Social Source

GiveWell: Evaluating Marketing Messages as if they were Impact Statements

2009-12-04T08:16:00.000-08:00

I have followed Givewell (http://www.givewell.net/) since it was founded and have come to an epiphany. Givewell is evaluating marketing messages as if they were performance data. So naturally very few charities look effective.

Givewell was founded on the idea that if we evaluated charities in the same way we evaluate stocks... with the same rigor and analysis... donors could make better investment decisions. Unfortunately, donors make donation decisions, not investment decisions.

And charities know empirically (fundraising is a science with direct mail stats, A-B testing, etc.) that donation decisions are driven by emotion not analysis.

In the world of public companies there is a simple fact. Companies lie. That is why we have the SEC, that is why we have accounting standards, that is why stock analysts are always trying to pry out more information to evaluate the "truth".

The lies that companies tell are not about maliciousness, they are about marketing. Take a class in marketing and they tell you to focus on the benefits to the consumer. Simplify the message. The process of taking complex and nuanced facts and boiling them down into marketing messages leads to distortion and hyperbole.

Now we apply this to GiveWell and the 388 charities they evaluated and the 9 they recommend. Our sector has no equivalent of the 10-k form so Givewell looks at the marketing messages and sees distortion and hyperbole. Well of course!

Lets just remind ourselves of the difference between a 10-k and a marketing messages.

The 10-k is written by operations professionals in the finance department based on reams of real financial and operational data. Marketing messages are written by marketing staff, who generally don't have access to the same financial and operational data.

The 10-k goes out under the CEO and CFO's signatures. By penalty of law, the data needs to be correct. The marketing messages doesn't go out under the CEO/CFO signature and in all but the most egregious situations, hyperbole, distortion, and yes even lies are not sanctioned in any way.

The information Givewell has to work with is generally not produced based on internal financial and operational information (with the exemption of the 990) AND hasn't gone out under the CEO/CFO signature as true and factual under the penalty of law. The fact that most evaluated charities can't be considered "effective" is less about the charities themselves than about the data those charities make available.

I personally think that Givewell should continue doing what they do. Their methodology is sound and highlights that fact that charities generally don't provide the data required to evaluate effectiveness/ROI. Hopefully their work will encourage more charities to provide that data.

At the same time, they need to lower the intensity of the attacks on the marketing messages. They recently took SmileTrain to task (http://blog.givewell.net/?p=466) for their $250 per surgery figure. While the analysis is good and I don't disagree with them, I would like to see them acknowledge that the $250 figure is a marketing message not an operational measurement.

Again, the corporate world is littered with marketing messages that don't stand up to the facts - "Build apps five times faster, at half the cost." and a million similar statements. Let's not hold charities to a higher marketing standard than everyone else, lets highlight the fact that they don't provide the operational data required to evaluate their effectiveness.

Crazy...

2009-10-26T12:46:00.000-07:00

I couldn't agree more,

"Sitting in the session about Drupal made me think about how crazy it is that we have hundreds of PBS and NPR stations all working on the same problems, and there is not enough sharing going on. Why should we all spend tens of thousands of hours working on the same issues separately?"

Via Ken Rickard http://www.palantir.net/blog/drupal-and-non-profits

Who is carrying that torch now? Or better yet, perhaps no one is carrying the torch since it is more of an organic discovery process going on.

If the Whitehouse understands how software can have mission impact, why do we have so much trouble in the social sector?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/24/AR2009102401266.html

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/whitehouse-switch-drupal-opensource.html

CiviCRM's 3.0 Review: Where are the weaknesses?

2009-08-06T13:27:00.000-07:00

I wrote a post in 2006 about CiviCRM's weaknesses. With the upcoming CiviCRM 3.0 release (try it out), I thought I would revist those weaknesses and see if I could add some more.

1. Ecology. The ecology is now mature enough to support virtually any size customer.

http://civicrm.org/professional (support the active contributors!)

Community reviewed list of hosts

2. Documentation. Online docs done by the esteemed John Kenyon and just released a CiviCRM book! I think the documentation is certainly on par with anything out there.

3. Donor Management. Pledges, soft credits and user configurable LYBUNT reports, what more can anyone want? (there are some things, but the basic functionality in now all present)

According to my criteria, CiviCRM has long surpassed the sustainability tipping point:

Lots of competant consultants are avaliable.
Nonprofits can pay for hosted CiviCRM or an install.
Documentation and online training is avaliable.
People are extending CiviCRM and contributing back. Go CiviCase!

So what are the weaknesses now? Since the CiviCRM team moves very rapidly, many of the key weaknesses are getting addressed in the 3.0 release... I probably should do this post yearly.

