Anticipate - Personalize - Integrate

When I have the pleasure of talking with leaders in nonprofit organizations, two things come up again and again as critical to building a sustainable future:  the need to achieve a broader and better view of their constituents; and the need to reach them in new and more meaningful ways.

Anticipate
There is a generational shift underway, and this year could possibly mark the third year that the actual volume of donors declines in the US. If we in the nonprofit community are going to succeed at reigniting the growth in these numbers, we are going to have to anticipate the needs of the next generation of donors. The million-dollar question you should ask is not only, “How can we keep our current supporters engaged?”, but also, “How can we attract the millennial generation that is so vital to sustaining our mission in the future?”

Personalize
“Gen Yers” expect everything to be open, connected, and personalized. The path to achieving this openness is the Application Program Interface (API). The power of the API lies in the ability to connect databases and applications to provide a 360-degree view of your constituents; this is something that can only be achieved when all of your systems (and other applications that contain valuable information) are talking in real time, versus collecting and transferring data after the fact. 

Your principal database – what you might call your “database of record” – also needs to reach out in real time into the systems in which your constituents interact and network. This “outbound” version of the API enables nonprofits to connect and provide personalized interactions with their constituents in Facebook®, MySpace®, and YouTube®, anywhere they shop or order services, and through the technology devices they use. Check out Blackbaud Labs to see these ideas in action.

Integrate
APIs also enable nonprofits to connect and extend inside their own environments, allowing them to combine multiple disparate databases into one holistic data view.

When Blackbaud NetCommunity and its corresponding free and open API were released in 2004, we affirmed our commitment to openness and leading the nonprofit community to a better place. We welcome the recent movement by other suppliers who have also published APIs — it is not only good for nonprofits, it is a critical element in their future success.

Blackbaud NetCommunity provides an open, programmable component architecture for incorporating powerful customizations. Taking that one step further, we recently announced that we are providing the API for The Raiser’s Edge to current and future Blackbaud NetCommunity customers so that developers who write custom applications or incorporate third-party applications will be able to achieve a much deeper integration. 

Along with the release of Blackbaud Enterprise CRM and Blackbaud Direct Marketing in 2007 and the recent release of Blackbaud NetCommunity Universal  — all leveraging the Infinity platform — came another level of openness. Through the use of SOAP and language-agnostic Web services, APIs are evolving and becoming much more robust, while simultaneously becoming much simpler. The current and future Blackbaud products of the next generation (v.8) will all follow suit.

Your constituents enjoy the benefits of your integrated solution every time  you use your 360-degree view of them to do any of the wide variety of things that will make them happier and enable them to support your organization in the ways they prefer. By leveraging APIs, you can learn more about your constituents and enrich the donor experience to build lasting relationships.