From the category archives:

Software

How’s that donor database of yours?

by Michelle Murrain on December 2, 2008

In general, although I am sometimes asked, I tend to avoid assisting clients with choosing a donor database package. Mostly because, although I actually know the field pretty well, it’s at the 10,000 foot level, rather than the 50 ft level that clients really need. And I know there are plenty of folks out there who know the field really well at 50 ft, and can step in with the best advice.

As a 10,000 footer, NTEN’s new Donor Management System Survey is of keen interest. There is, of necessity, a lot of overlap betwen CRM systems and Donor Management Systems. Many of the CRMs also show up here, although there are quite a number of packages that did not show up in the earlier survey.

In some ways, it is astonishing how many different donor management packages there are. In most ways, however, this is far from a surprise – donor management is a primary way that money gets funneled into nonprofits, and, unsurprisingly, organizations often spend significant dollars on their donor management packages.

By far the most popular DMS of the ones surveyed was … you guessed … Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge. 18% of users surveyed use that one, which also accounted for 35.5% of use in very large organizations. Others I think about: CiviCRM had 4.8%, Organizer’s Database at 3%,  Salesforce was at 2.6%, Democracy in Action at 0.6% and MPower at 0.4%. I  also have to wonder (shudder) how many home grown Access and Filemaker databases fall into the “Other” category of the survey, almost 20% of the total.

So how did people like these? They ranked the percentage of folks who would recommend a package. In a three way tie for first included two proprietary packages I’d never heard of: NEON CRM and Donor Pro. In that trio was Organizer’s Database, the desktop open source DMS. 4th (since there was a 3 way tie) was CiviCRM. Included in the bottom four are 3 properties of Blackbaud: Raiser’s Edge, eTapestry, and Kintera Sphere which was in dead last place. (iMIS rounded out the bottom four.) Salesforce was somewhere in the middle (ranked 9th).

What’s interesting is that they did a size of org and recommendation analysis – to break down recommendations by size of organization. Raiser’s Edge, for instance, did much better among large and very large organizations, and very poorly in small orgs (which probably shouldn’t be using it anyway.) The reverse was true of Salesforce. (The numbers aren’t always quite large enough for these to be solid, but it’s a great indication of what’s going on.)

What can we say about the open source packages? There are only three in this race: CiviCRM (web) Organizer’s Database (desktop) and MPower Open (client/server). CiviCRM and ODB were at the top of the pack in terms of popularity, reccomendations and grading, and MPower had very few respondents who used it, and it wasn’t included in the ones that were ranked. But its safe to say that these are good contenders, and did well.

Last but not least, the grading. Who’s going to get into med school? DonorPro and NEON CRM are at the top of the class, and will, I’m sure, get into Harvard Med. Donor Perfect, CiviCRM and Antharia’s On Deposit have solid A’s, and will for sure get in. There is a large group of packages, like Salesforce, ODB, Giftworks, that will probably make it, but they might have to settle for second tier schools. Raiser’s Edge, eTapestry and iMIS are going to have to get themselves into a special tutoring program, if they have a hope of making it. And Kintera Sphere, I think, is going to open a car repair shop.

Bleary Eyed and geared up

by Pearlbear on November 20, 2008

I don’t usually title my tech blog entries with quite that sort of title, but that’s how I feel after spending 3 days with one of the most fabulous groups of people I have had the honor of spending time with in recent memory. I was at the Nonprofit Software Development Summit, which was an event full of great sessions, meeting neat people of all sorts, and having lots of geeky fun.

It was a great combination of really detailed tech learning (like I learned a really cool trick using JQuery to generate rounded corners, which is generally not an easy thing to achieve,) and big picture thinking. I got to learn a ton, and contribute a bit.  Sessions I went to included:

There are lots of great notes there if you missed those sessions, and I’m looking forward to reading the notes from other sessions I wanted to go to, but missed. Now, I’m just going to sleep.

Cake vs. Symfony

by Pearlbear on November 6, 2008

In my new explorations of PHP web application development, it seemed a good idea to get a look at both CakePHP and Symfony. Both of them seem to be PHP’s answer to Ruby on Rails.

The approaches are similar and different to each other. I set up both on my laptop, and tried out some really simple app development. In Cake, the database build is separate from the application building (you do it yourself), whereas in Symfony, you use Symfony to build the database with schema files written in YAML. Then, you build forms and such using the schema as a foundation.

They both use the MVC pattern, and both use object oriented PHP, which is great. I got a lot further with Cake in one evening of playing with both than I did with Symfony. At this point, I really prefer Cake – it feels like it jives with my own coding sensibilities better. I also don’t like the overhead of learning YAML. I can imagine, though, that the Symfony approach can be powerful.

Looking at Ohloh, Cake is more popular than Symfony (on Ohloh, who knows about in general), but Symfony has a lot more developers (81 vs 17). They both have good documentation and active communities.

