Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NTEN just released their CMS satisfaction survey. There is some great food for thought, although in some ways, the results aren’t so surprising. Most people (67%) want an easy to use interface. Most people (57%) also want ongoing support.

The single largest CMS used was Drupal, at 15%, followed by Plone and Joomla (approx 8% each.) Wordpress (which was not originally in the survey, they parsed this data out from the “other” category) was at 2%. Further, in looking more at the “other” category (which made up 29% of the CMS) there were quite a number of other FOSS CMS, including ImpressCMS, Zope, Movable Type, and Typo3.

All of the free and open source options did quite well in terms of Quality, Usability, and Value. The other questions, that are really more geared toward particular vendors, for FOSS CMS are not really applicable to the CMS itself, but to the consultants or vendors who implement it - which is bound to be variable.

Only two proprietary CMS systems, Antharia’s and Ektron, had scores as good as the open source CMS.The CMS options from the big three (er, now the big two) didn’t score as well.

Anyway, the survey report, and survey data are worth looking at if you are shopping for a CMS.

In retrospect, this probably was inevitable. And I’m sure that the very low stock price of Kintera’s certainly made a buyout of it by Blackbaud easier. Today, Blackbaud announced the acquisition of Kintera. So, there is now one less nonprofit CRM vendor to choose from, and Blackbaud keeps getting bigger.

But will it get better as a result? Hard to know. In Kintera, Blackbaud certainly got it’s hands on a platform with pretty good open APIs (Allan Benamer argues they are better than Convio’s.) Will they continue in that direction? Blackbaud’s other recent acquisition, eTapestry, did open up their APIs recently, although they leave much to be desired.

It will be interesting to watch what happens with Kintera, and especially, what happens with their APIs. And how will Convio react? And, of course there is still Salesforce.com, as well as the developing realm of free and open source options, like CiviCRM. It’s going to get interesting, for sure. But, in all honesty, if I were part of the teams of any of those options, there would be no shaking of boots because of this merge.

Update: Allan Benamer has some more information that’s worth reading.

Yesterday, the big news is that Google Health launched. Google says:

“Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with our overall mission of organizing patient information and making it accessible and useful. Through our health offering, our users will be empowered to collect, store, and manage their own medical records online.”

Sounds pretty interesting, but hold on a second. Before you sign up, read the privacy policy carefully. And note: this application is not HIPAA compliant. Here’s why. They do have a point - since they don’t provide health services, they don’t need to comply with HIPAA. The language (especially in this table) seems to suggest that the privacy they are providing is better than HIPAA. I’m not so sure, and, in the end, it comes down to “trust us”. I’m just not so sure how far I should trust Google with my health care data. It gives me enough pause to trust them with my email.

There are some really interesting tidbits of stuff out there. Here are a few:

The blog at the Nonprofit Times, called “Don’t Tell the Donor” has a very interesting entry on the flurry of benchmarking studies that came out recently. It’s titled “Benchmarking With a Warped Stick.” It takes aim at Convio’s recent benchmarking study. To their credit Convio asks this question on their blog: “Should organizations like Convio, and Giving USA continue to offer these sorts of insights to the nonprofit community, or is this simply self-serving marketing fluff?” What do you think? This is what I think: Convio should partner with neutral players to underwrite benchmarking studies that get data from a much wider sample of organizations than just their clients. Everyone (including them) gets better data.

Speaking of metrics, Drew Bernard has an awesome post about how to use web analytics based on the functions of specific pages or sites. Way to go!

Allan Benamer points out that Kintera is about to be delisted by NASDAQ. Blackbaud hasn’t been doing so well, in the stock price department either. Commenters on Allan’s post wonder about the fate of Convio’s IPO. It does make me think a lot about this whole space, and wonder if the fast moving train of Salesforce, and the slower moving trains of the open source alternatives, are beginning to bear down on the old guard, and how they will respond to them (or not, which would spell doom.)

Speaking of the responses of the old guard, eTapestry, which was bought by Blackbaud last year, is opening up it’s API this week. Allan, in his inimitable way, points out how bad the API is. And yeah after reading the docs, I agree, it’s bad. So is it good news, when companies open APIs that don’t make it easy to really use? Are these attempts at “OpenAPIWashing” (my new term for companies that might spend more $ promoting their APIs than actually developing them) or are they just steps along the way to finally really good, solid, usable APIs? Time will tell.

As you’ve probably noticed, I haven’t been blogging a whole lot lately. I’ve been pretty busy with a variety of projects. I’ll be on hiatus for about another week, and will have some long awaited new FOSS tools, as well as other posts that have been brewing for a while.