Check it out -- the Knol article mentioning Blackbaud as a SaaS has been unpublished!

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Learn about Timothy Chou's attempt to position Blackbaud as Software as a Service on Google's attempt at a Wikipedia, Knol.

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Read and learn more about the new internal social network at the American Cancer Society.

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Read about Aikido and why Susan G. Komen for the Cure adopted it.

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I don’t always get a chance to commend nonprofits for their great use of technology but I ran into a paper article in ArcNews (it’s a newsletter about ArcGIS software — and no I don’t subscribe to it, it’s my wife’s!) that discussed a remarkable GIS project conducted by the IRC to plan for the location of school sites in Ethiopia.

Every day, millions of rural children in Ethiopia do not attend school. Instead, they work on farms; dig in mines; or perform strenuous household tasks, such as gathering firewood or fetching water, which together can take several hours each day. For them, education is out of reach, both because poor families require the additional income and because many areas lack elementary schooling altogether.

Beginning in 2005, the United States Department of Labor funded the International Rescue Committee (IRC) to build schools and train teachers for community Alternative Basic Education (ABE) schools, which would serve as institutions to transition children from the labor force into more formal educational institutions, such as primary schools. Simultaneous community awareness and education programs promoted the benefits of education and encouraged families to send their children to school…

…The Ethiopian Education Office lacks the infrastructure and funding to maintain information on primary school locations, village school age populations, and distances between schools and village populations. Low-level road maps are also not available for most rural districts. The IRC Ethiopia program therefore had to build its geographic database from the ground up. Behar Hussein, the IRC Ethiopia GIS coordinator, trained eight people in the use of Garmin eTrex Vista GPS units to aid in the survey of 491 villages. The surveyors used Garmin eTrex Vista GPS for the survey. While four of the eight surveyors gathered geographic data about village boundaries, roads, health centers, water points, and primary school locations, the remaining four gathered demographic data from each village: the number of households, number of children of each age, and number of children of each age attending formal schooling. The data took more than 50 days to collect and was cleaned and compiled at IRC’s Addis Ababa office.

Good job, IRC. You are rocking the techno-goodness. Next steps? Why not release this data using an open content license so that other nonprofits can use it.

Check up on the IRC's use of Garmin eTrex GPS units to plan for school sites in Ethopia!

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Do open source CRM software a favor and vote for MPower Open over at Sourceforge. Here’s the Marketwatch posting:

MPower - which provides the most open, flexible, and powerful software for nonprofit constituent relationship management (CRM) and fundraising - has been named a finalist for SourceForge’s Community Choice Awards in the “Best New Project” category.

SourceForge is the world’s largest online repository of open source code and applications, with more than 100,000 projects and 1,000,000-plus registered users. The organization’s growing annual Community Choice awards competition recognizes today’s most significant open source initiatives in a dozen categories and is open to all open source projects, not just those on SourceForge. Members of the SourceForge community vote for both the finalists and winners so these awards truly reflect the knowledge and spirit of today’s open source community. To join the SourceForge community to become eligible to vote (and also enjoy additional membership benefits), please visit http://sourceforge.net/account/registration. Once registered, go to http://sourceforge.net/community/cca08-vote, click on “Best New Project” and select MPower from the drop-down menu. Yeah, I know CiviCRM is already out there. This just expands the field. And as an IT guy, you always want more viable vendors in your space than not.

Vote for MPower Open as the Best New Project at Sourceforge

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What’s next is that Blackbaud can finally blog about the acquisition. The most important in my mind is in regards to Kintera and Raiser’s Edge. Here’s the Q & A:

Will Blackbaud integrate the Kintera CMS (Sphere) to The Raiser’s Edge?
Yes. Blackbaud plans to develop an integration solution from Sphere to The Raiser’s Edge that is the best in the industry. Nonprofits place a high value on having a truly integrated solution combining online and offline interactions in a single database. This is one of our highest priorities now that the acquisition is complete and will be available before the end of the calendar year.

So there you go… no specifics as of yet. Again, the issue of having a roadmap from CRM vendors is raised. Send Steve MacLaughlin some questions. I suggest you send him scans of old Route 66 maps with suggested destinations such as “Open API” and “Open Platform”. And oh yeah, will the custom entities in the Kintera API survive the acquisition?

Read a little bit more about Blackbaud's thoughts on the Kintera acquisition.

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Let’s go through some recent developments that have occurred over at Kintera, Convio and MPower. It’s been a cascade of announcements all about the new platform strategies of what is rapidly developing into the Blackbaud and Convio camps.