For now, unless something strange happens, I’ll settle on Cake – although I’ll not be spending too much time on it, since I’m working hard to grok Drupal. But perhaps a cool project will manifest, and I can use it.

Update: I learned that Yahoo and delicious have a huge investment in Symfony (which, I guess, might be why they have so many more developers.)

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Firefox add-ons to love

by Pearlbear on October 23, 2008

I’m in love with Firefox. I’ve actually been in love with Firefox since 3.0, when it seems like a few of the things that plagued it finally got ironed out. More and more websites are designed not only with Firefox in mind, but sometimes even primarily with Firefox.

Here’s a short list of the Firefox Addons that I use all the time:

  • Firebug – it’s a great tool for HTML/CSS/JS development
  • Web Developer – a nice toolbar, also useful for development
  • Google addons, including the toolbar, and Google notebook add on (although I’m beginning to use Evernote more, because I have a copy of notes both on my desktop and online.)
  • Feedly – it’s a really nice tool for making your feeds more readable, and it syncs with google reader, so that when you read something using Feedly, it’s marked as read on Google Reader.
  • Fire.fm – I’m in love with both Pandora and Last.fm. Fire.fm provides a nice toolbar – where you can play stations from, etc. It’s a nice integration.
  • Delicious Bookmarks – this is the official plug in from Yahoo. It’s sweet – a button to easily tag the pages you are visiting, and a nice sidebar to see your bookmarks from.
  • I also use varied greasemonkey scripts to make things more interesting.

There are a gazillion (well a lot) of add-ons for Firefox (and other Mozilla tools as well.) What do you use?

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OpenOffice.org goes Aqua!

by Pearlbear on October 21, 2008

As many of you know, I have been using OpenOffice.org, the free and open source office suite since before it was OpenOffice.org. That would be when it was Star Office. That was a long time ago. So I’ve seen it develop and change (and helped a tiny, tiny little bit along the way by submitting bugs.)

The Apple OS has been the poor stepchild when it comes to OpenOffice.org for a long time. With Windows and Linux, there were native versions that were easy to install and use. With OS X, you had to either use the most recent version of OpenOffice.org with X Windows, which most Apple users don’t use, and didn’t have the nice Aqua window dressing, or you had to use NeoOffice, which was steps behind OOo, and had some serious memory leak problems (it got better over time, but it still was pretty unstable last time I used it.)

But, while I was busy doing other things like moving, OpenOffice.org released version 3.0, and with it, native Aqua versions for Intel and PowerPC Macs. Can you see me doing a happy dance?

OpenOffice.org has been a great alternative to Microsoft Office for Windows users (and really the only full-featured office suite for Linux users.) But now, Mac users don’t need to sacrafice to get the latest OOo goodies.

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Next up …

by Pearlbear on October 2, 2008

I used to spend most of most days hacking (mostly Perl) code. It had its ups and downs, although in retrospect, the downs weren’t really about coding. I haven’t done daily coding now for about 3 years, and I’m missing it, terribly. So … I’m going back to it, slowly but surely.

I also have to admit that my gut tells me that in the coming economic landscape, going back to using my coding skills will likely increase my chance of keeping myself in iPhones, BeagleBoards, and microbrews, as well as the more necessary, but boring things like keeping a roof over my head. Strategic planning is already something that’s somewhat of a hard sell for organizations. Methinks its only going to get harder as grants and donations start to dry up.

In my last post, I was talking about platform choice, and although to some extent, I can appreciate the argument that Python is a better language than PHP (just like in 1999, Perl was a better language than PHP was at the time.) However, PHP is the basis for Drupal, which is inarguably the most popular open source CMS system, and WordPress, inarguably the most popular Blogging platform. It’s also the basis for Joomla, a CMS I appreciate. There are also some very cool PHP development frameworks, like Cake and Symfony, that I’m excited to explore. It’s also the basis for CiviCRM, a project I’d love to be able to contribute code to. I’m psyched to learn jQuery (OK, that’s not PHP, but I figured I’d stick it in there.) And I don’t have to learn a new language (I’ve done a fair bit of PHP some time ago, and it’s not so unlike Perl.) So PHP it is, starting with Drupal.

So my first steps are to find some projects to help out with, volunteer for, etc. and take it from there. Maybe start doing some work with CiviCRM. It’s such a different landscape than it was even 3 years ago. But it’s a landscape that presents itself with all kinds of amazing possibilities for creating totally amazing applications that we couldn’t even dream about a few years ago.

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SaaS vs. Open Source

by Pearlbear on September 24, 2008

I just finished writing a post for the Idealware blog about choosing SaaS vs. Open source. I said in that post:

At one level, whether or not the software underneath the SaaS is open source is not relevant. You are not obtaining the software, and whether or not you can see the code, or modify it, is really not the key issue here.

