March 2008 - Posts
This is my last day in San Diego at the AFP International Conference before taking the red-eye back home tonight. I had been mulling over an April Fool's Day post but decided anything really humorous would also probably cause me some trouble. The Agitator took today's date as an opportunity to an older faux news story from The Onion about the Flehner-Lathrop Syndrome Foundation.
Bob Geldof is today's keynote speaker and he takes the main stage at 9:30am this morning. The speakers have all been very good this year and I'm looking forward to hearing Geldof's remarks.
From 11:30am to 12:30pm today I will be doing a book signing with Jim Greenfield and Ted Hart for People to People Fundraising: Social Networking and Web 2.0 for Charities. The book is now in its second reprint and Ted informed me last week that this is the fastest selling book in the series published by Wiley.
On a related note, Blackbaud is sponsoring an event in London called "Social Networking for Charities: People to People Fundraising" on May 1st. The event is part of the UK launch for the People to People Fundraising book. Click here to get more information and to register online.
Another sunny day in San Diego and some great sessions taking place at this year's AFP International Conference. Dr. Jane Goodall was this morning's keynote speaker.
I'm speaking in just a few minutes and jumped online long enough to post my presentation: The Power of TrueCRM: Unleashing Integrated Online and Offline Strategies to Get Results
The exciting news of the day is the announcement by Blackbaud that we've released Blackbaud NetCommunity Universal. The product formerly codenamed "Scorpio" provides all the functionality and capability of Blackbaud NetCommunity without requiring organizations to have The Raiser's Edge. BBNC Universal leverages the Infinity platform where we are building all of our next generation applications. I'll be giving a closer look at BBNC Universal in a future blog post.
I should have some more interesting things to post tomorrow from the conferences. Lots going on and as always too little time to blog about it.
It's a mostly sunny morning here in San Diego and I've already hit Ralphs for a day's supply of diet soda. (Some dude was in front of me buying a carton of half-and-half with a personal check.)
Things get into full gear a little bit later today at AFP's 45th International Conference on Fundraising. Yesterday there were some CFRE training and fundraising workshop sessions. The marketplace opens at noon and there are some goings-on before the opening plenary session at 4:30pm. The complete schedule is posted here online.
Changing the Look
Blackbaud launched the latest version of our corporate website today. Some different approaches to presenting information, content, and a much bigger emphasis on different types of media including video testimonials and podcasts to mix things up. There is also a focus on presenting some of the stories from across our 19,000 clients. And finally, the new site presents some brand and identity changes that have been in the works. Hats off to the team that put in a lot of hours pulling off this redesign. It's never an easy task.
Changing the Meme
Every year I try and take in a bunch of different concerts. And with each passing year the number of lighters used during the rock ballads continues to decline. Instead the concert air is lit with the luminosity of mobile phones. There was a very telling moment at NTC last week when the air was full of iPhones. I caught a concert last night with a friend and we were simply gobsmacked by an entire venue lit up by phones. I'm waiting for Bono's magic trick from a few years ago to start becoming more common place.
Changing the Location
Tomorrow morning I'll be flying out to San Diego for AFP's 45th International Conference on Fundraising. There are some great sessions lined up for this year and I'm looking forward to the keynotes by Jane Goodall, Bob Geldof, and Kevin Carroll. I'm fortunate enough to be presenting at AFP for the second year-in-a-row and I will be posting my presentation online next Monday.
Changing the Transparency
Next week our product development team will be code complete on Blackbaud NetCommunity version 5.5. In the past, we have done feature review sessions with clients prior to the actual release and they have always been well received. That will continue but I'll also be posting sneak previews on this blog over the next few weeks. There are some really exciting new things on the horizon.
Blackbaud formally announced today that all Blackbaud NetCommunity customers can now receive The Raiser's Edge API without having to pay a software license fee. The BBNC API has always been free to use for clients and this was the next logical step to encourage more development. Our BBNC API wiki also continues to grow and expand as well.
At last week's NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference there was a whole lot of talk about open API's and what various companies and organizations were doing with them. But about 97% of the discussions and spin about open APIs were all about data or functionality. Very little of the conversations were about data and functionality. A user could move data from this system to that system a bit easier. Or a user could build new features on top of a single platform. But not both.
The major difference about what Blackbaud is doing with our API initiatives is to allow clients the ability to do data exchange and functionality development. You want to surface information unique to your organization online? Great! It's all there and we've given you the ability to do it. (Not just limited sets of the data.) You want to build your own functionality in the application, but take advantage of the built-in security, transaction capabilities, or content editor? Great! That's all there too. It's form and function with no limits.
Last week I got an email about this kind of stuff in action. The U.S. Naval Academy Alumni Association and Foundation launched the latest version of their online website built using BBNC. USNA is one of several clients that have built their own data exchange and functionality using the BBNC API. USNA's Garrett Keating, who runs his own Customizing Blackbaud NetCommunity blog, showed me a Google Maps + BBNC + Raiser's Edge data part that they built just for their alumni community members to use.
This is an example of some of the really powerful things that the plat form allows you to do. Garrett references some other parts built using the BBNC API on his blog. All is this is pretty exciting stuff and I have been talking to a lot of clients that have also developed their own parts or have partnered with Blackbaud Interactive to assist them in this development work. Look for some more examples and news in the near future.
Wait a minute! What happened to Day 2? I got so caught up in the sessions, the hallway chats between the sessions, and the sessions after the sessions that I never got a chance to blog about the day. Check out some of what some other bloggers have been saying here. I'll sum up Day 2 in a few words: Piano. iPhone. ROI. Integration vs. Interface.