Usability. This was a recent bug-a-boo that the CiviCRM team took a big swing at in the 3.0 release. The new navigation bar is pretty much to die for. The configuration checklist that makes setting up a new site a snap is underadvertised and perhaps underappreciated. Oh, and the recent items list is a basic but import feature. There is still room for improvement, but CiviCRM is certainly now on par with any competitive piece of software.
Reporting. The new CiviReport framework addresses the basic reporting gaps and allows the community to fill most remaining reporting gaps.
Donor management gaps. Things like postal mail merge are not tightly integrated into the application or into the CRM history. Prospecting and proposals have yet to be addressed directly.
Accounting integration. This need to be smoothed out and improved. And the community is already on it.
Volunteer management. Not sure this is a weakness, per se, it just hasn't been a priority.

And other things people can add to the comments.

Overall, the 3.0 release represents the end of fundimental gaps in the utility of CiviCRM for most nonprofits.

Read this and be ashamed

2009-08-05T09:05:00.000-07:00

Every once in awhile I read something that just makes me sad.

Reading the Northern California Grantmakers blog, I came across this statement from a Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) publication.

Grantmakers, for instance, often are not aware of what it actually costs nonprofits to deliver services.

Something is seriously wrong with an industry that doesn't understand its customers. How on earth can grantmakers be OK with this situation?

Well, a gem from my experience with private foundations. In almost all cases grantees are not customers, the trustees are the customers. Foundations understand their trustees *very* well and generally (not always) the trustees don't require their organizations to understand grantees. And even if staff understands grantees, that isn't enough to change policy or trustee behavior.

In the egregious cases, the value of a grantees to a trustee derives from their ability to support the trustees ego. Does the grantee make me feel good? Does the grantee support my religious construct of "giving back." Does the grantee connect me with other powerful people? Can I chat about what the grantee does on my private plane with my social and business associates?

And finally, since the grantmakers are basically running the White House Social Innovation Fund, are we OK with people who are often unaware of what it actually costs a nonprofit to deliver services making the decisions about what the most innovative, scalable and effective programs are?

Nice little nugget to chew on there.

Inspired Contributions: Intervention for Dummies

2009-07-08T16:11:00.000-07:00

I'm usually pretty cynical when it comes to corporate contributions to development or social change. Then I read an absolutely inspired toolkit for human centered design done by IDEO and the Gates Foundation.

http://www.ideo.com/work/item/human-centered-design-toolkit/

With more and more do-gooders floating around poor communities, they should read the toolkit and really design interventions that effectively address the problems they are trying to solve.

Social Source Four Years Later

2009-06-18T10:37:00.000-07:00

I love it when thoughts converge.

Sonny Cloward tweeted a nice reminder of the nonprofit technology open source vs. commercial debate that has been going on for awhile [his post, my post]. He was congratulating Johanna Bates on a very nice post on her personal view of open source and nonprofits.

All this was catalized by Eben Moglen's NTC Plenary and has been covered by Holly Ross's post.

Four years latter basically nothing has changed in the discourse, but facts on the ground have seen a sea change.

The discourse is stil either/or & black/white.

The CiviCRM guys don't point out that Salesforce has a more polished functionality and better reporting tools. The Salesforce guys don't point out that CiviCRM can do membership management, events management, seamless acceptance of online donations and mass email -- all things that nonprofit users ask for every day on their message boards.

Why?

Simple marketing.

It is virtually impossible for platform providers to acknowledge one another or integrate because you are trying to get the customer to select your platform. Salesforce says select our platform and our ecology will help you out (though over the last 4 years I have seen little in the way of software innovation avaliable on the same terms as the platform donation - volunteer management tools, member management tools, event management tools, etc. CiviCRM says wait a few months and you'll get the stuff on our roadmap (better reporting, case management, improved events, etc.). I'll leave others to invent a better model of marketing a platform.

The facts on the ground, however, are finally getting really inspiring.

Salesforce has done a great job of penetrating the market through their donation program. In the last month, they finally seem to have got their act together and put the infrastructure in place to support long term, sustainable impact on nonprofit technology. And in doing so, low and behold, they have embraced open source.

Four years ago Sonny pointed out "I could easily use Salesforce as a model of proprietary/open source partnership—a corporate developer that embraces open source integration into their product." Yet it took them until today for them to actually take the lead and open source the starter pack.

The Nonprofit Starter Pack is now and open source project and they can begin the process the CiviCRM team began 5 years ago of building out nonprofit software that works for day to day users (events, memberships, etc.). By Salesforce embracing open source, they have finally, IMHO, put the critical pieces in place to transform nonprofit technology as part of a mission rather than as part of corporate philanthropy/marketing.

As an interesting side note, the traditional commercial nonprofit software providers are being assimilated into the Salesforce borg (Convio's CommonGround, recent MicroEdge announcement). Not sure of thos implications, but very interesting.

On the CiviCRM side, the juggernaugt continues to innovate and expand with features that regular nonprofit staffers need to use every day.

Four year ago Sonny took me to task and highlighted the key point: "nonprofit staff are pining away for affordable and effective apps that allow them to do their jobs"

Today, the situation is far better than it has ever been before.