Despite the self-imposed quiet period due to the acquisition of Kintera by Blackbaud, Kintera issued a press release on June 6th touting the ability to add custom entities (database tables) to Kintera and have them automatically exposed through the Kintera API. Yes, you can now develop unique third party apps in Kintera that have nothing to do with fundraising (even though everything has to do with fundraising).

A week later, on June 13th, MPower sends out their press release touting the appearance of MPower on Sourceforge under both a GPL v3 license or a license that allows you to develop code without sharing with the rest of your community (I call this the Ebenezer Scrooge license). That’s right you can download MPower off of Sourceforge the same way you can download many popular open source products.

And then yesterday, on the 17th, Convio issued their own press release, heck their own mini-website about a new CRM they’ve developed for nonprofits using Salesforce.com as the underlying platform.

It’s an impressive series of wins for those of you who signed the Integration Proclamation so many moons ago. Each of these developments are unqualfied wins for openness but as always, not all these wins are equal. In fact, they can be described as an open API, an open platform and open source.

The Open API: Kintera’s custom entities is mighty impressive but it does keep you locked to the Kintera platform. On the other hand, the automatic exposure of new tables through the existing Kintera API means that once you build a custom table in Kintera, other applications can see it through web services. This is a Good Thing. And it has some unusual implications as well… If this new feature set in the Kintera API survives the Blackbaud acquisition, we potentially have a new way to interact with Blackbaud data once Kintera is fully merged into the Blackbaud product set. It’s unknown if this feature will survive but let’s hope that this tiny window into Blackbaud isn’t automatically shut by the powers that be.

The Open Platform: Convio’s new offering on Force.com is another evolutionary step for the nonprofit world. Remember that Force.com is an open platform with great APIs but is NOT open source. Frankly, this level of openness is more than enough for many non-profits. It remains to be seen what exactly the pricing model is for this new product codenamed Aikido. As you know, I’m a big proponent of salesforce.com and its use for nonprofits but I’ve been a little disillusioned by the lack of fundraising logic in salesforce.com itself. If what Convio is offering this Fall erases those problems, I can see salesforce.com really penetrate the nonprofit sector even faster than it already has. This announcement seems to be directed at generating FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) with existing Kintera customers trying to decide whether or not to stay with Kintera or to move over to Convio. No pricing information or even a release date has been offered which I interpret as a FUD move on Convio’s part. Nevertheless, this is a welcome development for those of us simply looking for a SaaS platform that has better fundraising logic.

The Open Source: MPower Open is on Sourceforge. Repeat after me — MPower Open is on Sourceforge. And they have it under a GPL v3 license. You can’t ask for more. OK, you’re right, you CAN ask for me. MPower Open is written in .Net which isn’t exactly my cup of tea but for those nonprofits that are heavily standardized on Microsoft products (and most are) this isn’t really a barrier to entry. Hiring good .Net programmers is the barrier. On the other hand, if you’re not looking to modify MPower right now but might in the future, it’s still a viable option. Keep in mind that I haven’t done a thorough review of MPower so I’m just waiting until the hosted version is available for me to look at it. What’s great about MPower being on Sourceforge is that there are statistics available for the project. They’ve already had 86 downloads since they released five days ago. Next up: getting more community members willing to add code to the project.

A reader wrote this to me the other day:

Cannot understand the big deal about MPower. Right now ASI’s iMIS software has fundraising, segmentation, RFM analytics, a data warehouse, and email marketing that is far greater in scope than Convio….They have been doing this a while now so yeah, M Power is a developer’s dream and maybe nice for the resume, but why re-invent the wheel when sophisticated software already is in use?

Indeed, why re-invent the wheel? I think the reader is missing a couple of issues that are a result of looking at fundraising software within the silo of a fundraising department.

Firstly, there should be no more silos. You see, dear readers, there’s a problem when one assumes that fundraising logic only exists between the screen and keyboard of a data entry person caging checks or when someone is looking at a LYBUNT list for their next mail merge. What about your web site? Wouldn’t it be nice to have some fundraising logic there? Or if you want to integrate fundraising logic with your accounting data?

Secondly, you want leverage on your vendor. Openness not only gives you choices. It is about setting up a competitive marketplace where an existing contract coupled with proprietary software does not determine whether or not you stay with a vendor like Blackbaud or Convio. In other words, legalistic and technological strategies have been designed to keep us paying our vendors. That’s THEIR side of the game. We should try to break those bonds whenever possible.

