You have probably heard lots about Web 2.0, but increasingly companies are using Web 2.0 to drive what is now being called “Customer Service 2.0”. Customer Service 2.0 is about using blogs, discussion boards, and all the latest social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. to monitor and stay in touch with customers to help uncover and resolve their issues. No doubt, this will increase customer satisfaction in the short term, but more importantly, it will be something that is expected from any type of organization with “customers”, even including nonprofit organizations.
Last month, Comcast received a lot of press when they began monitoring and responding to anyone who tweeted about Comcast on Twitter.com. How do you engage with someone who is only known online as digitalkitty or oxjox? Well, by their preferred method of communication, of course, which in this case is Twitter. Comcast set up a Twitter account called comcastcares and began responding to complaints and problems within minutes of them being posted.
(BTW, Comcast probably should have checked with their marketing team before calling their effort Comcast Cares, since a Google search for “Comcast Cares” returns a lot more hits for “Comcast Cares Day” — another admirable initiative which is their employees’ day of caring in the community.)
In the past, Blackbaud has sometimes been hesitant to intrude upon posts about us on public forums, either because we felt our responses would be unwelcome or perhaps because we were afraid of publicly giving the wrong response. But this type of response is now welcomed and even expected, so we have really increased our online presence as of late with Blackbaud Labs, and better forums and blogs that are all publicly available. We attempt to participate in discussions about Blackbaud when it feels appropriate, all so our customers can understand how committed we are to understanding their issues and meeting their needs.
So what should your strategy be? Should your employees or volunteers be out there authoring blogs, tweets, and comments on news articles, message boards, and discussion forums? Or is your organization concerned, like many others we talk to, that this kind of activity will dilute your brand? It is definitely a scary proposition the first time you post something like this blog, take it from me. But I can also pretty much guarantee that as your organization grows and widens its impact, others will be discussing you online whether you prompt that discussion or not. So I encourage you to learn as much as you can and decide how your organization wants to participate in this media revolution.
And be sure to let me know how it’s going!
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.
(Originally appeared on Connections)
Each day the certainty of the changing tides is the one constant. I suppose it's more obvious when you live in a coastal city and less apparent if you're landlocked. Low tide gives way to high tide and back again. Get caught out at low tide and you might end up stuck. Get too comfortable at high tide and you might lose sight of the dangers below. We live our lives between the tides.
And just like the tides, change in our lives is never instantaneous. It takes place over a period of time. Although the rate of change may vary, just like tidal ranges and patterns differ depending on your location, the basic concept remains the same. This isn't a tale by Washington Irving and there's no fast-forward button or TiVo to skip past what happens in-between. When you wake up tomorrow, there won't be a robot butler waiting with your food tablets and flying car ready to go. It never works that way.
Technological change is no different. It is a constantly evolving hive of chaotic balance that ebbs and flows. Some changes happen quickly and others seem to take an eternity. But how do you live between the tides? How do you balance the old way of doing things with the new way of doing things? How do you transition the ways you fund your mission without cracking the foundation? How long do you hold on to what has always worked before you risk getting caught high and dry? One day at a time. One tide change at a time.
"The old systems get broken long before new ones become stable." – Clay Shirky
The horse and buggy was broken long before the automobile was perfected, and even after 120 years we're still trying to get the car on the good side of Mother Nature. The typewriter was broken the moment the personal computer debuted, but no one would say it doesn't still need improving. The record album business was broken by the cassette tape, which was then undone by the CD, then digital music files changed everything, and something else is sure to come along. The frozen TV dinner was broken the minute the first microwave came out, but popcorn still gets burnt 50% of the time in one. The newspaper classified ads were broken forever by the Internet, thanks to a one-two punch from the likes of Monster and Craigslist. The direct mail world was broken the instant the first email was sent, but 80% of all email sent is spam.