Platforms, people, platforms! OpenWiser

2009-05-04T16:16:00.000-07:00

I had a conversation years back with the WiserEarth people since it pains me to see history keep repeating itself.

Recently there was an effort to fund open APIs for the WiserPlatform which had me take another look at the software ecology behind the mission. And in that look I found a priceless quote:

Paul's vision for WiserEarth always, always included it being open-source - there was never any back-and-forth on this matter, which is why we've always been so openly confident and deadfast in stating that WiserEarth is an open source project.

This is why folks in the sector need to find themselves some qualified technologists. Lets recap some of the highlights of executing this vision:

They roll their own platform because they don't want to build on existing platforms like Drupal or CiviCRM or a million other platforms I'm not personally associated with.
They don't make their code available to anyone (later remedied).
They don't build a data standard or API for www.wiserearth.org .
They have to hire someone to "clean up" their code for the open source release.
When they release their code, significant amounts of functionality from wiserearth.org are not available.
They can't afford to build any APIs and have to crowdsource money to raise the money for it.
Near as I can see from their developer community, no one except the folks that paid to open source their code uses their platform.

First, these guys are deserving, they run a really compelling community and they have a bunch of great ideas. But their technology execution is horribly misaligned with their mission and vision.

If Paul's vision was always to open source the platform, he either meant it in "marketing-speak"or didn't really know what he meant by "open source" - he was just using the word. This is all to common among executives and progressives with good intentions, but that doesn't make it OK. Just calling something an open source project has absolutely NO mission impact other than providing a "marketing lie" that makes people feel better about signing up at your website.

So if you want to do a social change technology project and have it be "open source," please bring in the technology strategist that knows what that means and the coders with the experience to do it correctly -- just hiring any old development firm tends to put you square in the "marketing lie" category.

Another Painful Aside

No APIs?! Talk about not having a technological clue. I suppose the logic was "wikipedia doesn't have APIs, why would we need them" (even though by 2006, MediaWiki had APIs).

This is yet another area where you need a good technologist. As an illustration:

Back in 2005, when we had to put together a "database in the sky" (which is an apt description for so many social change web projects) for a database of every missing person on the web in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina the FIRST thing we did was define a data format. The next thing we did was define an API. Then we built what we wanted to build.

Believe it or Not...

Having said all that, believe it or not, you should give a couple bucks to OpenWISER. I hope that someone will nock them upside the head and make them publish their data formats (or adopt existing ones) before they build code, but it would be a very good thing for the progressive movement to actually execute this one right.

Comercializing a Community

2009-04-21T10:31:00.000-07:00

A very interesting discussion is going on around Drupal's core development process.

As I read it, I realize the only voice of the companies that drive a lot of Drupal in that conversation is Dries. Sure, a bunch of people that are employees of the companies are contributing as individuals, but the companies themselves are not in the conversation.

Drupal is clearly being comercialized... folks noted that the Drupal homepage no longer has interesting stories, it's tipping toword site annoucements. The Drupalcons and various development sponsored by commercial interests is moving Drupal away from its roots.

I have two thoughts on this:

The companies are paying attention closely and communicating only through back channels. One might ask why that communication can't happen in the open.
The companies should be neck deep into the conversation. This is the future of their businesses.

Drupal 7 UE Redesign: Just Copy Already

2009-04-15T16:35:00.000-07:00

So I've been observing the Drupal 7 UE redesign project and have made another tremendous discovery. There is little (probably nothing) new under the sun. So when you want to hit the 80% principle, just copy from others.

So you have some of the intial Mark Bolton concepts & Lullabot's Buzzr UI for Drupal. Then you look at other CMS's, specifically Concrete5 and CMS Box (one of 2008's best UIs according to Jakob Nielsen). And you come to the conclusion that a CMS requires, drum roll please, a header, overlay window and inline editing -- three things that are in each of these CMSs and CMS designs.

This begs the question just how much original usability testing, getting to know your user time is really required. Couldn't you just copy what has gone before you? Or perhaps it is really good validation that the basic concepts are right on.

And a final thought. These concepts really aren't going to make Drupal unique... something else is required.Hopefully Bolton's concept of a "Tool for Site and Page Structuring" can be that unique element.

What it would take to start a CiviCRM ASP

2009-03-31T14:12:00.001-07:00

So we tried to start a CiviCRM/Drupal based ASP to solve the constituent relationship management/website/online donation/ mass email problem that most charities face with CivicSpace. It failed, but that does not mean that another attempt will also fail.

There are three basic approaches to doing a CiviCRM/Drupal ASP:

Technology first
Customer first
Hamster first

The technology first approach is building out the infrastructure to handle a high volume, self-service ASP.... low monthly price and high customer volume. This requires either piles of money or the super-committed technical geek founder to do the work. It relies on the build it first, then find the market approch. We did that at CivicSpace and we "ran out of runway".

Customer first says lets go out and build a lot of demand. Sure it will be really labor intensive to maintain the technology infrastructure and initially the customer service will not be great, but you avoid solving the technology problem until you have the real problem of too many customers and you need to build automation technology.

