Convio + Salesforce

During my due-diligence process for a client, I realized that one Convio's strengths is their newly created elegant content management system (CMS) and that SalesForce.com has a complete lack of an integrated CMS. (Salesforce Foundation even gave a $25k grant to Plone to integrate Plone with Salesforce.) Salesforce.com has been gaining market share in the non-profit space due to the flexibility, extensibility, and pricing (free for the first 10 users) of the Salesforce environment. Self admittedly, one of Convio's week points is their lack of a complete back-end-database-of-record system, which is a strength of Salesforce.com.

Now if Convio decided to leverage the strengths and momentum of Salesforce.com, Convio could use the coat-tails of Salesforce.com to gain even more market share and provide a complete and scalable hosted/SaaS solution for non-profits that is both elegant and scalable. I also think that a formal partnership at this level would help increase Convio's expected IPO stock price.

Non-profit 2.0 :: A reality

I have been thinking a lot about how to make the whole Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0 now) a reality for Non-profits (I call it non-profit 2.0). My technology recommendations for non profits with less than 20ish million in revenue is:

Google Apps for Non-profit enterprise email/contacts/calendars
NING for Social networking (with Joomia or Drupal CMS installed on their platform)
SalesForce CRM for a CRM (and has a very open platform for integrations. I think Kintera is a very close second if their connect platform rivals SalesForce.)

Now the question is how can we take donations online with this setup? Well, Salesforce has integrations with 3rd party (via AppExchange) credit card processors that can take money online. And, I also recommend that Google Checkout be used as a donation engine due to easy of integration and the low over head of processing/credit card fees (2%...and 0% until Jan 1, 2008).

So adding everything up, the total costs for small non profits is less than a few hundred a month. (For example,www.myafh.org is using this stack. As Athletes for Hope is using my recommended technology stack. I will report back on their success.)