We don’t accept vendor lock-in in many aspects of our daily life and we shouldn’t accept it at the very heart of nonprofit line of business applications, fundraising tools. It’s a fundamental obligation on the part of IT directors to constantly push for openness of architecture in both hardware and software purchases. This doesn’t necessarily mean you stop buying Microsoft. Instead, you help foster a marketplace where Microsoft feels COMPELLED to compete with open source vendors to provide you with the best bang for your buck. Notice the quick number of revisions to Internet Explorer the minute Firefox hit 15% of browser market share. And in the same way, this doesn’t mean you move from iMIS or Blackbaud or Convio tomorrow. Hey, over 70% of computers still use IE to browse the Web. However, it’s clear that the changing marketplace and concerted action by nonprofits have engendered a new environment where there is now more choice than ever before. And our choices shouldn’t be dictated to us by vendors who say that their application can’t do what we want it to do.

Read about the recent development in the CRM world between Kintera, Convio and MPower.

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I’ve been lucky enough to meet millennials who are working in nonprofits in the last month and I’d like to highlight them here.

• Jonathon Lunardi from Charity for Debt
• Cristina Moon from 8-8-08 For Burma
• Karina Qian from TechY (so new that they don’t have a web site)

Jonathon Lunardi’s startup nonprofit is based on getting students into paid volunteer positions at local charities and using those positions to help pay for the loans incurred while getting a college education. What’s really fascinating is that he’s adept with PHP and also coded the org’s website. This seems to be typical of millennials in that they reach for digital tools at the same time they’re starting up their organizations. Traditionally, to start a 501c3, you’d form a board, have a few constituents in your neighborhood form around you and and start fundraising. These days, a website and an organizational e-mail address is the real de facto beginning of a nonprofit.

Cristina Moon’s 8-8-08 For Burma is an organization formed on Burmese advocacy using the startup to the Olympics as part of the campaign. The Web site just came up a week or so ago. It’s actually Wordpress (designed by Matthew from theCoup) that powers the site which is perfect for very small nonprofits.

Karina Qian hasn’t even finished college yet and she’s already trying to match up nonprofits in Southeast Asia and the Middle East with technologists. She’s already been to Netsquared. Has your Executive Director been there yet? And her organization is mostly Facebook-based.

I find it fascinating that these millennials have such facility with social media. I’m a Gen X-er myself and I find myself surrounded by ignorant over 30 types whose primary modes of communication are still e-mail and not IM or Twitter. I’m still told that Facebook is for kids (sigh).

For these three, blogs and IM are as natural to them as writing a grant. There’s been much made about the loss of executive leadership that is going to come in the next decade. For one, I don’t think that’s a terrible thing and given the new crop of Executive Directors coming into the sector, we’ll at least not have to explain IT basics to these folks. Imagine yourself as an IT director years from now, and you won’t have to worry about explaining the loss of control due to a “comments” section on a blog, indeed you won’t have to explain what a blog is. Your primary worry years from now when these folks come into their own in the sector will probably in redefining what an IT director will be. If you don’t have enough hardcore skills now, it will be harder to differentiate your services versus what the average nonprofit manager will have in a few years. Learn to code, learn to innovate, learn to align IT resources with the mission — your nonprofit manager counterparts are catching up!

Read about how millennials are incorporating IT into their nonprofit management strategies as a given

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Ok, very rarely do I do consulting jobs and I decided a couple of weeks ago to do some part-time consulting for the New York City Campaign Finance Board. My first real step into the non-profit world was in the government sector so at times, it feels like I’m just picking up where I left off ten years ago. While I’m helping them out, they’re also looking for someone to replace their previous Webmaster. Imagine applying all that neat stuff at Netsquared or when Beth talks about social media to New York City politics. See? It’s an unbelievably cool job and you get to live in NYC while you’re at it…

Check this job out:

Government 2.0 Webmaster Needed! Help us get ready for New York City’s biggest local election ever and keep NYC elections transparent and open by maintaining and improving upon the New York City Campaign Finance Board website, http://www.nyccfb.info. We’re looking for a hardcore techie with great communications skills to serve as the webmaster and grand poobah of our online efforts. You will maintain and improve the current website while also serving as an internal evangelist to help keep the CFB at the forefront of government agencies involved with the administration of elections, public disclosure, and voter education. This is your chance to join the new wave of public-service techies who are making public sector websites relevant to the next generation! If you’re a big fan of donor disclosure mashups such as the Federal Elections Commissions maps and opensecrets.org then you’ve come to the right place.