Hamster first is buy a VPS, put up a cool web page, market your product and hope for the best. The technology stack (CiviCRM/Drupal) is actually fine for this approach at the moment, but you'll face bulk mail deliverability, scalability, performance and other issues along the way.

Tech and customer both require a fair amount of capital to pay for the technology development (the ASP platform) or the marketing (making the service known in a very crowded vendor space). Hamster first could financially support a single consultant and once they have a working model, could easily be put in front of investors to attrach "expansion" capital rather than "start up" capital.

The other trap is the set up fees. We tried to make things self service... life is just too complicated. There has to be a set up service before your customer starts paying their monthly fee. My feeling is copy success... i.e. copy PicNet who have built a similar business on Joomla. People pay a couple thou to get started and then a monthly fee. I think they cracked an important part of the code.

Idealware releases new CMS report

2009-03-31T10:04:00.000-07:00

So Idealware released the much anticipated CMS report covering Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla and Plone. Overall it is a must read and all around general "reference for the ages."

I'll start with the nit picks and then get to the good stuff.

First, the "market analysis" fails what my ex-boss used to call the smell test. Sure the methodology is perfectly defensible, but the result is no where near reality. The 10,000 pound gorilla is Wordpress, not Joomla. Even though Joomla has a lot of traction in the traditional NPO world, I find it hard to reconcile the numbers. Plus, in most of the rest of the world the word "charity" is used instead of "nonprofit" so you might want to also inculde that keyword.

The security methodology appears to be just plain wrong. It appears that platforms with more security advisories are considered less secure. I'll hope that the actual methodology was different, but if not, it shows a fundimental misunderstanding of how open source security works.

The starting point is that there will always be bugs and security flaws in released software. The security of a platform is measured by the significance of those flaws and the speed at which they are resolved.

There can be both good and bad reasons for a high number of announcements.

Bad

(1) Code quality is poor - more security flaws are released in the the wild

Good

(1) A larger community of people is testing and therefore identifying security vulnerabilities.

(2) The community standard for what constitutes a security vulnerability is more stringent than a comparable project.

(3) A more transparent security process. No security problem is ever fixed without the release of a security advisory.

(4) The lifespan of security issues is very short... no security issues "linger" after they have been identified.

In general, the number of security advisories is a flag to look a bit deeper. High numbers of advisories can be either good or bad, you need to dig deeper to draw a conclusion.

The good stuff is the financial model behind the report. The ad model is really a quite good one. Since charities don't have the money to actually buy the report, get the consulting shops to buy advertising.

I think they should take it one step further. There is little upside to ad sales to cover the production of a report + surplus. Idealware has a good neutral reputation. They do a good job of maintaining it.

Why not broker leads to companies? All the idealware information is "hidden" behind a registration wall. Idealware's interactions with information consumers provide an opt in for vendors to communicate with them. Those opt in leads are sold to vendors.

This is a lot more involved than the ad model, but has a much higher upside as your volume goes up. Haven't done the numbers to see if this is really viable and don't have a solid sense of what the consulting firms would pay, but I suspect it would work.

FINALLY, the vendor community steps up

2009-03-30T10:16:00.000-07:00

So I look at this new Blackbaud NOW product and I must say, they have their corporate strategy right on to own all of the charity software market, soup to nuts.

Blackbaud NOW is basically Groundspring/ Network for Good -- a set of services designed for very small charities -- accept online donations, keep a central contact database, send mass emails. They take around 5% of your donation and you get the service for free.

Judging from the mailing address in Indiana, this is built on etapestry's technology (PS, please spring for a web designer, guys, the etapestry site is an eye sore). I find it interesting they didn't build something on Blackbaud's Infinity platform, but hey. They also couldn't spring for an email blast tool, but I suppose that might open a can of worms for them-- their email tool is basically designed to send email to individual contacts rather than mass mails with open tracking, etc.

If I put my cynical hat on, I would say this is just an etapestry lead gen tool, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and hope it is the precursor to real service for small charities. And hopefully some corporate strategist at Blackbaud has figured a way to serve the bottom of the market in order to feed prospects into their higher end offerings.

It makes me a little sad since CivicSpace offered this basic package plus soo much more , but alas... we were a bit to early and under-capitalized.

And finally, yet another data point that a CiviCRM-based ASP would be a good value proposition! Come on folks, anyone?

CiviCRM Continues to Make Constituent Relationship Management Accessible to Small Groups

2009-03-12T14:45:00.000-07:00

With the latest CiviCRM release (2.2) I am reminded that the CiviCRM team is one of the few groups actively making a product designed as a solution rather than just a tool.

The single most important feature in 2.2 is the Simplified Configuration option for CiviMail. Email marketing is a critical engagement tool for charities and all other civic groups. But for the folks that don't have the money to use commercial services, there just aren't any integrated, simple options. The new CiviMail solves that by just connecting to a SMTP server to send mail. Got Gmail? You now have open and link tracking!