And the nonprofit fundraising world is being broken a little bit at a time too. Kiva breaks it. Room to Read breaks it. GlobalGiving breaks it. GOOD magazine breaks it. Causes on Facebook breaks it. People to people fundraising breaks it. Care2 breaks it. And this list of new-but-not-yet-perfected things will go on and on. You can choose to ignore it all, but that won't stop the changing tides. You can dismiss some of these things as fads or just a flash in the pan. You can cover your eyes right up until the moment you find yourself stranded on the exposed rocks. That's your choice.
Change is messy. Who will win? Who will lose? No one has a crystal ball and you can't call Miss Cleo either. The technology landscape of the past 30 years is littered with big hits and even bigger misses. Remember Betamax or Laserdisc or ColecoVision or Iridium satellite phones or PointCast or WebTV. And yes, even Apple once bombed with the Newton. Thomas Edison tried 6,000 different filaments before he got the light bulb right. Success is usually the end result of a series of failures. And sometimes the things that looked like failures the first time around often reappear down the road. Anything look familiar about Blu-ray or Xbox or the iPhone?
The industries change and the professionals do too. When is the last time you called on a cobbler, cooper, lamplighter, wheelwright, tinsmith, farrier, or a telegraphist. What's next on the career extinction list? There might not be some for a while, but every career path is now on the transformation list. The profession of a major gift officer, volunteer coordinator, international programs director, alumni relations manager, event planner, annual fund manager, donor services manager, fundraising system analyst, marketing communications specialist, overseas missionary, online content developer, and just about every other career path in the nonprofit world is changing with the tides. Are you changing with it? More importantly, are you seeking out people with a healthy appetite for change? Or do they get sea sick?
The technology providers are not immune to the tides of change either. What got you here won't necessarily keep you there in the future. And what makes you novel today can quickly make you a nobody tomorrow. The price of more novelty is always less understanding. What you deliver has always been more important than how you deliver it, but even that changes with the technology tides. Back in the day, Blackbaud used to hand-deliver the hardware and software to our clients. Now we let you choose who hosts the bits and bytes, and those bits and bytes are changing too. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The rate of change in the nonprofit world has been steadily increasing over the past decade. This is in part because the easier you can communicate, the faster change happens. But it has also been driven by major events like 9/11, the Asian Tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina. And the 2008 U.S. presidential election are giving us a whole new glimpse of the multi-channel communication and fundraising industrial complex in action. This isn't the world of tomorrow. This is the world of today. The tide has changed.
Nonprofits used to have the luxury of letting other organizations take the plunge first. But those days are quickly coming to and end. Depending on the mission and constituents that you serve, then you might already be past the tipping point. Many of you are already seeing the tide going out on some of your fundraising efforts and are working to adapt to the changes. There will be organizations that get lost in the depths and others that thrive at the edges. Everyone likes change, but no one likes changing. This is never easy, but it is necessary.
All of this change is spurring the growth of more nonprofit organizations than ever before. In a world where businesses keep consolidating to survive the nonprofit world is actually expanding more and more. These new organizations may not be as large as the old growth nonprofits, but they aren't carrying the same baggage and bias about change either. If you started your organization over from scratch today, then what tidal patterns would you pay attention to first? Now just take out the "if" and get started.
Amongst the chaos and the uncertainty is where the innovation happens. This panics some people and drives the passions of others. These are the exciting times to live in. This is where nonprofits finally overcome the roadblocks of the past, and get on to fulfilling their missions in dynamic new ways. It starts with experimenting with new strategies and technologies (not the other way around). Try one new thing, measure where you started and measure where you finished, and then adjust. Fail fast. We live our lives between the tides. It can be a great place to live if you are willing to give it a try.