The ideal candidate will be proactive in maintaining the site, improving its navigation and look & feel, and both devising and implementing technical and visual enhancements. Some training in and/or experience using ASP.NET 1.1/2.0 controls is a plus. Must be able to hand-code all web elements—WYSIWYG drag-and-droppers need not apply. We’re also looking to expand our reach into social networking so it would help if you were acquainted with Facebook, Digg, del.icio.us, etc. Of course you’ll need to be an expert user of Dreamweaver and Flash; understand dynamic or active web content, including DHTML and Javascript; and be familiar with AJAX technology such as XHR, XML and JSON.

The position offers excellent benefits and a competitive salary commensurate with experience. A bachelor’s degree and NYC residency are required.

If you’re interested, here’s the contact information:

Ms. Elizabeth Bauer
NYC Campaign Finance Board
40 Rector Street, 7th Floor
New York, New York 10006
Fax #212-306/7143
resume@nyccfb.info

Read more about this kickass government 2.0 job in New York City!

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Those of you looking for more information regarding the purchase of Kintera by Blackbaud may want to check out the recent EDGAR filing by Blackbaud. It contains FAQs that were sent out to Blackbaud and Kintera employees. Many of these questions are pertinent to nonprofits such as:

A customer is raising issues that are specific to them that are not covered by the generic messaging. Who do I contact for more information?

Should any of your customers raise Kintera-Blackbaud issues that are specific to them, contact a member of the Integration Leadership Team so they can be involved. You should contact the person from your company below based on the product the customer has questions about:

• Sphere – Shaw Drummond (Blackbaud); Rich LaBarbera (Kintera)
• P!N – Chris South (Blackbaud); Ian Gruber (Kintera)
• Fundware – Scott Butler (Blackbaud); Scott Bechler (Kintera)
• Other issues – Bob Hughes (Blackbaud); Rich LaBarbera (Kintera)

UPDATE (6/2/2008): Thanks to EDGAR, we now have access to e-mails sent from Blackbaud and Kintera management to their employees. Check it out!

There’s also a webcast available that was hosted by Marc Chardon and Timothy Williams. The questions were inevitably financially-related but I’ve distilled some of the more technically relevant pieces for those of you looking for more information.

The webcast starts out with a prepared statement from Marc and Timothy. They went on to state that they believed that Kintera Sphere is the most advanced and the best Internet fundraising software in the sector. They went on to say that 2300 nonproifts use Sphere.

They said that the acquisition is intended to accelerate Blackbaud’s move into online fundraising. They will continue to use Blackbaud NetCommunity for solutions requiring tight integration with Raiser’s Edge but KNTA will be for those customers who aren’t looking for Raiser’s Edge integration.

What was interesting to me is that it looks like they bought Kintera primarily for Sphere. Per seat licensing fees are what makes up Kintera Sphere revenue whereas Fundware is associated with renewable maintenance contracts. Fundware has 1700 customers whereas Financial Edge has 4300 customers. Apparently, KNTA made $45 million in 2007 with the majority of it from Sphere. The purchase for Kintera was at 1x annual revenue which makes the purchase pretty close to a fire sale. Apparently, Kintera was still operating at a net operating loss this year and that will drop the purchase price even lower to around $36 million.

Blackbaud wants to improve profitability of Kintera by sharing the costs of building online fundraising and CRM. Also, people were concerned about KNTA’s sustainability and it weighed on decisions to purchase KNTA. BLKB is guessing that with its backing KNTA will have a better reputation in regards to sales.

There was a question and answer period as well. Here are some snippets from the Q&A period with the timelines inserted so that you can follow along in the Web cast.

25:00
eTapestry is donor management more similar to RE than to Sphere or BBNC. They don’t expect to see any integration between eTapestry and Kintera Sphere.

Sphere had very strong online fundraising characteristics and was on .NET platform. Blackbaud believes that makes for much easier integration. I forgot that Kintera was .NET but now that I hear it again I think this acquisition makes a lot more sense for Blackbaud.

Blackbaud will have a roadmap out in next three months and they think that Blackbaud NetCommunity and Sphere will integrate in the years ahead.

28:30
Are KNTA transaction processing fees continuing?
Yes.

You’ve got to listen to this question being asked of Blackbaud management as the analyst asking the question mentions that Blackbaud once thought of Kintera’s transaction fees as “mercenary” which is something that Blackbaud immediately backed away from. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that criticism of Kintera by Blackbaud but it was funny to hear.