Sure there are still spam management concerns... that's what paid services like CiviSMTP are for.

And yes wouldn't it be great if there was an ASP.... [any (social) entrepreneurs out there interested?] .

And, yes, other folks out there are making strides-- the Salesforce Foundation is taking some steps in the direction of an out-of-the-bax charity experience, but that hasn't been their primary focus over the past few years. As Michelle Murrain notes, the out-of-the box functionality of CiviCRM is just better... donation pages, marketing email, relationships, smart groups and more are there and with a few clicks can be working for a small group in a couple hours. You have to (sometimes) purchase and (always) integrate those solutions into Salesforce.

Now if we get the CiviCRM usability up a few notches we can have a horse race for meeting basic charity and civic group needs.

Operational Challenges of Scoial Enterpreneurs

2009-01-14T06:41:00.000-08:00

I'm hosting an online discussion over at Social Edge about the operational challenges faced by social entrepreneurs. With a big focus on finding practical solutions.

http://www.socialedge.org/discussions/social-entrepreneurship/operational-challenges/

If you have a story about an operational challenge you faced or ideas on how social entrepreenurs can think about their operations and business process to maximize social impact, please drop by and leave a comment.

Keep Evaluation Simple, Stupid

2008-12-16T09:04:00.000-08:00

So I served on the advisory board of the TechImpact project done by NTEN and NPower. That project confronted a key problem faced by Nonprofit Technology Assitance Providers (NTAP):

It’s common to hear examples of how technology has helped nonprofits achieve their missions. However there are few studies that demonstrate this impact in a measurable way.

The project got off to a great start but never quite got to the point of generating performance metrics for NTAPs. Well, over the past year I've been developing the performance metrics for NetSuite.org. We are basically an NTAP, so I very much looked at all the research and evaluation data on NTAPs out there.

I got a headache.

Lots of data, lots of academic mumbo jumbo (which is fine unless all you are trying to do is measure outcomes), lots of ideas and no overall simple solution for building a measurement system.

So what did I end up with?

(1) Second order social impact ( the social impact of a charity attributable to an NTAP) is hard, so

Don't bother with it
Allow the charity to self report on a question like "What social impact was most enabled by working with us".
Collect narrative data on the project and, if your can afford it, do a content analysis.

I personally use #3 becuase I suspect we'll be able to do the content analysis in the future.

(2) Use a simple proxy.

I like the Net Promoter score. Adjust the question a little to "How likely would you be to recomend XYZ to somone that needs to use technology to expand their social impact" That will generate a simple metric you can manage to (read the details, linked below)

Net Promoter

http://www.netpromoter.com/site/

TechImpact Project

http://www.nten.org/research/techimpact

Content Analysis

http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/research/content/pop2a.cfm

Complexity

2008-11-20T16:03:00.001-08:00

So my job is to give away fairly complex and powerful software. The downside of this is that it can be virtually impossible to serve small charities-- they have enough complexity in their lives as it is.

My company just did a press release and a podcast on nonprofits switching from Microsoft Great Plains to NetSuite. This was part of a broader story of folks from different industries making the switch from Great Plains to NetSuite.

As I read our press release and listened to the podcast I was struck by how similar yet different charities are from "regular" businesses. And how the differences are really hard for a standard commercial company like us to wrap our head around.

Take for example Imagine!, a human services agency that is part of the announcement. Buried in the press release is that fact that they turned to NetSuite first for Case Management. Case Management! Then they found out the system they bought for case management could replace Great Plains and their time tracking ap and their payroll and more.

As anyone in the charity world knows, case management is a really hard problem and there are a bunch of software solutions already out in the world. The key to their sucess was probably that they were a larger organization operating a social enterprise... a social business in their nonprofit. That meant there was less of a gap between how they look at the world and how the NetSuite software wants you to look at the world.

But I wonder is the really compelling story them choosing NetSuite for case management rather than the non-sexy back office financial applications. I wonder which resonates with your average charity more.

Financial Crisis, America and Ideology

2008-09-21T21:30:00.000-07:00

In a diversion from my normal topics, the US financial crisis has my attention at the moment.

First context... a bunch of financial institutions got greedy and bought a bunch of assets (mostly mortgage-backed securities) that no one wants to buy. Since no one wants to buy this stuff and no one can figure out how much they are worth, the government is going to spend up to $700B to buy this stuff.

So the financial institutions made decisions that should make them bankrupt, the government doesn't want them to go bankrupt and here is where it gets interesting.

If I'm a corporation and one of my rivals is going bankrupt, I don't buy the assets that made them bankrupt... I buy a stake in the company. This is what the government did with AIG... they bought 80% of the company (actually slightly less because 80% is a magic number in corporate land).

If, in the future that company does well, my stake in the company goes up and I potentially get a big financial benefit.