This morning I sat in on panel discussion about the grassroots efforts of nonprofits in the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Some inspiring stories of progress with so much done and so much left to do here in New Orleans. I hopped around to some different sessions as I keep trying to be in more than one place at once.
They just wrapped up the awards presentation. A lot of really good people and work were recognized including America's Giving Challenge. I hope they post all the winners on the NTEN website so people can get some ideas of successful campaigns and programs in action.
Later today I'm doing my session called "Let Your Stakeholder's Mouse Do the Walking." It's a mix of trends, ideas, and most importantly examples of nonprofits that are empowering their constituents in exciting ways. To download a copy of my presentation just click here.
I'm at the NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans this week. The Blackbaud booth is still somewhere in Memphis thanks to the weather and FedEx. (This actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise as our improvised signage drew quite a popular reaction and a large crowd.)
The NTEN folks have a blog up that's covering all the action from the conference. Give it a look.
I'm going to attempt to post a few things this week from the conference and hopefully post some photos as well. On Friday, I'll be presenting at the conference and will post the presentation online.
This past weekend's edition of The New York Times Magazine devoted a tremendous amount of coverage around giving and philanthropy. Here's a recap and some links...
"The Celebrity Solution" - James Traub leads with actress Natalie Portman's efforts on behalf of FINCA International and covers a wide range of celebrities engaged in philanthropy. The article points out that although celebs may get more access they still run into roadblocks trying to make things happen.
"What Makes People Give?" - David Leonhardt explores different theories including "warm glow" and "impure altruism" to explain the source of philanthropy. A lot of stats from places like The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University and a variety of different studies all point to a single answer: It depends.
"How Many Billionaires Does It Take to Fix a School System?" - Panel discussion that includes Steve Barr, Frederick Hess, Vanessa Kirsch, Joel I. Klein, Tom Vander Ark, and Paul Tough. A lively debate with some good discussion, including Kirsch's comment that "we’re seeing a new kind of philanthropist. They don’t want to put their name on a gym; they don’t want to put their name on a building. They want to see change."
"Self-Made Philanthropists" - Joe Nocera tells the story of Herb and Marion Sandler, who opted for starting their own non-profit instead of financially supporting one. The article plays off of what Matthew Bishop of The Economist calls "Philanthrocapitalists": wealthy entrepreneurs who are applying to philanthropy the same principles that made them successful businesspeople.
"For Good, Measure" - Jon Gertner dives into the impact dilemma. The number of large gifts continues to grow, but the ability to measure and show true impact remains a problem. And once you get past what is working, then you want to understand how it is working. The potential side-effect is that giving for giving's sake gets pushed aside for outcome measurements found in the private sector.
Sometimes when you start reading one thing it ends up taking you to new places and spaces. Here's some stream of consciousness connections from earlier today:
Beth Kanter starts blogging about her tag cloud and links off to Sam Lawrence. He's done a deep dive into some popular blogs and the result is a post called "10 Thought Leaders, Boiled Down" that is an interesting read. "People" and "Work" are the two big macro words that emerge from across all these blogs. One of the bloggers that Sam looks into is Robert Scoble, the former Microsoft tech evangelist who just started a new gig at Fast Company. Scoble has been blogging a lot about Silverlight, and he mentions that Microsoft and Nokia are working together to get Silverlight on the Finnish company's phones. Blackbaud has been doing some things with Silverlight (think Adobe Flash on HGH) and hopefully in a future blog post I can share some examples coming soon to Blackbaud NetCommunity. Mark Johnston threw in a comment about the iPhone's lack of support for Flash and adds his $0.02 that Steve Jobs might add Silverlight if the performance issues with Flash can't get worked out. All my Apple products are misbehaving lately so I guess this is another reason to wait on the iPhone.
Seth Godin has been jamming a lot lately about the music industry and points to Kevin Kelly's post about "1,000 True Fans", which looks at The Long Tail theory from a different perspective. Long Tail theory guy Chris Anderson has a great new article in Wired this month called "Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business" that is worth reading. I had stopped reading Wired back in the 90s when it got tired, but began picking it up again a year ago when they did a major redesign of the magazine. Chris also has a great blog where he writes about the FREE article and how they did a 6,000 word preview of the book, which doesn't come out until 2009. The mind-bender is that the ideas in the article and the future book have actually been getting a test drive on Chris' blog for a while now. This is something you see a lot more of these days. I think it was David Weinberger who was one of the first to do it with Small Pieces Loosely Joined a few years ago. David is one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto and I got to know him and Doc Searls pretty well a few years ago. Doc is now a fellow at the at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and is working on Project VRM (Vendor Relationship Management). His latest blog entry has Doc pondering how he'd do in a class about The Cluetrain Manifesto. Markets are still conversations.
FundRaising Success has posted my "Embracing Nonprofit 2.0 in Your Organization" article online. It's part of their monthly ProSpeak spotlight series that is only available online. The ideas in the article came out of an Internet strategy meeting hosted by one of Blackbaud's clients last year.
Almost every organization that I've spoken with in the past few years has struggled with getting their key stakeholders to embrace and value emerging technologies. I don't think you have to understand or appreciate all the bits and bytes, but you do need to recognize how new technologies can transform how your organization can interact with constituents.
How do you start that transformation? What mindset does it take to jumpstart change? The article breaks it down into four core ideas:
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Personalize Your Mission
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Embrace Your Frienemies
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Integrate Your Channels
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Measure Your Progress
These aren't "just add water" solutions but they can hopefully get things moving in the right direction. And momentum is one of the most powerful forces in the universe.