Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NTEN is doing some great work getting information about the use of different kinds of tools in the sector, and how people are using them. and how they like them. They are doing a CMS satisfaction survey, and the more info that they get, the better. So go rate your CMS!

In honor of the webinar that is happening in a couple of weeks, I figured I’d talk a bit about CiviCRM. CiviCRM is a nonprofit-focused open source tool, centered around membership, fundraising, events and such.

CiviCRM was one of the first (of a now growing number) of nonprofit-focused open source tools. It originally came out of the idea of making moving eBase (the CRM based on Filemaker Pro) to the web.

CiviCRM has 4 basic components: CiviContribute, CiviMail, CiviMember, and CiviEvents  - which allow you to track contacts, donations, members, send out email blasts, have event registration, etc. There is even a new case management feature in 2.0, which can be useful for organizations that need that functionality.

CiviCRM is a great CRM for small-to-medium sized organizations that need CRM functionality. In order to insure email deliverability on blasts, you’ll need to have it hosted somewhere where they are actively dealing with whitelists, etc. Otherwise, it’s easy to host it on a generic hosting account, if you don’t need that functionality. It can integrate with both Drupal or Joomla, and there is a new stand-alone version as well. Drupal integration is better, but there is a lot of active development going into improving the Joomla integration.

CiviCRM ranked #1 in satisfaction in the recent NTEN CRM satisfaction survey.

I guess because I’m a blogger, I get these interesting tidbits in my mailbox. I don’t always have a lot of time to investigate them, or figure out if they are useful, but I do like to not completely ignore the ones that look interesting. I do hope folks will comment if they know something about these, or have an opinion.

• ReviewBasics is a collaborative editing and reviewing tool. I’ve perused the demos, and it does look like it would be useful for reviews of things like specs, wireframes, etc.
• Zoomgrants looks like it is trying to be some sort of one-stop-shop for grantors and grantees. As a funder, you can put up RFPs (at a cost), and people can apply directly online. It looks interesting, and potentially useful. I wonder how many foundations will go for it, though. I started a little Twitter conversation about it, and people seemed intrigued.
• BlueAvocado is a new online blog/magazine/website specifically for folks who work in and with nonprofits. It looks very promising. I’m looking forward to reading it.
• Convio is getting into some interesting territory these days. They’ve been doing some nonprofit research. They have released two studies, one on the “wired wealthy” and another which is a “nonprofit benchmark index” study - basically providing some benchmarks for organizations to measure themselves against, traffic, email newsletter click through rates, etc. It’s actually a pretty interesting resource, and worth a read. Of course, it’s only a study of Convio’s clients - but it’s interesting nonetheless.

I am so far behind, it’s not funny. I’ve got to catch up. My goal is to catch up by the end of this month, so that I’ll still be on track to make it to 100 free and open source tools by December.

This post gives me the chance to finally write the very belated post on MPower I’ve been meaning to write since I got back from NTC.

MPower is not a new product. It’s been around for quite a while, and has a solid user base. It is an enterprise-class client/server CRM, and has the kind of features you see in such packages as Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge. What’s new about MPower is that it has very recently been released as open source.

I had a great sit-down with Randy McCabe, CEO and Leo D’Angelo (CTO) of MPower at NTC. I heard a lot about the product, and their plans, and I was impressed with their thinking, and with the direction they are heading. Their basic idea makes a lot of sense to me, and it clearly is an idea that lots of companies that release open source products are thinking: don’t increase revenue by trying to milk as many current customers as possible (which is, frankly, the goal of many proprietary software vendors, especially those with very niche packages without much potential for growth in customer base,) broaden the number of customers out there greatly by making barrier to entry low.

They expect to make up the difference in revenue that they got from licenses from services sold to a greater number of organizations that would not have been customers otherwise. Lots of open source companies (RedHat, MySQL AB, Novell, Alfresco, SugarCRM, Canonical) are doing similar things.

For you purists: don’t get all upset. Yes, it’s a Windows product. Yes, it’s written in .NET and C#. Yes, it requires MSSQL server. So what? It’s open source, and it is yet another option for organizations - and it is an open source replacement for Raiser’s Edge. How cool is that? And it’s open source - so someone who really cares can port it to work with MySQL, etc. And, it’s got completely open APIs.

All of that said, there are a few things I hope that they consider. I hope that they decide to go with an OSI approved license (they are currently using their own, which is a modification of the Apache license. Having looked at it, it’s a fine license, but it would help them if they used one that is known already, like the GPL, or LGPL, etc.)

