Tag Archives: Kintera

Reporting Across Multiple Systems

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Currently I spend a few days each week generating reports for transmission of information between my organization’s online and offline systems.  Matt McCabe of Orange Leap hosted a NTen webinar this week, Meaningful Reporting: A Holistic Approach to Reporting Across Multiple Systems which highlighted this issue.  While there are no easy solutions, there are some options to consider:

  1. Select vendors and products which connect well with other systems.  Salesforce is an example of a company which has many ways to link its CRM to other software.
  2. Before implementing a new product, figure out how you will synchronize its data with your existing systems.  If you need to spend considerable time running reports and exporting / importing data, you’ll have little time to focus on developing the synchronization.
  3. Consider how much information you really need to have in multiple systems.  Some products will allow you to transfer basic contact information, but may not  be able to handle synchronization of event data or custom fields.
  4. Unless you have a lot of money to spend, it won’t be possible to have a ‘real time’ synch;  decide how often it is practical to have your systems connect with each other.
  5. Make the synchronization run automated, preferably during off hours.  The more manual work you need to do, the more chance there is for error.  (But make sure you look at the error log to determine what didn’t work.)
  6. Confirm that you’re including all activity.  Donations and event registrations may not be available in the same report;  you may need to find a ‘transaction report’ that includes all activity (then confirm this by sampling different types of transactions)
  7. Stick to a schedule – and let your staff know when synchronization is taking place.  (My most common question from staff is why a particular transaction doesn’t appear in another system, and when they can expect it to show.)
  8. If you encourage constituents to fundraise for your organization using a tool like Convio’sTeamRaiser or Blackbaud / Kintera’s Thon, you’ll need to find a way for offline donations to appear quickly on constituents’ personal web sites when developing your synchronization schedule.

In his presentation, Matt described the steps of data extraction, consolidation, reconciliation between systems and presentation, suggesting that you compute the staff hours spent in completing these tasks – and making management aware of the actual price in making integrated information available.  His overall recommendations included:

  • develop standards, e.g. how does your organization define ‘online giving’?  Become familar with APIs (application program interface) and Active Messaging Protocols (XMLs)
  • seek platform independent tools, e.g. using OLAP data storage and a data warehouse
  • empower end users to generate their own reports

The benefit: more time to devote to mission, faster more informed decisions and higher morale, and an increase in staff morale, as they’re freed from tedious reporting tasks.

How are you dealing with this issue?

Blackbaud to buy Kintera, but…

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This isn’t a surprise to me;  hopefully this will give Kintera the financial backing it has long needed.  But I wonder how will Blackbaud integrate Kintera’s products with the other organizations it has acquired in the past year: eTapestry, GiftMakerPro, and Target Analytics.  After years of keeping Raiser’s Edge as a locally installed product, is Blackbaud really prepared to sell itself as an online organization?  A few recent experiences indicate otherwise:

  1. Blackbaud recently hosted an Interactive Internet Symposium in New York City.  I subscribe to many blogs and elists, yet did not learn of this event until a week after it was past. 
  2. So I would not miss out on similar events in the future, I visited Blackbaud’s web site to signup for its enewsletters.  But Friday and again today, I was unable to complete my signup.  After selecting a user name and password, I received no acknowledgment either online or in email about whether my signup was successful.  But I was unable to login with my selected credentials, nor have I received any email confirmations..

If Blackbaud relies on its own marketing to distribute information about events and if signup to receive electronic communications is so difficult, does this sound like a company that is committed to providing online services?

A New Day at Kintera

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Since my current organization has used Kintera since January 2005, I eagerly signed up for yesterday’s Nten conference call with Scott Crowder, who joined the firm as Chief Technology Officer earlier this year.  Although I’ve raised nearly $7 million in online fundraising revenues, working with Kintera has been a challenge, especially when trying to integrate with Raiser’s Edge, our offline fundraising software.

In addition to Scott’s arrival, Kintera also hired a new Chief Executive earlier this year, Richard LaBarbera, replacing the firm’s founder who had long held the position.  Recently, Kintera announced a new initiative - Kintera Connectwhich promised a new approach to integrating with other systems, a complete reversal from Kintera’s past strategy.  However, when few details of this program were available, I feared this was mostly talk with little substance.

By agreeing to do yesterday’s call, Scott made himself available for questions by the entire Nten community.  Although Kintera Connect was a main topic, he also addressed many other issues including one that Kintera has always sought to bury – the company’s financial viability.  After detailing many new technical initiatives currently in process, Scott described the firm’s goal of reaching profitability later this year and that they are “almost there now.”

Scott also described how Kintera no longer wants to do “everything for everybody,’ which has led to it having a product which tries to do too many things, not all which it does well.  By opening up to tie in with other systems, Kintera seems to now realize that it must focus on its strengths: e.g. CRM, CMS, advocacy, and leave the rest to others.

Other announcements included:

  1. implementation of Akamai technology to enhance performance
  2. data center migration
  3. sharp increase in capacity to send mass emails
  4. enhanced CMS, replacing current system

Although I’ve often been a critic of Kintera in the past, this conference call shows that the new management at Kintera is determined to set things right.  I’ll wait and see if the results equal the promise, but Scott’s willingness to talk openly is a promising sign.  A recording of the conference call is available at Nten’s site.