Innovation – Take 2…Blackbaud and Convio: together at last
My topic this week was scheduled to be a follow-on to the innovation topic from last week. As they say….sometimes material just presents itself.
I woke up to my iPhone ringing and dinging from texts, voicemails, and tweets about Blackbaud purchasing Convio for 300+ million.
I was one of the first three sales reps hired at Convio in mid-2000. I was fortunate enough to sell several of the cornerstone clients the first quarter out of the gate when none of us were truly sure how nonprofits would take to this new type of offering. We saw great promise in the internet as a communications and fundraising tool. Let’s remember that at that time the internet was literally six years old in its commercial usage.
After a two year stint running my own business helping small to medium nonprofits and having had the wonderful pleasure of working with Jay Love and the eTapestry team, I folded that company into Kintera (started about the same time as Convio) at the end of 2003. In the 4+ years I was there we saw emails go from thousands to millions to billions. Not everything always went smoothly, but it was newly discovered country 7-12 years ago. Technologies have since matured greatly and the wild west got some rules and grew up.
Who could have foreseen that 17 billion is now donated online and it being the primary mover of donor interaction for most causes today? It’s pretty amazing.
Now here we are in 2012 and all three of those companies, Convio, eTapestry, and Kintera are safely tucked into the Blackbaud nest for 300mil, 25mil, and 46mil respectively.
So what does all of this mean for innovation in our sector? I believe it means three things:
Technology Innovation – Not just for businesses anymore
Innovation is an attribute of companies and individuals that is highly lauded across the spectrum of activities. Last year, at the passing of Steve Jobs, the obits rightfully pointed to his legacy of technical and artistic achievement as they discussed his life and work. What always impressed me was his ability to sacrifice a currently successful product and its design for what he knew needed to be the next big thing. The term “creative destruction” grew popularity due to that kind of forward thinking. Innovation and creative destruction have been the means to the end of so much of the standard of living the world sees today.
In the world of business today technology is business and business is technology. Frankly, one can’t exist today without the other. The dry cleaners down the street even has sophisticated inventory systems. I can now track my Domino’s Pizza order on my smartphone and your car can drive/think for you based upon the conditions of the road. It’s pretty amazing.
When I say in the title, ‘Not just for businesses anymore”, I’m being a bit tongue in cheek, but I don’t think I’m over-stating the fact that many business leaders, who consider themselves ‘innovators’, do not consider the nonprofit/NGO sectors as enormous centers of technological innovation. That thinking couldn’t be more wrong, but it seems that not many know it or see it. Read more…
New Years Resolution – Make better decisions for our missions
It’s 2012 and my oldest daughters high school graduating class inaugurated t-shirts playing off the end-times theme that state “Class of 2012 – Saving the Best for Last!”
Amusing of course, but thankfully we have so much more to look forward to in 2012 than yet one more predicted armageddon. How many have their been in the last ten years or so?
This year promises to be the beginning of a watershed in technology for nonprofits. Integrations and efficiencies begun in the for-profit world are truly finding their footing in our space. This is the year that we will see social technologies and enterprise-ready solutions make large contributions and be successful for all types and sizes of organizations.
New investments and business models are coming online now that promise to help our sector eliminate many of our old inefficiencies and bad habits making the business of running our missions better servants of the donor dollar.
It’s an exciting time to be around nonprofit sector-focused technology.
What will the future fundraising office look like? How will the future nonprofit deliver its services? The future is here now and ready to go for connected technology solutions in our space. How do we make the right decisions for our organization when technology is getting better, but also more and more complex? Read more…
Top 5 Tips to Know Before Signing That Software Contract
Come join my webinar in partnership with NTEN ($35 for members and $70 for non-members)
Signing a new software contract with a vendor is, in many ways, like getting married. The contract then becomes your prenup which explains what should happen in case things go badly. Hopefully, you’ll never have to go back to it because if you do your relationship is probably already in bad shape. This webinar will help you with the top 5 tips you should be aware of when negotiating your contracts in order to prepare your organization for marriage success or any potential difficulties.
In this webinar, participants will learn
- An understanding of standard contract sections: what is standard and what is generally not
- Real-world examples of contract negotiations that can create goodwill between the parties and those that can create potential issues
- Top 5 tips to know before signing your next software contract
4 Quick Steps to Measure Return on Mission
I presented in a webinar earlier this year and posed a poll question that asked how many of the attendees on the webinar had asked for an ROI (Return on Investment) forecast from a vendor that they were about to spend money with on an important project. 76% of those respondents said that they had asked the vendor for an ROI calculation. The follow-on question to that was how many of those same respondents had gone back six months to a year from the time of the purchase to test if the vendors ROI calculation had held up in the real world. Only 10% said that they had done so. Only 10%….
Why do we forget to check back to see if the ROI is working out like the vendor foretold:
- The honeymoon phase of purchasing something new makes many feel that everything is great even when it may not be performing as promised
- We get too busy implementing and stop measuring
- Many find the process of buying something so painful that the idea of extending that process into measurement is not an enjoyable prospect.
ROI only measures the financial impact of a decision. It doesn’t measure the impact on the mission.
Free copy of ‘The Nonprofit Buyer’ for attending webinar and trialing the Constant Contact Event Marketing Solution
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Knowledgeable Purchasers – 4 Easy Rules
Thanks to Kevin MacDonell, of the CoolData blog, for this awesome guest post. I appreciate others who, like myself, seek ways to help organizations find efficiency in processes that directly aid mission impact for organizations. Thanks Kevin!
