Comments on: Top 10 Things You Need to Know as a Nonprofit Web 2.0 Entrepreneur

By: Joe

Joe — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:47:55 +0000

re: #1 and #7,

The RubyVote library (http://rubyvote.rubyforge.org/) provides all those methods, and more, easily usable from your rails app. Use the dev version, not the release. In use, among other places, at http://selectricity.org

By: Allan Benamer

Allan Benamer — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:29:21 +0000

I don’t think of Blackbus as YASN. User communities are a breed apart for a typical social networking “platform”. I think when I see YASN I start thinking — so what’s your marketing budget for this? What’s so unique about your network that people will go to it? Where is your niche in the long tail? So how do you position yourself against the nonprofit communities that DO work like NTEN, Idealist or Change.org? Etc. etc. Quite often, a lot of YASN entrepreneurs have had zero or no formal professional experience in the nonprofit sector. It shows quite easily because they don’t know the accepted donation practices or why development directors may not be interested in your whizbang social networking platform. In our sector, if you build it, they will not necessarily come. Worse is when people expect to build a slightly different business model and call that the reason for their existence. Folks, it doesn’t matter whether you build a social network where you get a cut of the donation stream or whether you charge nonprofits for getting a very large cut of your donation stream. For the most part, social networks are intermediaries between donors and nonprofits. To say it crudely, social networks for the nonprofit sector package donors and ship them to nonprofits. I’m hoping that we can get past the aggregation model soon.

By: Paul Morriss

Paul Morriss — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 14:40:09 +0000

I think Blackbus works fine, as it has a well-defined “audience”. It’s not trying to be JASN for non-profits, it’s just trying to be a switched-on user group. (At least that’s what it looks like to me.)

Thanks, Allan, for this post. I thought I was up on most relevant techie things, but I learnt a lot just now.

By: Allan Benamer

Allan Benamer — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 03:48:54 +0000

True, but that’s the conundrum of hitching yourself to a product. Your community is at the mercy of Blackbaud. Diversification will only keep Blackbaud honest. Imagine if your folks found a way to convert large portions of the RE database to salesforce.com. Just enough to scare the bajeezus out of Blackbaud… Yum!

By: Peter Gulka

Peter Gulka — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 02:30:38 +0000

JASN = Just Anothe Social Network.

To do what you’re suggesting would require us to go head to head with SugarCRM and SalesForce. I doubt that s the right approach. They are great at what they do. Our angle would have to be something unique that serves our community in a way no one else does. Open source collaborative development of RE plugins might be a start. You don’t need the API to build them.

By: Allan Benamer

Allan Benamer — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 01:28:03 +0000

Well apparently I’m not that smart as I don’t know what JASN is. I like anything that permits a crowdsourcing element to your work. Blackbus is primarily about people helping each other out on Blackbaud products. That’s one of the earliest forms of crowdsourcing there is. SourceForge for Blackbaud is great — but Blackbaud has to cooperate. That sux bad. I’d love for Blackbus to turn into a user community that eventually builds its own version of Raiser’s Edge on a more suitable platform. Now THAT would be wicked. Could you imagine?

By: Peter Gulka

Peter Gulka — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 22:36:46 +0000

OK smart guy – what is Blackbus beyond JASN? We’ve got some product advocacy going on but beyond that I think I’m quite comfortable with what’s going on at the moment.

Next steps will probably be adapting the community into something like SourceForge is Blackbaud ever releases an Infinity SDK.