Tag Archives: CMS

A New Day at Kintera

Since my current organization has used Kintera since January 2005, I eagerly signed up for yesterday’s Nten conference call with Scott Crowder, who joined the firm as Chief Technology Officer earlier this year.  Although I’ve raised nearly $7 million in online fundraising revenues, working with Kintera has been a challenge, especially when trying to integrate with Raiser’s Edge, our offline fundraising software.

In addition to Scott’s arrival, Kintera also hired a new Chief Executive earlier this year, Richard LaBarbera, replacing the firm’s founder who had long held the position.  Recently, Kintera announced a new initiative - Kintera Connectwhich promised a new approach to integrating with other systems, a complete reversal from Kintera’s past strategy.  However, when few details of this program were available, I feared this was mostly talk with little substance.

By agreeing to do yesterday’s call, Scott made himself available for questions by the entire Nten community.  Although Kintera Connect was a main topic, he also addressed many other issues including one that Kintera has always sought to bury – the company’s financial viability.  After detailing many new technical initiatives currently in process, Scott described the firm’s goal of reaching profitability later this year and that they are “almost there now.”

Scott also described how Kintera no longer wants to do “everything for everybody,’ which has led to it having a product which tries to do too many things, not all which it does well.  By opening up to tie in with other systems, Kintera seems to now realize that it must focus on its strengths: e.g. CRM, CMS, advocacy, and leave the rest to others.

Other announcements included:

  1. implementation of Akamai technology to enhance performance
  2. data center migration
  3. sharp increase in capacity to send mass emails
  4. enhanced CMS, replacing current system

Although I’ve often been a critic of Kintera in the past, this conference call shows that the new management at Kintera is determined to set things right.  I’ll wait and see if the results equal the promise, but Scott’s willingness to talk openly is a promising sign.  A recording of the conference call is available at Nten’s site.

Report from Boston Technology Conference

On June 5, 2007, I participated in a panel at the Boston Technology Conference which discussed how CRM and CMS tools can be effectively used by nonprofit organizations.  Below are some major points:

CRM: A set of processes and supporting technologies used to acquire, retain, and enhance the relationships with all different constituent groups who interact with an organization.

CMS: Software tools that allow non-technical users to update a website without having to be a website designer.

Chris Atwood of SalesForce discussed how a CRM is used for marketing, sales and customer service.  He also mentioned the importance of identifying constituent groups (e.g. donors, volunteers etc.), outlining processes and workflow and the role of nonprofit staff in managing, analyzing and reporting donor data.  While Chris’ presentation was clearly not product specific, he pointed out that all nonprofits may receive 10 donated licenses to use SalesForce through Sales Force Foundation.

I then presented on how content management tools can be used to quickly add / edit / remove web content, and described types of CMS products (e.g. locally installed, hosted, open source vs. proprietary) available.  I also outlined several variables to consider when selecting a CMS:

  • Staff expertise
  • Frequency of site update
  • Approval levels needed
  • Type of site content
  • Budget
  • Stability of vendor
  • Integration with other systems
  • Availability of support

I also discussed the issue of whether to integrate CMS and CRM tools.  Integration provides the advantage of being able to easily send out segmented emails and web site content oriented towards specific groups of constituents.  Joomla, an open source CMS products which was presented briefly by Pradeep Suthram of PicNet, is especially strong in this area,   PicNet’s Nonprofit Soapbox, a hosted CMS tool based on Joomla, was also mentioned.

We ended our presentation with a recommendation of various resources:

Thanks to Tech Foundation for sponsoring this conference and to Chris & Pradeep for sharing their expertise.

Not-for-Profit Webmaster Roundtable

This week I attended the quarterly meeting of Not-For-Profit Webmaster Roundtable, which has been run successfully by David Milner for several years.  We discussed the arrival of super fast Internet connectivity through services such as Verizon Fios and how this will affect how nonprofit web sites are developed,

At least one organization represented at the meeting, the Rainforest Alliance, is already taking steps towards adding video to its web site, although it has not yet allowed constituents to submit their own videos.  With the amazing popularity of YouTube and other video sharing sites, it seems that it is only a matter of time until videos are widely available on nonprofit sites.

We also discussed content management systems, an area which commonly comes up for debate.  I suggested that organizations first determine who is likely to handle content updates, and then select a product which matches these users’ expertise.  My preference is usually towards packages that are easy to use even if they lack all the bells and whistles of more advanced offerings.

Other topics: how to best implement organizational blogs (make sure they are updated frequently), web statistics (Google Analytics new version is reported to be very nice, and it’s still free) and the availability of tools such as Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo Site Explorer to find out what pages on your web site are currently indexed.

Convio & GetActive Speak, New Integration Report on APIs

Listened to an NTen sponsored call today with Sheeraz Haji and Tom Krackeler of GetActive and Gene Austin and Dave Crooke of Convio.  Both companies seemed very optimistic about their planned merger which will aim to take the best from both companies, e.g. online fundraising from Convio and advocacy / CMS from GetActive.  Time will tell how things will play out as current customers learn more about migration.

Meanwhile, the issue of how to connect data in different systems was squarely addressed in a comprehensive report on Open APIs by Michelle Murrain and Katrin Verclas, available free from NTen.  At my current organization, we’re struggling with two separate integration projects, one which involves two products from the same company.  Open APIs are important because then you don’t necessarily have to get everything from the same vendor.  While Convio & GetActive will make a good try, it’s hard for any one company to offer the best of breed for many different applications.