Now, instead of this Schumpeter-ian creative destruction, the government is going to buy all the bad assets. This is the key issue... the owners of the firms that made bad decisions get a free pass-- they are not dilluted by government ownership.... which is pretty much the only punishment capitalists understand.

Now, in the ideal world, the government would actually take a stake + buy the bad assets off the balance sheet, since both actions are necessary... buying the bad assets to resolve the crisis and taking a stake to punish the owners of these firms/

(oh wait, I don't want to punish main street since that might cause shareholder activism that might crimp those multi-million dollar executive pay packages)

I suspect if any of the rich people that understand investment and such actually paid any significant taxes, they would be hollaring for the government to use *their* money wisely by buying the assets only on the condition of getting an equity stake.

But since the money comes from a bunch of middle income folks that don't really realize they are partially responsible for this mess by holding Bear Sterns in their retirement portfolios, its OK to just buy the bad assets.

And this is where the ideology comes in. God Forbid the taxpayers own a significant percentage of the financial system they are bailing out. That would be socialism and that would be bad-- not that we know what socialism really is, not that the government acting like an astute investor is good.... since capitalism is only good if you are a private citizen or corporation.

And tying this up into a nice little bow... this just shows the contempt that Americans have for government. Carly Fiorina says that the a person qualified to be president of the United States... in charge of an organization with revenues of $2.5 trillion and 1.7 million employees.... isn't qualified to run Hewlett Packard ($113B revenue and 172K employees).

We say our government isn't qualified to own equity stakes in our financial companies.

We'll probably unload all those bad assets to early to make a decent profit (like we did with the Resolution Trust Corporation) becuase of the contempt Americans havce for their own government.

Its my money darn it, I want it invested well. I want a government that is run well, and just like when my airline does a crappy job, I'm going to switch vendors.

Wait we have an election in a few weeks.... mmmm.

Platforms...

2008-08-26T16:03:00.000-07:00

How amusing is it that platform is the dominate meme for this blog?

What is Donor Management Software?

2008-08-18T14:34:00.000-07:00

So NTEN decided not to include CiviCRM as a listing in their Donor Management Survey. On the face of it, that was an OK decision because CiviCRM wasn't specifically designed as donor management software.

That kind of made sense to me, plus we have plenty enough users that use CiviCRM that we'll have just as many responses as the named systems. [If you use CiviCRM for donor management, Vote Now!]

Then they modified the front page of the survey to define donor management and I started thinking this is another conflict between the platform solution vs. "best-of-breed". Their definition of donor management is:

1. Manages relationships with current and prospective donors
2. Sends/Tracks correspondence and relationship history
3. Is more than just a donation processor (i.e. PayPal, Google Checkout, DonateNow)
4. Tracks ALL types of monetary gifts (on- and offline, events, etc.)
5. Is available for purchase/download

CiviCRM was probably excluded since it does so many other things, but from CiviCRM v1.0 oh so many years ago we supported each and every on of these "features". But as a platform, we tend not to support "deeper" version of these features... for example, you could track pledges in v1.0, but real useful pledge management / automation functionality had to wait for the current release.

As a platform, we weren't included, but I bet if we called ourselves fundraising software from day one, we would have been.

Platforms like CiviCRM are designed very much on the 80% rule... try to get most of the way there for most of your users. But when you are trying to be a platform for operating a charity, most of the way there for most of your users doesn't look anything like most of the way there for most of your users if you are just building a gifts database. Features for a platform tend to be broad and shallow.

Over time, however, each aspect of the platform becomes deeper and more capable as more users use it, more contributions (code and financial) are made and time simply allows you to get around to a specific piece of functionality.

And finally, there is another reason that CiviCRM doesn't show up on the comparision lists (Techsoup, Aspiration, NTEN, etc.). I think the assumption is that if you can't install it on your Windows PC or access it as SaaS online, it is simply too complex for charity users and therefore shouldn't be put out there as an option. I agree a little with this, but the simple fact is that installing and maintaining a MYSQL application is not beyond an advanced accidental techie... I'm not sure we are helping too much by excluding a high-quality solution for the reason it requires some technical competence to deal with.

OK, they get the benefit of the doubt

2008-08-13T10:32:00.000-07:00

I've watched Wild Apricot since it came out of the gate and been impressed with their product as a solution for small groups. I've also been impressed with their well thought out blog and they seem like all around good guys.

I see this blog post about how they are going to:

...take a closer look at free and open-source software: the real costs, the barriers, and the trade-offs; some of the best FOSS alternatives to “brand name” software; and online resources to help you make the most of it.

And I start to wonder if it is going to turn into a stealth vendor hit piece / FUD on open source. But as I mentioned, they don't seem like those type of folks, so I'm looking forward to what they write up.

PS, if anyone wants to compete head to head with Wild Apricot using open source software, you could run a CiviCRM-based ASP ;)

Manatees of the Tech World: The End of Best-of-Breed

2008-08-12T10:16:00.000-07:00

Part of the fun of nonprofit technology is that you always know where it is headed with 100% certainty. Just look at the small & mid-sized enterprise (SME) technology market 5 years ago... that is where nonprofit tech is heading today. [note: that time gap is closing, but is still pretty significant]

You'd think you could make some money with that insight, but I digress.

