The Forefront of Technology

Jay Love — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:08:00 GMT

During a recent reading session I was taken back down memory lane by an article in Fast Company entitled "The Evolution of Amazon". (One often goes down memory lane once past 50, but hang with me on this one if you can.)

The article speaks for itself regarding the total transformation of the book publishing industry by Amazon and the Kindle. Such massive changes are exciting for most and downright scary for those closest to the established industry. In this case, the metamorphosis of the book publishing industry with its many strange caveats may be good. Like most industry transformations the established few will fight it tooth and nail.

This made me ponder the many such transformations I have been part of in the technology world. My fascination with technology started early with taking old radios and televisions apart. You could see radical changes then based upon models 3-4 years apart. Now the changes come every 6 months.

My first job out of college allowed me to be the trendsetter in a more traditional business. I started my career in business forms. I was pretty good at selling them up and down the street to all sorts of businesses on the southwest side of Indianapolis. Because of that fact the owners offered me the chance to help introduce carbonless paper forms to our area. This was sort of like the fax story I related a few posts back.

If you can imagine, I had customers plead with me to keep their old carbon paper forms that were messy and literally added tons each week to waste in our environment. Thank goodness the new way caught on. More importantly I was hooked on being part of the catalyst for change in any business setting.

My next two examples allowed me to be on the buying rather than the selling side. Not long after our first child was born, my wife decided to call in the Encyclopedia Britannica salesperson. She reasoned that, for us to be a proper household for attainment of knowledge, such a set was needed. We listened patiently to the presentation. Just as the properly trained salesman was going for the close, I mentioned the rudimentary online information service at the university where I was taking MBA classes. I asked why we should buy such a large set of books when I could research any article online there. I even ventured as far as to predict that nearly every middle class home and up may someday have access to such research via this online interface. Neither the sales person nor my wife bought in and we purchased the entire set and the annual updates until the worldwide web became commonplace!

The second one was over lunch with my travel agent in the early 90's. I asked her what she was going to do when all of her customers could easily compare flights and buy them with a few clicks of a button. Her retort was that the airlines would never put her out of business and the paper printed ticket would keep her around. She closed up several years later after downsizing twice.

In both cases technology caused transformation to happen in real time. Numerous people benefited and only a few lost. However, those who were losing made a ton of noise.

I truly believe this will continue to happen in philanthropy. We have already seen the convenience and proliferation of web sites and online giving. That in my opinion is just the tip of the iceberg. Communications and the relationships they nurture are the key fulcrum of philanthropy. It is in this area of communication where the transformation of technology is happening quite rapidly.

Communications are now pervasive for all of us. We have the desire to share and to know what everyone else is doing that we care about, hence the lightening fast growth of social media such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Add in the RSS feeds, emails, texts and other real time communications and you have the makings of a revolution in relationship building for nonprofits.

Just imagine how easy it will be for all of us to be in the real time communication fray when we only need to carry one single device to use. Please click on this link to see Dan Mascai’s opinion on how that will all happen.

Here is a brief snapshot of the essence of the single page article. Online you can point to each device and see how they just might morph into one single device. Perhaps it will be as commonplace as a wristwatch is now!

How our diverse species of consumer electronics -- books, music, computers, and phones -- have evolved. Will a single device ever unite them all?

Quite a First Year

Jay Love — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:48:00 GMT

August 1, 2008, marked eTapestry’s one year anniversary as part of Blackbaud. It has truly been quite a year. So many in the sector wondered just what this merger would mean for our clients, employees and leadership team. My last post mentioned that the partnership has exceeded our expectations. Such a statement is huge when you consider the impact on our customers, prospective customers and staff.

I thought I could illustrate my statement by using the first year milestones I created for our all company meeting last week. Please let me know if you agree via the comment area of our blogs. Here goes:

Payroll/benefits switchover a success (This happened without a hitch and in just a few months. Need I say more?)
Sharing of leads between BB divisions (Such a win for our prospective customers! They now have the vast resources of numerous product lines and add-ons to evaluate and pursue. Obviously, this is neat for all of our sales and marketing teams too!)
Extensive partnership with Blackbaud hosting center (One of our secondary hosting centers is now the vast and extremely state-of-the-art center we share with other Blackbaud product lines in Atlanta. I hope some of you reading this will have a chance to visit. Hardly any possible stone in security and technology has been left unturned!)
Leadership training and mentoring (Superb training and guidance has been part of the first year for many of our team. Resources far beyond what we had as a small company do make a huge difference.)
Public company legal and finance teams (Throughout the past year our use of these outstanding resources made life easier for our customers and partners.)
Establishing a Blackbaud RE support team here (The synergies were abundant as the team was recruited, trained and placed into full gear right here in our expanded offices in Indianapolis!)
Blackbaud grants made to eTap employee-selected charities (As part of the ongoing commitment to philanthropy by Blackbaud many of our employees were able to request and secure grants for the charities they volunteer for.)
Technology upgrades and improvements (The number of items, which result from being part of such a large and vibrant company, are almost too many to mention. Among them were internal system replacements, video conferencing, state of the art phone systems and switches.)
Blackbaud’s MatchFinder became an eTapestry module (Due to the excellent and fast work of our product development teams, this key fundraising tool for our customers became part of our module family almost immediately!)
Blackbaud Analytics/Prospect Research became an eTapestry module (This important fundraising tool became part of the eTap product line even faster than the module above. Then to kick off our new partnership, Blackbaud provided it to many of our current prospect research customers for FREE through the end of their current contract term!)
We convinced 99% of the Non-Profit sector eTapestry will remain a viable solution for a fundraising tool well into the future! (We thank so many of you for believing what all of us so emphatically stated over and over about the future of eTapestry. We are so much stronger and better able to serve our thousands of existing and future customers than we were even a year ago. Maybe that 1% will always be caused by a few of the wacky competitors and the rumors that seem to hatch from within...)

Well, there you have the milestones all in a row. I hope you agree it has been quite a first year. As Tony Hinkle, the great coach of my alma mater Butler University, and many others have stated, the best thing about freshmen is that they become sophomores!

Perhaps our sophomore year of being part of Blackbaud will allow us to achieve even more success for our customers and our team. I personally think it is a safe bet!

The Jay Love Blog : technology

The Forefront of Technology

Quite a First Year