Tag Archives: Allen Gunn

Blackbaud Will Buy Convio – My Thoughts

Having watched many nonprofit vendors combine over the years, I probably shouldn’t be surprised by this week’s news that Blackbaud intends to acquire Convio.  But since the companies have taken such different paths with contrasting cultures, it’s hard to imagine that a merger will go smoothly and provide significant benefits to nonprofit customers.

Blackbaud’s most popular product has long been Raiser’s Edge, which provides unmatched functionality but is also beyond the financial reach of many small to medium nonprofits.  Despite efforts recently to make it more web based, RE is still primarily locally installed.  Of course Blackbaud has bought many other companies over the years which provide web options, such as eTapestry, Kintera, and PIDI, so many that it’s often hard to know how the multiple products all fit together.

In addition to its foundation online marketing platform (now Luminate), Convio took a significant risk by developing Common Ground, a web application built on Salesforce.  While Common Ground offers much less functionality than software like Raiser’s Edge, it offers the strong advantage of being able to connect well with other products due to its Salesforce infrastructure.  (Integration between platforms has been a major issue at every nonprofit I’ve worked for.)

While Blackbaud has been most active in acquisitions, let’s not forget that Convio also bought GetActive – and the transition of GetActive customers to the Convio platform was long and painful.

As many of my colleagues have said this week, it’s hard to know how this acquisition will pan out, and which products will continue to be maintained.  I have friends at both Blackbaud and Convio, and I can only hope that the inevitable personnel shakeup will be handled respectfully.

In my view, this merger may have the effect of reducing competition and innovation, which is always a bad thing.  However, this may also be a wake up call for those organizations who have not discovered the benefits of using open source solutions which are not tied to the fate of a particular vendor.

If you’re on the Progressive Exchange and Nten email lists, I encourage you to read the comments of my colleagues Peter Campbell, Michelle Murrain, Robert Weiner , Allen Gunn on Aspiration Tech and Alyson Kapin’s on Frogloop.  Also see Nten’s take and then join the free Nten conference call this Wednesday to further sort out what is likely to come next.

Collaboration and Management in Cross-Departmental Web Projects

At today’s Managing Nonprofit Technology Projects conference, I facilitated a session on Collaboration and Management in Cross-Departmental Web Projects.  We focused on techniques to implement successful projects which involve staff from multiple areas within an organization, most who don’t directly report to the project manager.

Some major points:

  • Although many projects involve web sites or other technology implementations, project management is more about ‘soft’ skills in winning cooperation from team members who are often assigned to a project while having to manage their already overburdened task list
  • Nonprofit organizations rarely embrace project management principles as set forth by the Project Management Institute, nor do they develop internal structures such as a project management office.
  • Assigning a team or task force across department lines can be utilized as a way to give team members an identity separate from their usual work responsibilities.
  • The basic definition of project management should include an informal toolkit of ‘soft’ tools such as finding evangelists to help drive project progress, ways to win stakeholder cooperation and addressing organizational culture challenges.

More details on this session and other discussions held at the conference can be found at this wiki.  Thanks to Allen Gunn of Aspiration and Laura Quinn of Idealware for organizing this event.