Nonprofit 2.0: Accelerating Your Organization to Success

(Originally published at
http://www.convio.com/resources/newsletter/multicenter-federated-organizations.html)

One of my core philosophies for organizational success is that nonprofits should focus 100% on their mission and remove all extraneous noise generated from infrastructure processes or systems that are not core to their mission. The theory behind this accelerative philosophy is that attention and time are finite and valuable. Therefore, capital resources and people should not be used to develop solutions or solve problems that others have already solved.

A good litmus test for the need to partner with a company versus tackle a problem yourself is to ask the question: "Is the management of the system part of our mission or is the use of the service it provides part of our mission?" If the answer is "use of the service," then look for ways to partner with best-of-breed companies that provide services that meet your organizational needs.
Example 1

Let's apply this philosophy to traditional internal email service. Is your organization's mission to provide the best email service to your constituents or is it simply to communicate with your constituents? I suspect it is to communicate. So, if your organization's mission does not include providing hosted email services, then move the management of your organization's email server out-of-house to a Web 2.0 provider such as Google Apps. By doing so, you create a situation where extraneous resources are not spent worrying about backups or installing the latest security patches.
Example 2

Now let's apply this philosophy to the slightly more complicated service of constituent management. It might seem like owning your own constituent management system is key to providing your organization's programs or services. I would argue that the use of the service is most important, not the management of the system. Therefore, the management of the physical constituent management system should be moved out-of-house. A primary benefit: You don't have to worry about creating the next version of the system; your time is spent gaining knowledge about your constituents or providing more services.

Sometimes an argument to keep a system in-house is made because of the perceived need for a specific feature or the need for more control over security or databases. I would respond by doing a true root-concern analysis of the feature and then look for different ways to address the concern. One way is to choose a partner, such as Convio® and their Common Ground™ CRM system built upon the Force.com™ platform, that is flexible enough to support almost any feature or security request.

With the dawn of the Web 2.0 space, this philosophy is even more effective and practical due to partners such as Convio, Amazon®, Google®, NING®, Yahoo!® and salesforce.com® — all of which provide best-of-breed services to nonprofits. Below are a few examples of what's available:

* Google, through the Google Grants program, gives an in-kind grant of approximately $100,000 per year in Ad Words spending to every nonprofit that submits an application, and provides Ad Words expertise to help organizations leverage Ad Words more effectively.
* Google provides free private label email and calendaring services to nonprofits via their Google Apps program.
* NING.com provides private label social networking technology for about $30 per month.
* Yahoo! Small Business provides an industry leading ecommerce platform for about $150 per month.
* Convio provides multi-channel constituent relationship management across an integrated platform that reduces costs and removes the IT hassles associated with traditional legacy systems.
* Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) provides online file storage for $0.15 per gigabyte of storage per month.
* salesforce.com provides 10 free user licenses to nonprofits and then provides additional licenses at a substantial discount.

Nonprofit organizations are maturing into Nonprofit 2.0 organizations, and the landscape is ever changing. For your organization to ensure its stake in the Web 2.0 world, it must maximize time and resources by using partners to solve non-mission problems, leaving you to concentrate on what is most important — the successful execution of your mission.

Convio Aikido Program (aka Convio CRM)

As a member of the Aikido Charter Program, I wanted explore the power/benefits of the Convio CRM (aka Convi Aikido Program) before I discussed it on my blog.

First what is Aikido, one might ask? Well, it is Convio's custom non-profit template built on top of the Force.com (aka Salesforce.com's platform-as-a-service environment). They took the many years of non-profit eCRM knowledge and built a modern, scalable, cost-effective tool for non-profits.

Why is this a good thing? Many reasons: 1) It allows Convio to stay focused on the CRM needs of non-profits and not have to deal with the noise of the large scale infrastructure management (The Force.com platform does that for them.) and it allows the non-profits to stay focused on delivering programmatic value instead of managing a local CRM infrastructure. 2) Because they are not having to deal with the infrastructure management, it allows the smaller non-profits (which are most non-profits) to leverage the full benefit of a CRM without the costs. 3) The force.com platform allows for the rapid (and easy) customization of reports and account settings. 4) The force.com platform has a plethora of 3rd party apps (AppExchange) ranging from marketing (email, offline,events...), Google tools (apps and adwords), eCommerce integration, financial accounting packages, and several non-profit specific tools.

If you have been reading my blog for a while, I suggested a long time ago that Convio partner with Salesforce. Convio's strength is the eCRM front end content management system (CMS) and Force.com's strength is the backend technology. The Aikido CRM program marries the strengths of both Convio and Salesforce.com and creates services that are ideally suited for the non-profit space.

(I wonder if Salesforce should acquire Convio and leverage Convio's CMS across the business world? )

The good news is that there are progressive thinking non-profits out there that understand the power Aikido brings: Susan G. Komen for the Cure is one of them.

Battle of the non profit eCRM vendors

The last two days have been very interesting for the non-profit eCRM space. On Friday, Kintera announced the release of their open platform. Today, Convio announced the release of their open platform. Now let's look at what was "released":

Kintera:
- Sphere and Constituent Management SOAP API's

Convio:
- Constituent Management API's
- Database Connectors
- Extensions

For me, one of the hidden gems of the Convio announcement is the integration with Facebook. (In my previous blog post, I thought Kintera would be the first to the market but I guess Convio beat them to it.) Also somewhat hidden in the release of Convio's open initiative, is the database connector to Salesforce.com. That is really interesting (see my blog post a few weeks back...I guess they were working on it).

In the end, I think that competition between the leading eCRM vendors will only help non-profits achieve success with whichever platform they choose. Both Convio and Kintera have strengths and both have weaknesses. Can they work on their weaknesses while increasing their strengths. I think the key to success is to really study the market (using both SWOT and STEEP methods) and learn from the customers and then executing perfectly to their, the customers vision.

I think the key to winning this duel is to learn from Sun Tzu in the Art of War: Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy, will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second in the field and has to hasten to battle will arrive exhausted. [6:1]

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.)