FINALLY, the vendor community steps up

So I look at this new Blackbaud NOW product and I must say, they have their corporate strategy right on to own all of the charity software market, soup to nuts.

Blackbaud NOW is basically Groundspring/ Network for Good -- a set of services designed for very small charities -- accept online donations, keep a central contact database, send mass emails. They take around 5% of your donation and you get the service for free.

Judging from the mailing address in Indiana, this is built on etapestry's technology (PS, please spring for a web designer, guys, the etapestry site is an eye sore). I find it interesting they didn't build something on Blackbaud's Infinity platform, but hey. They also couldn't spring for an email blast tool, but I suppose that might open a can of worms for them-- their email tool is basically designed to send email to individual contacts rather than mass mails with open tracking, etc.

If I put my cynical hat on, I would say this is just an etapestry lead gen tool, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and hope it is the precursor to real service for small charities. And hopefully some corporate strategist at Blackbaud has figured a way to serve the bottom of the market in order to feed prospects into their higher end offerings.

It makes me a little sad since CivicSpace offered this basic package plus soo much more , but alas... we were a bit to early and under-capitalized.

And finally, yet another data point that a CiviCRM-based ASP would be a good value proposition! Come on folks, anyone?

Nonprofit Technology Vendors are Competent, Who Knew?

For many years, I always thought the big Nonprofit software vendors were not very smart, nimble or perhaps, even competent. Now that we've gone from Blackbaud, Convio, Get Active, eTapestry, and Kintera to Blackbaud and Convio, these companies are doing some really smart things.

Blackbaud acquired Kintera, giving them a working, robust SaaS platform along with a healthy dose of customer and product consolidation.

I just saw today Convio released a CRM system on Salesforce.com's force.com platform. This I must say is a stroke of brilliance. It does beg the question of why the SFDC Foundation has been slow to get a nonprofit edition out the door.

From a business point of view, it is a no brainer... Convio doesn't have to pay for the servers or the platform AND NEITHER DO THEIR CUSTOMERS! If you are looking for an opportunity to move down market, this is a perfect opportunity. All the customer pays for is basically charity product development expertise and support.

No hint on pricing, but I hope they take this as an opportunity to drive down market.