There are a few great debates in the software world client server vs. SaaS, best-of-breed vs. platform. Nonprofit technology is finally getting its head around SaaS being better than client server. A year or two ago, it became pretty clear that SaaS was the way to deploy applications even though the cost advantages were not what were once pomised--in the SME world. In a couple of years, nonprofits too will just accept SaaS is better than client server-- actually the adoption gap here is far smaller since SaaS addresses a bunch of challenges nonprofits have... the least of which no tech staff.

And now no less a luminary publication than the Wall Street Journal has published the truth, "The End of Best-of-Breed," noting best-of-breed software companies have been bought at fire sale prices.

Such software vendors became known as “best-of-breed,” reflecting a belief that specialists in automating certain business tasks can provide customers with a competitive advantage—at least over companies that use multifunction suites of programs that come from a single vendor.

But there was a problem with this approach: It is hard to get different pieces of software to exchange data, which is necessary to understand everything that is happening in a business, said George Lawrie, an analyst at Forrester Research.

So what does this mean in the nonprofit software space? Be very afraid of Blackbaud Infinity if you are a vendor. Find lots of money to buy Infinity if you are an NPO. Since infinity is the closest thing to a platform we have in the sector.

For the small charities, as always, technology will be a harder nut to crack... yet things like CiviCRM, Wild Apricot and others are approaching the world as a platform so eventually something complete might be avaliable. And then there is Salesforce and NetSuite... if they could release a set of applications on their platform, the smaller organizations would have a pretty fantastic resource.

Thinking about security

2008-08-11T17:23:00.000-07:00

So after 5 years, I changed all my basic passwords. Why? I was reminded that some of them were used in less than secure sites and I have been remiss in my regular practice of changing them every year or so.

Recent compromises at TechSoup and Network for Good reminded me that ultimately I am responsible for my own security. It is inevitable that security breeches will happen. Most of the responsibility for dealing with those breeches is on me... when a site is breeched, how much of my online life is vulnerable?

The other part of responsibility is on the provider. How do they react? How do they manage risk? How do they communicate the facts and the implications of those facts? The rather minimizing notifications from providers are a little bit disconcerting: http://techsoup.org/maintenance/page10338.cfm.

I'm not sure there is clear communication going on:

Viruses and malware means "a key logger could have been installed in your computer"
No evidence of download of personal information does not mean the keylogger didn't get your personal information.

You don't want to scare people unecessarily, but I would certainly hope that a mission driven NTAP would err on the side of caution and education rather than delivering what i would call a text-book vendor notification of a breech.

Viruses and malware are used to do little things like capture all your passwords (keyloggers). I saw a great demonstration once of cracking online banking after visiting an infected site.... these are serious issues and I'm not sure that the magnitude of the potential issues is really being communicated to those impacted.

What if viruses and malware are just decoys? I know that most NPO technical services are staffed by competent, well meaning folks. But hard-core security folks that can uncover the *whole* story? Not so much. Without information on what, exactly their response has been, it is hard to have a lot of confidence.

Finally, I think there is something very inevitable about two major NTAPs suffering a compromise of their older, creeky infrastructure... technology changes rapidly... continuous expensive investment is required to keep up with the moving ball. If you can't invest the money and people and time and planning in moving the ball forward, it's time to outsource your efforts.

I will note that both providers have made timid forays into modern technology that can address some of these issues.

Techsoup has used the Drupal open source system for a number of projects. Keeping up-to-date with an open source platform does a huge amount to improve security... the open source community fixes vulnerabilities and staying up to date protects the user.

But why not over the past 3-5 years budget and upgrade to an open source platform?

Network for Good takes another good tack... go to the cloud. They have experimented with Salesforce.com, where Salesforce engineers take responsibility for security and as the cloud gets updated the user is protected.

But why not over the past 3-5 years budget and upgrade all your services to a cloud-based platform?

In the end its all about management. How well do I manage risk by changing my passwords? How well do providers manage risk by investing in their technology infrastructure?

The brighter side :: NGO technology collaborations

2008-07-30T11:15:00.001-07:00

Slightly depressed by my last post, I thought I'd highlight some of the big thinking that has happened... the success levels might not be what I would hope for, but it does highlight there are people out there thinking the big thoughts and putting them into action. Yay for them!

Greenpeace Melt. Built for a specific Greenpeace project, open sourced, but never really got much traction. -1- -2- -3- .

NPOKI. Perhaps the most real effort I've seen. -1- -2-

Global DME Solution. Collaboration of big global NGOs. Similar/ same as NPOKI. -1-

Solpath. Stillborn open source grants management solution, but great market research -- very foundation like, lots of paper but o actual code ;) . -1- -2-

Voluntary Action Westminster. "To reiterate what we want to do is develop a community of developers who all use - and are improving the same system. " on CiviCRM!