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I’m a believer in nonprofit fundraisers learning how to mine their own data. I love to see highly motivated people learning the true value latent in their databases and leveraging it for their causes, to the point where they are gaining actionable insights and developing their own predictive models. It’s what I write about on my blog.
You might think that because I believe in developing in-house expertise, I must look forward to a day when vendors of analytics products and services are no longer needed. And you’d be wrong! Skills development is not necessarily about replacing outside services — it can also be about helping us to be more knowledgeable purchasers. The client is in control of choosing or rejecting a vendor: Any knowledge acquired will be an asset in making good choices.
I’m inspired by the example set by people such as Peter Wylie, Joshua Birkholz, Lawrence Henze, James Parry and others. They write books, issue freely-downloadable white papers, speak at conferences and give webinars. They may be regarded as educational leaders, pushing our profession in the direction of improved “analytics literacy”, but they are also all vendors, which is why I single out these names specifically. They sell software, predictive models, wealth screenings, and various services related to data analytics. Although their education efforts are helpful to everyone in the sector, you can be sure that it forms part of their business plans — and that’s just fine.
In-house staff have the advantages of proximity and agility when it comes to mining their database for variables related to affinity with the organization. But external companies have the advantage in areas involving external data sources, wealth screening, and matching up philanthropic activity outside the organization. A hybrid of internal (affinity) and external (capacity) modeling can be especially potent in major gift prospecting. A vendor might also have a wider range of approaches and techniques to draw on than an in-house practitioner has, and therefore more likely to have the appropriate solution. (Of course, that depends on the vendor.) Read more…
Return on Mission included in new nonprofit best practices guide
I’m very excited to announce that my chapter on Return on Mission and what it means for the nonprofit buyer is a part of the new best practices guide from CharityChannel Press, ‘In the Trenches, You and Your Nonprofit.’ As one of 43 contributing authors to this book I am proud of how it is chock full of unique ways to support nonprofit organizations in their missions, fundraising, and daily operations.
As the title states, it is written by those who have been in the trenches doing our kind of work for years. It is exciting to be included next to so many distinguished authors and thought leaders in our field. It is equally exciting to see the message of Return on Mission becoming more recognized in our sector. It is truly a best practice for any nonprofit that is seeking to be a better steward of their donor dollars when it comes to any type of infrastructure spending for the mission.
About the book from the CharityChannel Press:
“This book has been written for those who want to learn more about the nonprofit sector or improve their knowledge and skills related to nonprofit leadership, management and fundraising. Peer-reviewed articles selected for inclusion in this book have been contributed by nationally known experts within the nonprofit sector.
You and Your Nonprofit:
- Explores planning issues that are often a challenge to nonprofit organizations.
- Provides models for improvement of management, governance and leadership.
- Presents best practices related to the science and art of fundraising.
- Addresses many of the day-to-day issues that confront nonprofit leaders and professionals.
- Provides practical and replicable problem-solving suggestions.”
“This is surely the book I wish I had decades ago.”
—Bob Carter, Chair-elect, Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP)
Are all of your fundraising efforts actually generating real returns?
By andrew urban
How many books or articles have you read on how to fundraise? One, a dozen, fifty or more possibly? The volume of helpful anecdotes, measurements, and tactics can be overwhelming. Unfortunately, there isn’t a surefire method that leads new donors to your door or automatically creates lifelong donors out of new ones. However, as we have seen over the last number of years, the rise of online friends/social fundraising is about as close it gets.
What other fundraising method encourages those who care about your cause to go out and be effective advocates and fundraisers to their friends, family, and social networks for you? Your golf tournament, gala, annual fund mailers, or even funded publicity campaign can bring new people to the fold like a quality social fundraising campaign. The knock on this kind of fundraising? That the people giving only have a tie to the person asking and not to the cause itself. That is true in many cases. However, the ability to reach out to those donors in new and interesting ways to see if they can become more is beginning to show promise.
Given the fact that friend-based fundraising via socially-aware (Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, WePay Giving, etc) online giving pages has proven itself as a means to capture donations and encourageengagement with supporters, the question then becomes how do you, as an organization wishing to raise money online, find a vendor, out of the myriad of choices, that is right for you? Read more…
In my last post I discussed the usage of the poor statistic of infrastructure versus program expenditures as a judge of the efficiency of a nonprofit organization. I made the case that with todays technology the line is blurred between the two functions and saying a piece of technology is completely divorced from the implementation of an organizations mission is ridiculous. What used to be infrastructure is really program. What used to be seen as only program is now intertwined with infrastructure.
That point being made I thought I’d relay this particular bias as it shows up in the larger world. By continuing to use this statistic, or other worthless measurements, we perpetuate charity stereotypes that culminate in articles like this one I read last month. The article came to me through a google alert of some kind, I’d have to go find exactly where and how it came across my desk, but it is entitled “10 Reasons Why I would Never Donate to a Major Charity (or, How to be a Superhero, Part 2)“. The Author is James Altucher and he posted this on April 27th. He is a well known trader/investor who appears regularly on CNBC and the like. Needless to say, if you read his bio, you’ll realize he’s a pretty smart guy.
With that background in place let’s look at what he’s saying in this article and what it means for our sector. This post is not meant to excoriate Mr Altucher for his opinions. Rather, it’s meant to hold up a bit of a mirror that shows us what we have done to ourselves by relying on old, outdated statistics to showcase our successes to the world and that we need to do better.
In this article he calls giving to charity a “myth” that we follow blindly and that more “harm than good is done” by giving to us. Read more…