They also have, at this point, no community. They have a partner program, which is like a lot of partner programs - you have to be vetted, yadda yadda. Not at all in alignment with the open source ethic. They need to open their doors, make installing MPower easy (it’s not, at this point) and set up some community functions to help grow a community around the product, which will help it grow, and really help to begin to provide the avenues for developers to get involved, and continue to help build the product.

I’ll be following MPower closely over the next months and years. I have high hopes for it. And Blackbaud may well be shaking in their boots.

Here’s some other coverage:

• Podcast from the Nonprofit Tech Blog
• Post from Josiah Richie
• Video Interview of Randy McCabe

I like hosting the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants. Mostly, because I get to read blogs by people that aren’t on my list of feeds I read regularly. And I get to highlight the work of some of my favorite bloggers, too.

Joanne Fritz asks the question that is probably on the minds of lots of folks in the nonprofit sector: what are we going to do in facing the current problematic economic climate? She suggests not to panic, and not to change course - keep steady, and keep communicating.

SOX First, which is a new blog to me, and focuses on Sarbanes-Oxely compliance, asks whether nonprofits hold the ethical high ground. Their answer: they may well be losing ground.

James Young, writing on Convio’s newish blog, Connection Cafe, talks about how to find, and create, influencers. What are “influencers?” Read the blog entry. It’s pretty interesting.

Marketing and Fundraising Ideas tells us about how not to ask for a major gift.

There is an interesting case study of the marketing of Tampax and Africa on the Cause Related Marketing Blog.

And Katya tells us why Seth Godin is right about people being lazy and in a hurry, and gives us some tips on how to use that.

And lastly, since I’m hosting, I get to mention my recent post on Twitter and nonprofits.

Next week, the Carnival is being hosted at A Small Change - Fundraising Blog.

(Photo by frankienose)

I’m hosting the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants here, next week. So send in your best of the week!

This actually was a post to the Progressive Exchange discussion list.

I love twitter, which in some ways surprises me, and in some ways doesn’t. It provides for me a sense of community, and a sense of what people I know and care about things I care about are talking about (in a certain realm, on other realms, not so much). I think that Twitter is, in many ways, a harbinger of the future - I think eventually, a lot of things that happen between people over the net will work a lot like twitter, even if it’s not actually twitter - social networks carrying short snippets of people’s thoughts, ideas and events.

But right now, at this moment, twitter’s demographic is both tiny and highly nonrepresentative of the population of the world. It is made up of people who are techically-oriented, largely affluent, and largely spend inordinate amounts of time in contact with electronic devices. We are still in innovator phase here, not even early adopters have signed on.

There is no question that you will get out of twitter what you give. And, wow, yeah, you can be highly successful in twitter. And so what on earth does that really mean?

If your organization’s mission will be greatly benefited by making connections with the twitter demographic then, yeah, twitter makes tons of sense. And organizations and movements can certainly use twitter to organize - I think that’s a great strategy - as long as the majority of those to be organized are on twitter - which is quite a stretch for most orgs or movements.

But there is no way on earth that I am going to suggest that a client of mine whose demographic is mostly women over 50 that they even spend any time on twitter in trying to accomplish their mission, or even get the word out about what they are doing. Should the communications person use twitter to connect with other nonprofit communications professionals? Heck, yeah, I could easily argue it will help them in their work. Should they spend a bit of time tying their RSS feed (if they have one) to a twitter account? Sure, why not. But should the organization as a whole put resources into a “twitter strategy”? Or even a social network strategy? I’d be really hard pressed to suggest that they spend much of their meager resources on that.

I know that people are doing fantastic work around the ways in which social networks can be powerful tools. And there are, for sure, some interesting case studies. And there are also some organizations for whom this makes sense, and who have the resources, and are ready to take good advantage of all of these tools, including twitter. But from my perspective, working with organizations that are sometimes having a hard time moving from a static website to a CMS, social networks in general, and twitter specifically, are a long way away.

I feel like what happens all the time is that we nptechies grab onto a new technology, and the first thing we think is that we gotta get organizations using it. And people in orgs hear all this buzz about this thing or that thing, and feel hard pressed and stressed to get on the bandwagon. And I feel like we don’t spend enough time thinking about whether or not it is appropriate - whether it makes sense, whether it really is going to benefit the mission of the organizations we work with.

