Tag Archives: SAAS

Still More ePhilanthropy Ideas From Around the Web

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According to the Foundation Center’s Philanthropy News Digest. “some of the nation’s largest charities…have seen only modest gains in online donations…because many of them have been slow to embrace or aggressively market their Web sites as a platform for giving.”  So this may be more a result of a lack of marketing than to a slowdown in the growth of online fundraising.

In Fundraising Success, Steve Kehrli suggests that there’s no such thing as a free donation, The costs of ephilanthropy usually include:

  1. e-commerce platform integrated with your constituent database.
  2. creative team that creates effective copy, images and video
  3. production department that standardizes email content.
  4. list of online prospects that eventually become donors
  5. consultants and analysis that provide actionable recommendations.

Steve suggests that there are other costs, such as the correspondence team that responds to inquiries and training / developing staff that are also part of developing effective online strategies..

Pew / Internet released a report on cloud computing that estimates 69% of online users are now using hosted applications and/or storing data online, but many are concerned about how this information will be used by online vendors.

eJewishPhilanthropy’s Brand Sharing 2.0 suggests that to make the most of Web 2.0 tools, nonprofit organizations give up some control over their organizational identities and “allowi their strongest supporters to use these organizational brands as an extension of their own personal online branding efforts,” offering examples from the Salvation Army, National Geographic and the World Wildlife Fund.

Finally, marketing guru Seth Godin gave a stimulating talk this week as part of Network for Good’s wonderful Nonprofit 911 series on how to become a ‘purple nonprofit.’

Tips on Working with an Online Vendor

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At my current organization, we’ve just rolled out our first week of going live with Convio for our national walks program, which raised over $6 million in the past year.  Having worked with many online services products, below I offer some tips in maintaining a successful relationship with your vendor:

  1. Take advantage of any training that is available to learn the product.  This enables you to deal with issues more quickly and avoids the situation where support staff impatiently tell you to ‘read the manual’
  2. Develop a rapport with your account manager or whoever has been assigned to handle your relationship.  This includes asking not only what the vendor can do for you, but what your responsibilities are in using the product and dealing with the vendor’s staff.
  3. Document problems over the web;  Convio provides a Salesforce enabled support system which allows me to review calls I’ve placed, and add updates.  If your vendor doesn’t provide this, use your own tracking system, as I did in the past with a product like Elementool.
  4. Be respectful about prioritizing issues.  If a problem is affecting a major application and / or many of your co-workers, make sure the vendor knows this and use escalation procedures.  (Make sure you specifically ask about how to escalate issues.)  If you make every problem into an ‘emergency,’ then nothing will be treated as a high priority.
  5. If you’re dealing with a vendor like Convio that has many modules, learn which products are most actively supported (preferably before you’ve decided on a vendor);  you can find this out by asking which modules are used by the most large clients.
  6. When rolling out a new application, be sure to test exhaustively.  We’re dealing with a problem this week that we might have avoided had we tested a bit more extensively.
  7. Develop a relationship with other nonprofits that are already using the product and take advantage of any online forums (either promoted by the vendor or not) to learn from others and share your own experiences.
  8. Be careful of criticizing your vendor to internal staff.  Even if you’re feeling frustrated on a particular day, don’t vent to your co-workers;  you want them to feel positively about the product you’ve selected despite any occasional glitches that come up. 

Should nonprofits use hosted software?

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I participated in an interesting discussion recently on NTen‘s discussion group about how much nonprofit organizations should take advantage of hosted software applications.  I’ve been a proponent of ASPs / on demand software for quite a while now;  the only major application I haven’t switched over is email, which I continue to download to my local PC using Thunderbird.  But my main CRM (SalesForce) and calendar (Google) is web based;  I still can’t understand why my wife (and many others) insist on relying on Outlook where this information is stored locally where it is subject to computer / backup failure AND can only be accessed from that one location (or through remote access).

Nonprofits usually have limited technical resources, if any at all.  Using hosted applications reduces the need for a home grown networking infrastructure;  the main concern becomes having a reliable Internet connection.  But this doesnot mean that no tech savvy staff are needed.  The technical skills to support online applications are different from what is required to maintain local applications since it puts a heavier reliance on choosing stable vendors and maintaining these relationships.

As is the case with local software, choosing packages that play well with other vendors is important, so it’s helpful to investigate APIs and whether or not the vendors have previously developed links to other systems.

Nonprofits can of course get discounted (mostly local) software through services such as Tech Soup,  but in the long run hosted applications will win out.  It’s also fascinating that some nonprofits still insist on custom applications when there are so many web based programs that can do so much ‘out of the box.’

Nten’s annual conference kicks off next week, so I’m sure this topic will be debated anew.