Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

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.