprofit management people in grad school when it comes to data analysis? It’s a joke. This is what I mean by 80%.
As for SQL Server Express, you can by all means install a real copy of SQL Server 2008 in place of SQL Server Express. It will only put you back $240 at Techsoup. However, for many users, SQL Server Express will do them quite nicely. I know as system administrators we like to goldplate requirements and thus puff up our resumes. I’ll be the first to say that I’ve been sorely tempted at times. However, SQL Server Express will do for many people until their fundraising efforts are well underway.
As for setup fees, I think it really depends on how you want to set up SQL Server. That seems to be the driving issue in terms of cost. Does your org need a load-balanced SQL Server with RAID 5 redundancy running on SSD drives? That will cost you a pretty penny in terms of hardware. I think if you have an existing Raiser’s Edge server, I’m pretty sure you could use that. As for setup labor costs, anybody with SQL Server administration skills can set this up so I leave it to you to find those people and figure out what that would cost. My guess is a day’s work by any decent IT guy who can follow someone on the phone when they hit a roadblock.
I’m new to the nonprofit sector. I’m a database administrator by trade. I would agree that the full version of SQLserver would be the way to go, but it too would have the seats/licensing issue too wouldn’t it? I use Oracle, and it is licensed by type and number of CPUs. So the larger the system the more it costs. Not sure how SQLserver works.
However, that’s not what interest me. Why is each nonprofit doing this themselves. Isn’t there a service provider out there that has all the IT stuff set up and the NPO just pays to use the service? Why is each NPO doing it for themselves? That is what Oracle is increasingly doing even with its own products like Oracle’s Enterprise Resource Planning suite (ERP). They have it set up and instead of companies setting up the software and infrastructure themselves, they simply pay Oracle for access, and have what appears to be their own private system.
@Jim Boles: Luckily for nonprofits, they can purchase SQL Server through Techsoup. Microsoft provides licensing for nonprofits to their products at a massive discount. This means that while licensing and per seat costs are an issue for nonprofits, it’s not too painful for them when it comes to purchasing SQL Server.
Your other point is well taken and I have, along with many others, advocated for such resource sharing. MPower Open has taken a step with its clients by letting sister clients share their MPower database.
Salesforce.com has also done a good job of it as well. Ultimately though, Jim, the major issue isn’t the technical barrier, but nonprofit management as a whole. There’s no existing incentive on the part of many nonprofits to share these kinds of resources.
Maybe we are talking about two different things. Yes, I see the multi-org feature and I know how that works. The Oracle ERP has the same thing. But that isn’t exactly what I’m suggesting. Instead, a hosting service would install MPower and provide the functional and technical support to any NPO out there. Each NPO would use the same installation of MPower, but WOULD NOT share data. It would appear to be a private DB. The NPO only pays a monthly fee for the service, saving them infrastructure and staffing cost to support MPower themselves. This would be attractive to smaller NPOs could never afford to implement their own servers etc.
As the number of NPOs grows who bought into the monthly service, then the hosting service would buy a second server (other hardware etc), and another copy of MPower, and new clients would come onto the 2nd server, etc.
Hi, I found your blog on this new directory of WordPress Blogs at blackhatbootcamp.com/listofwordpressblogs. I dont know how your blog came up, must have been a typo, i duno. Anyways, I just clicked it and here I am. Your blog looks good. Have a nice day. James.
I appreciate Allan’s voracious ability to challenge this sector, and bring up things that just seem to go ignored.
case in point: seat licensing and its negative impact on solution adoption. kudos, dude. By setting it up as a scarce resource, the system becomes a barrier to transparency and breeding ground for dysfunction.
I sure wish we could figure out the business model for a SAAS offering on this.
Did you happen to ask if they have built an interface to SalesForce?
doug
Thanks for the kind words, Doug. No, I don’t think that there have been any connections built between MPower and Salesforce but it’s not impossible to do so.
When I was completing my MBA in Portland, OR, I worked with the Youth Symphony to help guide them in their fund raising efforts. This tool would have been a very interesting one to explore – especially given its open source nature and relatively cheap commitment level.
How long have you been blogging…your good at it.