The technology world is full of buzz words that make up a language all their own. With the turn of the 21st century, software as a service (“SaaS”) took its place in the dictionary of technology terms that are redefining the way many organizations plan for the future. With the web as the virtual foundation, SaaS providers can offer solutions that remove many of the obstacles created by traditional software. A number of companies have successfully deployed the SaaS model to hundreds of thousands of users, most notably SaaS blogger Phil Wainewright's four horsemen of SaaS, and in the nonprofit world eTapestry blazed the trail. However, these benefits often come with limitations on flexibility and data access. At the same time, traditional software vendors with deep functionality are undergoing the transition to the web delivered software business model. Forward thinking traditional software vendors such as Oracle and Blackbaud have invested in technologies to deploy their solutions over the web by providing hosting services, often called “OnDemand” services, while retaining the ability to offer full-featured, customizable, and data rich solutions.
Easy to Deploy and Easy to Access
There are key strategic benefits for organizations that make the move to this new generation of SaaS or OnDemand technologies. A significant challenge for traditional software, particularly for nonprofit organizations, is the lengthy implementation cycle, extensive IT staff resources, and investment in hardware to implement and maintain applications. OnDemand and SaaS solutions alleviate these concerns by offering a technology solution delivered on an internet-based platform, completely eliminating the need for IT investment. This is a powerful capability, because it provides the opportunity to deploy solutions very quickly, and speed to market is an important competitive advantage in today’s economy. Gone are the days when organizations have to worry about IT procurement cycles, servers, or capacity limitations — now they can simply log on and get to work! Also, pure web accessibility means that users, whether they are back-office users in the finance or development office or website users like donors, volunteers, and program specialists in the field, can access the applications anywhere they can get an internet connection. Now, that's accessibility!!
Predictable Technology Costs
OnDemand and SaaS technology is also changing the way organizations think about their financial investments in technology. With SaaS, they are not paying to own software, but are essentially “renting” the right to use it over a specified contract term. SaaS applications are often priced on a per-user or per transaction basis, which helps organizations match their costs to their revenue streams. The upfront cost is usually much less and ongoing expenses are more easily controlled, thus creating a low-risk model that many organizations find attractive. OnDemand solutions provide a hybrid approach. While typically the organization will still purchase and “own” the software license, the remainder of the technology investment is paid on a flat rate subscription basis over the contract term. So, the organization can avoid significant upfront costs in hardware and other supporting technologies. Either way, the organization gets a more predictable cost structure which helps ease planning and budgeting.
However, despite all the benefits, there remains some hesitation to adopt the SaaS and OnDemand models. First and foremost, organizations are very sensitive to the security of their critical data. Top tier SaaS and OnDemand vendors have made substantial investments in security and other technologies that likely far exceed the capabilities of an individual organization’s IT department. Despite this fact, many organizations are just not comfortable moving their applications outside the walls of their buildings, while other organizations do not yet trust the reliability of the “virtual” infrastructure. Despite some natural trepidation, there’s no denying that SaaS and OnDemand is becoming a cost-effective option that is forcing organizations to at least begin to think about the technology roadmap for the future.
Thanks to technological advances, advertising for open positions using online job boards is an easy and economical way to recruit. Check out any online job board and you’ll see that it’s saturated with thousands of job postings — looking for everything from hourly workers to CEOs.
With thousands of jobs posted on the Internet, many organizations are asking how they can attract highly qualified candidates. One creative solution is social networking. “Social networking technology” is the term used to describe websites that allow members to use their personal and business relationships for networking, hiring, and obtaining references.
At Blackbaud, we have turned to sites such as LinkedIn®, MySpace®, Facebook™, and Spoke to build social networks designed to attract candidates that may not be actively looking for a job. So far, we’ve found the most success in making connections through LinkedIn®, a networking site that represents more than 17 million professionals in over 150 industries.
LinkedIn® users create profiles and build their networks by inviting friends and past and present colleagues to join their social networks. Once someone is added to a user’s network, the user has access to view and correspond with that person and the people in his or her network. It’s like the “six degrees of separation” in the professional world — by allowing users to leverage personal relationships for professional gain, it proves once again that who you know is as important as what you know.
