Non-Profit Tech Blog

Susan G. Komen for the Cure has adopted Convio’s Aikido. Not just one of the affiliates but all of them plus the HQ. The most telling stats in the press release are as follows:

Ricketts [VP of information technology for Susan G. Komen for the Cure] added that one of Komen’s main goals is to increase revenue associated with Race for the Cure — its most significant fundraising event — by 15%-20%. The organization also aims to decrease technology costs by 30%-40% by moving to the shared platform.

That’s basically the promise of SaaS for the non-profit sector, the cost decrease comes about by the use of shared code and less server infrastructure. It’s a lesson that I hope other vendors, like Blackbaud, will adopt with their own infrastructure. Note to vendors of proprietary software: even IF you don’t want to open up your code, for God’s sakes, don’t waste your money and your customer’s money maintaining proprietary data centers. Seriously. Go over to EC2, fin d a decent provider and start converting your code to run on those boxes. And yes, Blackbaud, you can move to a .NET infrastructure there too.

Convio seems to already have taken this advice with Aikido. By moving hosting costs over to the SaaS provider and just writing code, it allows them to be a lot more nimble in dealing with the Blackbaud beast. All things considered, I would like to see more resources going into business analysis and software development then in maintaining uptime for boxes. Time will tell if this newfound agility will allow them to gain market share in the same enterprise space that Blackbaud has dominated in the last few years but starting out with Susan G. Komen for the Cure isn’t bad.

Again, Aikido hasn’t been reviewed thoroughly by me or anyone else so we’ll just have to wait and see until later in the year how good (or bad) the software is. The question for me though is whether or not Susan G. Komen was an earlier customer of Convio. It looks as if affiliates of SGK were earlier customers of Convio, I’m not sure Convio had all 120+ affiliates as their customers previously.