Here’s a few interesting tidbits gleaned from the net:

• It appears that Microsoft’s bid to get Office Open XML, their new office standard did get through ISO. Interestingly enough, lots of developing world countries voted against it. There’s lots of great details on Groklaw.
• Venture capitalists are liking open source more and more. Why do we nptechies care? More $ toward open source is a tide that lifts all boats.
• It’s still mighty small (still around 2%), but Linux Desktop market share grew from 40-60% (depending on who you ask) from last year.
• Adobe (yeah, Adobe) joined the Linux Foundation, and released a Linux alpha of Air, their new application platform.

Someone mentioned to me that from what I write on my blog, she wouldn’t know what it is that I actually do in my consulting work. I kinda thought that was surprising, but in thinking about what I write, I realize that people could get the wrong idea (or, more accurately, fail to get the right idea.) And, I guess truthfully, the blurb on my consulting site is kinda dry. Gotta work on that.

So, what do I do? I think of myself in these terms: I educate, facilitate, mediate, and problem-solve.

For one client, I am their technology go-to person, since they are really small, and have no tech staff. I don’t implement much for them (although in a pinch, I’ll set something up, or fix a specific problem.) But I help them plan their technology initiatives (a new database, a new website, etc.,) help them find the vendors that will do the work by helping them craft good RFPs. I answer all of their tech questions, and solve pretty much all of their tech problems (mostly by helping them figure out who they should call.) I’ll be the project manager on their big new client database project, and help them think about how far to dip their toes into Web 2.0.

For another client, I helped them vet vendors for their new website, taught them the difference between Joomla, Drupal and Plone, and I helped free them from a vendor who was particularly egregious in their hosting charges, among other things. ($1200/month for an old and therefore crappy custom CMS and not much support. I. Kid. You. Not. I myself wrote a custom CMS a long time ago that would be considered crap now, so I don’t blame them for that, but the charges???)

For a third client, I helped them translate their ideas about what they wanted their website to do, to things that could actually be implemented in a CMS. I helped them vet CMS vendors, make sure the CMS that was chosen could do the complex job they were asking it to do (some were not up to the task) and am the intermediary between the current web vendor and the client, lending my expertise as needed, and helping to move the project forward.

I think my clients benefit from one particular thing that I think is pretty unique. Although I am deeply experienced and knowledgeable in implementation of technology, from networks to web applications and databases (I really know how DNS works, can write a left outer join in SQL, and know the difference between REST and SOAP) since I don’t do implementation or coding anymore, I’m not wedded to one set of technologies. I can bridge the gap between technology vendors and clients in a way that is pretty unusual, and, honestly, that I’m proud of. I know when a vendor knows their technology, and when they are blowing sales language at me, and might not be up to the technical task. I can evaluate previous projects based on what I see is the underlying complexity, and figure out how much experience a vendor has had with a particular set of problems. I know when a technology is really appropriate, and when it’s not.

I have other kinds of projects as well - those that use my talents somewhat differently. I do a ton of technical writing, and I have become the “documentation facilitator” of the OpenMRS project - it is an open source medical records system, designed to serve clinics in low-resource areas (such as sub-sarahan Africa) that treat patients with HIV/AIDS. Since we’re starting with the developer documentation, one of the coolest things about this project is that it’s making me learn Java and Eclipse, plus get my hands dirty with Tomcat. Yum! I love learning new stuff.

I like the range of projects I do. I’d like to do more of all of it. I’d also love to consult with for-profit vendors who are thinking about dipping their toes into offering support for open source projects, or open sourcing their software.

OK, enough of that. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming. :-)

Since I’ve been covering CRMs for the webinar today, I figured I’d switch categories on my free and open source software list. So for the next few tools, I’ll be describing CRMs (Constituent/Contact/Community/Customer Relationship Management). The first one is one that I’ve been using recently for my consulting business - SugarCRM.

Unlike CiviCRM, which is targeted to nonprofits, SugarCRM is a system targeted toward sales in for-profit companies. It has three versions: Enterprise, Professional,  and Community Edition. That’s the one I’ve been using. They also have a newer on-demand version (that is, software as a service, like salesforce.)

I’ve been hearing good things about SugarCRM from organizations that use it. It also gets kudos from NTEN’s satisfaction survey (it came in third, after CiviCRM and Salesforce.)

Anyway, SugarCRM is basically “enterprise class” CRM, and is worth a look.