Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

This is old news, but I’ve been busy. What’s kind of funny is that I was quoted on the press release, which was out 3 weeks ago or so, but it’s taken me this long to blog it. Bad Blogger! (I think my clients thank me for being a bad blogger.)

So what’s the news? MPower Open is now on Sourceforge, they released their product under the GPL v3. These are good steps forward. This is what I said (in what I think is my first quote for a press release):

By adopting a well-regarded license, joining the SourceForge platform, and launching its community, MPower is making great strides in creating an open source community around its application,” said Michelle Murrain, Principal, MetaCentric Technology Advising, and Coordinator, Nonprofit Open Source Initiative (NOSI). “I look forward to the growth of this community, and the ongoing development of the MPower solution as an open source alternative CRM for nonprofit organizations.

So my hope is that they really begin to use the platform. So far, there is basically no activity in the forums and mailing list. It’s going to take some real elbow grease of reaching out to people who might begin to form the kernel of a development community to get that going. “If we build it they will come” only works in the movies.

That’s what I said to Tompkins Spann, of Convio, when he told me last week (after I duly signed the requisite NDA) that Convio was going into the donor database business by building an app on top of Salesforce.com. Actually, I didn’t use the Battlestar Galactica expletive, I used the one you’re more familiar with. :-)

Convio is launching the new application, built on top of the Force.com platform. It is named, as of now, Aikido. It has the kind of functionality you’d expect from a donor database.

It seems in a business sense, to be a brilliant move. Leverage the power of the open platform of Salesforce.com, and do the work that nonprofits (and consultants) have been having to do to bang Salesforce.com into shape as a donor database. And make it reasonably priced. They are starting with a “charter” program - a few nonprofit organizations, to iron out all of the varied issues, both technical and logistical, I imagine.

This ups the ante major league for Blackbaud, for sure, as well as other long time desktop donor database providers. It may, depending on pricing, even give the open source CiviCRM a bit of competition. And it means an interesting dance for those in the nonprofit salesforce community. Of course, the proof will be in the pudding - we’ll find out over time how this app works, and whether organizations like it. But the whole CRM field just got more interesting.

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.