And, at the level of most nonprofits choosing software, this is, in fact, correct. But the real story is much more complicated.

SaaS is not, by definition either proprietary or open source. There are a few examples of SaaS that are based on open source projects, although most SaaS are proprietary – the code is never meant to be released.

One of the most important things to understand is that SaaS is primarily built upon open source tools such as Apache, MySQL, and MySQL. It would not be as cost-effective (and thus, not produce as much profit) if these SaaS developers had to pay license fees for the software they use (besides the fact that these are the most stable and robust platforms to build upon.) So SaaS vendors are taking good advantage of open source software, and, in many situations, not giving a whole lot back. This is not uniformly true – some SaaS vendors give back in a variety of ways – contributing code back to those projects, having their own programs to give back in some way or another (like Google Open Source, or Salesforce.org)

Bur in any event, SaaS based on proprietary software violates the basic software freedoms – you can’t use it freely, you can’t see the code, you can’t modify it, and you can’t release the modifications to others. And, in some situations the existence of SaaS can inhibit open source development in the spaces in which it is popular, especially if the SaaS is cheap or free (how many good open source webmail clients are there, for instance?)

From my perspective, the key is openness. Some SaaS, like Salesforce.com, and increasingly the nonprofit CRM SaaS vendors, are open platforms. From my perspective, it’s all about balance, and having an active ecosystem, with healthy open source options present. The more SaaS vendors can contribute to and not detract from that ecosystem, the better.

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How to choose a CRM

by Pearlbear on March 26, 2008

I’ll be doing a webinar on open source CRMs tomorrow. In the process of going deep into those CRMs, I’ve been thinking about how nonprofits might choose CRMs to begin with. Of course, all nonprofits already have a CRM (even if it is a spreadsheet) – the issue is, generally, migration to a new system, or integration with what they already have to add new features.

Idealware has a great article on CRMs, and how they are different, and how you can begin to figure out what might work best. I also wrote a software choice worksheet, that can help with the process of looking at a wide variety of tools.

One of the fascinating things to me is how quickly the CRM space is evolving. New open source players entering the market (more on them soon),  high satisfaction for other open source tools, and SaaS vendors throwing the doors open so that nonprofits can integrate their systems well (I’m psyched to hear about all the new connectors, mashups and apps happening all the time.)

The lesson here, I think, is that CRM, even for large organizations, is changing rapidly, and the days are numbered where systems that are expensive, proprietary, and closed rule. I’m glad to see that. And I think that nonprofits should make sure when they choose to look at the wide range of options, some of which are very cost-effective, and open. And you don’t need to feel overwhelmed by vendor sales-talk – it’s possible to get things translated to language you understand.

After the webinar, I’ll be putting the slides up in varied places, and NTEN will have a recording of the webinar.

What I’m learning

by Pearlbear on November 30, 2007

It’s been mostly fun so far at the Open Translation event here in Zagreb. I’ll leave the complaining about Croatian food and other things to my personal blog, when I get the time. The event itself has been fab.

As one of those monolingual American types, I’m learning a huge amount about what it takes to create open content in different languages. It is actually pretty mind-boggling. There are issues that relate to encoding, fonts, and character sets, machine translation, interfaces to facilitate human translation, issues of workflow, volunteer and project management, and a whole host of other issues.

It’s also really interesting to see how free and open source fits into all of this.  What are the tools like? How do we replace proprietary tools? How does this all get paid for?

My role has been to gather up the use cases (specific examples of translation processes). That’s been a very interesting process, and we have been generating some good examples that will be really helpful in the process of figuring out what tools are present that can do what’s needed, and what gaps exist.

Check out the wiki. Lots of food for thought for NOSI and the future.

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Wiki Syntax madness

by Pearlbear on November 26, 2007

As most people deeply imbedded in Web 2.0, I am an avid Wiki user. I have become a complete devotee of Dokuwiki, which I use locally on my laptop, for my to do lists, notes, etc. I love it because it’s really easy to set up and back up (it’s all files, not in a database,) and it’s has draft autosaves (yay!).

I have two other wikis (a public and private wiki) that are in Mediawiki, on my web host. And I contribute to varied other wikis, which are on varied other wiki platforms.

And none of these have the same syntax – they are similar, but slightly different. Different enough to drive me crazy.

A while ago, when I was still developing web applications, I wrote a wiki plug-in for this behemothic open source CMS/Web database system that I wrote, and has (mercifully) died a slow death (there are still a few installations of it in use, hopefully soon to be retired.) I didn’t get so far into coding the markup, but I had decided that I’d follow MediaWiki’s syntax, since it was the most popular wiki software.

I just wish that somehow, the  gazillion wikis out there could decide on syntax they all would agree on. I doubt it, but it would be nice.

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