30:05
Blackbaud was asked about the previous integrations with Target Analytics and eTapestry. Blackbaud is claiming that the integration between Target and Blackbaud’s Analytics groups has gone well and that they think eTapestry and Kintera integrations will proceed similarly.

41:45
The question is asked as to why did BB stop with Scorpio and think of purchasing Kintera.
They say that 18 months ago stock prices were different. Blackbaud NetCommunity is still not really finished and not yet connected to infinity. As a result, Scorpio (the recent improvements to NetCommunity) wasn’t really wasted if Blackbaud bought Kintera. There would be very little duplication of engineering.

44:45
An analyst asks about Kintera’s restricted cash line item?
Blackbaud responds that restricted cash and donations payable are offsets to one another.

Here’s an interesting item I didn’t know about. I believe this restricted cash line item on Kintera’s quarterly statement is the float that Kintera carries in order to insure that donations are paid. It was $7 million in Kintera’s last quarterly statement. This means that Kintera is earning interest on that $7 million before it gets disbursed to nonprofits on their system. It’s a nice job when you can get it

UPDATE (6/2/2008): Don’t Tell the Donor has posted Gene Austin’s response to the acquisition. It’s a bit strange in that there’s a call from Convio to have Blackbaud open up its API despite the fact that Convio’s own API is problematic at best in its inability to provide multiple records in one call. In fact, if Kintera’s API gets adopted into the Blackbaud codebase there’s a good chance that Blackbaud itself will have the more open API vs. Convio’s. Sometimes, I have to wonder if Convio’s strategists ever bother to check themselves before they wreck themselves. I concur with Don’t Tell the Donor in that it’s highly unlikely that people will believe Convio’s new stance as an advocate for open APIs since they themselves were late to the game in this respect.

Read more information about Blackbaud's recent acquisition of Kintera - more links and a semi-transcript of Blackbaud's webcast to investment analysts..

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Causes put out a press release yesterday that I’m putting out in its entirety. It’s nearly 2 AM out here in Brooklyn. More analysis will follow tomorrow — I promise:

BERKELEY, Calif. — May 29, 2008 — One year after launching an application on the Facebook and, subsequently, MySpace platforms, Causes celebrates the milestone of registering 12 million consumers who are now supporting more than 80,000 non-profit causes worldwide. The Causes audience, to date, has raised $2.5 million in charitable donations, benefiting 19,445 501( c ) (3) charitable organizations.
Causes on Facebook, and subsequently MySpace, debuted 12 months ago with the opening of the Facebook development platform. Since its inception, Causes has created a new paradigm for online activism, spurring millions of Internet users to pledge online support for causes, make charitable donations, and to take action in the real world.
“We are thrilled that Causes is starting to gain hold and reach a critical mass of socially and politically aware people around the world,” said Sean Parker, CEO and co-founder of Causes. “Causes on Facebook and MySpace has become a gateway for people seeking to take action in support of causes and issues they care about, as well as raise funds to sustain positive change. We could not be more pleased with our first year results.”
One-Year Momentum and Results
Currently, Causes directs online activism into ten categories of support. Of the tens of thousands of non-profit causes supported through the application, the community engagement statistics reflect the following rank by cause category:
Charity Category Number of Causes
1. Human Services 16,203
2. Health 13,156
3. Public Advocacy 9,339
4. International 9,274
5. Arts & Culture 6,559
6. Animals 5,838
7. Political Campaigns 5,652
8. Education 5,589
9. Environment 5,286
10. Religion 3,834

“Causes has helped create a new generation of UNICEF supporters,” said Caryl Stern, President and CEO , U.S. Fund for UNICEF. “Through virtual gifts and other social currency models, Causes is helping to activate first-time donors and volunteers to support UNICEF’s mission to do whatever it takes to save children’s lives.”

In another first year milestone, Causes partnered with the Case Foundation and Network for Good to launch the Causes Giving Challenge. The Causes Giving Challenge raised more than $570,000 for participating nonprofit organizations, apart from $250,000 matched by the Case Foundation. The peak of the campaign saw nearly 8,000 donors contributing to nonprofits in a single 24-hour period.

“This first year of growth on Causes has demonstrated the power of citizen philanthropy,” said Joe Green, co-founder of Causes. “Causes is on track to help restore social capital to the process of giving, and to provide young people or others who are not super-wealthy with a way to engage, contribute and become more aware.”

Read more about Project Agape's Causes as it reports that it raised $2.5 million in donations in its first year of operation...

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