While using free personal accounts on LinkedIn® allows our recruiting team access to many profiles, we also use paid accounts to allow us to dive deeper into the site and perform searches based on name, keyword, title, company, location, industry, or group (potential employees, consultants/contractors, hiring manager, etc.). In addition, we’re given an InMail account that allows us to contact people outside of our network directly. Typically, we search for a specific profile and reach out to potential candidates through InMail.
As many hiring managers know, finding qualified candidates is no easy task. But since we began using this tool in 2007, we’ve made several hires for professional, experienced positions. As social networking gains popularity with working professionals and those who don’t feel comfortable posting their resumes on one of the more traditional job boards, tools like LinkedIn® will become even more important to recruiters. Blackbaud will continue using this progressive recruiting tool to connect with high caliber talent. Will we see you out there?
The Organization:
Founded in 1974, Bread for the City (BFC) provides food, clothing, medical care, and legal and social services to the poor of Washington, DC.
The Challenge:
Bread for the City wanted a new website that would create a more professional image, drive more support for the mission, and allow the organization to better integrate its online and offline marketing activities. To do this, the organization needed a solution that would integrate with The Raiser’s Edge® and avoid creating extra work for the five-person development staff.
The Solution:
Using Blackbaud® NetCommunity™, designers and consultants from Blackbaud Interactive™ worked with the development staff from BFC to create a new site that would better reflect the organization’s image, raise awareness, and engage constituents in a variety of ways.
The dynamic new website uses the following components to meet the staff’s strategic marketing goals:
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The Mission Statement is accessible from every page. The
home page uses Flash® technology to display principles and meaningful images. Repetition of the BFC mission statement reinforces the organization’s message, ideals, and goals.
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Online giving options are offered at various giving levels and methods for giving, all security-enhanced. The more options potential donors have, the more likely they are to give.
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Calls-for-action are accessible from every page, entitled “
GET INVOLVED.” A sidebar, entitled “Spotlight on:” urges new visitors to “
JOIN TODAY!” The site lists a variety of other ways that constituents can become involved, from
submitting recipes to
mirroring a case manager. Not only does it capture and create a record of the new constituent in The Raiser’s Edge®, but it allows returning visitors and donors to update their profiles.
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Advocacy options allow supporters to contact elected officials and the media on issues that impact the organization’s mission.
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Success stories demonstrate the organization’s community impact to supporters.
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News and articles provide fresh, informative content and give visitors a reason to frequently return. Adrienne Ammerman, BFC’s development associate, uses this feature in a very clever way. If BFC is mentioned in a news item, blog, or website, she sends a thank-you communication to the author. “It’s an appreciated acknowledgment for them and gives me the opportunity to create a rapport with members of the media, supporters, and potential donors,” she added.
Early Results:
Ringing in the New Year, the site went live on the last days of 2007. Staff members have been able to capture more information about visitors and constituents then they ever were able to before and have experienced increased operational efficiency due to the integration between Blackbaud NetCommunity and The Raiser’s Edge. Online gift processing has created significant time savings for the staff. “With our old site, we had to process online gifts and then manually re-enter them into The Raiser’s Edge. There was a three-day delay before we even saw the funds,” said Kristin Valentine, BFC’s director of development. “With our new site, what used to take me an hour now takes me five minutes.”
Welcome to NetWits, brought to you by your friends at Blackbaud. For many years, we’ve shared our opinions and advice on Internet marketing, online fundraising, and web-deployed solutions in a variety of other Blackbaud and industry publications. But with the recent creation of our Blackbaud Interactive division, we decided that creating a new publication focused on these topics would be a great way to serve our customers, share ideas, and simply show our enthusiasm for all things Internet!
We will be posting content from the NetWits newsletter to this blog to make it easier to carry on the conversation - so don't forget to leave a comment or two! Some articles will be unique to this newsletter, others will include links to interesting blog posts you may have missed, and from time to time we’ll republish information we discover in, or have contributed to, other sources. We’ll also feature original stories about many of our interesting clients, too. And as always, we invite your feedback, topic suggestions, and submissions!
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Now, on to the good stuff…..