Various efforts around PEG TV stations. -1-

These examples and other really do highlight the oil and water nature of organizing around mission and organizing around tools. I think you can do one or the other. Eventually, when CiviCRM gets big enough, it will gain market share, but will likely never be selected for mission reasons, just on a feature matrix and cost calculation.

CiviCRM was built because all these mission-driven efforts share very similar underlying CRM-based technology needs. Yet only one uses CiviCRM. And the Melt decision to roll their own put the nail in the coffin of collaboration.

More to the point, the structural considerations around something like NPOKI... funding sustinability, etc, actually drive people away from the CiviCRM model of build it, share it freely... if anyone can get the software, why would they spend money? If I open it to the world, I can't control the community!

These of course are red herrings... complex software requires consultants you pay for. And as long as you control the SVN check in you control the software. Very simple stuff.

It would be nice to know of other past present and future similar efforts, please put them in the comments!

Picking Winners... not so easy.

2008-07-28T16:48:00.000-07:00

In reading a recent OpenSourceCMS market survey by Water & Stone, I reflected on how we pick technology solutions to solve specific problems.

Around the same time a few years back, Jon Stahl, Ryan Ozimek, I and many others were trying to tackle the problem of how to provide small charities with effective technology... generally in the form of data (a CRM) and content (a CMS). We all agreed on the relevance of open source for its practical, rather than religious, benfits... cost, innovation, the potential to support niche markets.

There was no really effective CRM solution at the time, so I was involved in the ramp up of CiviCRM and Salesforce Foundation began donating licenses, so neither solution was really obvious. On the content management side, we went three different ways... Plone, Joomla and Drupal.

Here the interesting part. We were serving the same basic constituencies, we agreed on the same basic values being important, we had very similar mental models for how technology could support social change and charity operations.

In the end, we contributed to three different communities and effectively split the old Circuit Rider mind share (a subset of nonprofit technology assitance providers). Today, Jon is on the board of Plone, Ryan is on the board of Joomla, my old partner at CivicSpace is on the board of Drupal.

I have to wonder what all our (and others) deep comitment and significant invested energy and resources over the past few years might have accomplished if it had been invested in a single open source community. I have to be careful to not frame this as a "wouda, coulda, shoulda" question... the individual decisions that were made were fantastic. But since those decisions were about investing in a community rather than a vendor or piece of software, it is funny that the forces that drew us to the technology were far stronger than the forces that drew us together on the basis of our work in the same sector for the same constituents.

Technology is just a tool, so the mantra goes. Therefore, if you need to pound in a nail, you can use a hammer, a mallet or a rock and meet your mission. You'll probably talk to other mallet users and compare notes. Every once in awhile people will switch from mallets to hammers.

It is very clear to me that technology solutions come and go. The charity sector has no strategic vision of technology, nor will it ever... not many charities hire a CIO to think the big thoughts. And there doesn't seem to be the potential in the charity technology community to craft a community of action like there is in Drupal community.

For the life of me, I can't figure out why.

Open source vs Antharia

2008-07-08T15:27:00.000-07:00

The folks over at Antharia are some true blue mission driven nonprofit technology providers, but I suspect they are buying into the entire open source vs. vendor thing driven by FUD (fear, uncertainty & doubt) generation on both sides. To whit this post.

I think Jordan and I would enjoy having drinks... something about an affinity for a rant. So here goes,

Drupal, Plone and Joomla ARE NOT VENDORS.
Antharia, CitySoft, Convio, etc. ARE NOT SOFTWARE.

When you send Antharia a check you are buying two things:

FourtyFourFish / On Content, their software.
Antharia, the vendor.

Jordan has this comment her blog post that is a common misperception... and the way vendors spread FUD about open source (I'll cover how open source spreads FUD about vendors in a sec.).

If I did not know better I would swear the makers of Drupal, Joomla, and Plone were greasing the pockets of NTEN.

I'm not sure how the 1400 individuals that "made" Drupal by offering uncompensated contributions of software code could or even would slip NTEN a check, but hey, whatever. You are not buying a vendor when you use open source software. End of story.

Now, NTEN can take it on the chin for screwing the pooch on the CMS software survey by conflating the software and the vendors into a single entity rather than having people rate the software and the vendor seperately. Not sure how Drupal can deliver on promises since software doesn't make promises, vendors do.

And the open source guys spread FUD about vendors mostly by using the words lock in and free. If you have a good vendor, your probably pretty happy with your lock in.

Finally, as a big open source proponent, I must pose the question... who can write better software? A small company with a couple developers? Or 1200+ contributors driven by a multi-million dollar ecology?

And props to the small nonprofit technology vendors... who can help out a small nonprofit implement software better? 1200+ conributors who couldn't care less about you? A small company where you are an important customer?

What is the best solution for nonprofits? Excellent software (open source) implemented by excellent vendors (small mission driven shops).