Posts tagged as:

blackbaud

New kid on the block: BlackbaudNow

April 2, 2009

Blackbaud announced, just in time for AFP, their new product, called BlackbaudNow, in partnership with PayPal. It is a curious service. It is an extremely low-end, low-cost online website/online donation package from a vendor that spends most of its time on the very high-end of the scale.

It is simple. An organization can sign up for a free account, get a 5 page website, including a donation page, about page, etc. Editing a page is basically point and click – it highlights the part of the page you can edit it, and you edit it with a WYSIWYG editor. It’s decently AJAXy, but no, it’s not shiny – at least not my definition of shiny. You have a small number of templates to choose from (which, frankly, aren’t so great looking – I think they dedicated more graphic design time to their branding and pages than they did to the templates.) It’s free, although Blackbaud takes a percentage off the top. People can donate to your organization via Paypal only, and you can track donations in their very simple interface. You can export your donation history into a CSV file, and you can make your reports into PDFs. There are no APIs.

This was developed by the team that Blackbaud acquired when they acquired eTapestry. And, it’s designed to make migration to eTapestry easy – therein, I suspect, is the key. I’m betting this is a loss-leader – a product designed to get people in the door, and when they are chomping at the bit for more (which they will be in about 2 days after they set up their site,) there is a more costly (and profitable) product waiting right around the bend for them.

Small nonprofits – especially those with few or no staff, are always in a particularly challenging place when it comes to finding the best solution for a web presence and online donations. But I don’t think that a tool like this is going to serve very many nonprofits for very long, given its limitations. Of course, people like me, who make our living building websites, and helping facilitate the web presences of organizations, look askance at tools like this, so take what I say with a grain of salt. But I have to admit that this seems to me a bit too much like a gateway drug – get them hooked on free, then move them slowly but surely to much more expensive systems. And in the end, won’t a modest investment  (say, $2K or so) on the part of an organization in getting a better web presence going to serve them better in the long run? Heck, I think a Wordpress.com site attached to a Network for Good donation page will serve them better. At least they’ll have a lot more well-designed templates to choose from, and a real CMS engine.

Honestly, I’m underwhelmed by this service, and, in addition, I have a bone to pick with Blackbaud. The online help for BlackbaudNow is powered by the open source software MediaWiki. It is well hidden, but a somewhat savvy MediaWiki user will notice the telltale signs (the URLs are one giveaway.) Of course, proprietary software makers use open source software all the time, that’s not the problem. The problem I have is that they hid it. Why hide the fact that they are using an open source tool to build their online documentation? Not even a small mention on the About page. Did they do any modification to the code to make it work like they wanted to? Did they contribute anything back to the MediaWiki community? At the very least, they could have given credit where credit is due.

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CRM&CMS Integration: Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge and NetCommunity

February 13, 2009

What? She’s talking about Blackbaud?

Yes, it might be surprising, but I got a friendly email from fellow NTEN Board Member Steve McLaughlin, who also happens to be head of all things internet (more formally, Director, Internet Solutions) at Blackbaud. He gave me a demo and overview of their NetCommunity tool, which has been around for a while, and I figured it deserved a blog entry. It is, in fact, a great example of integration of a CMS and a CRM. Originally, I wasn’t going to cover the one vendor solutions, like this because, I believed (and, honestly, I still do) that you’re not going to get as powerful a CMS as you can as the best-in-breed CMS tools. However, it is true that Raiser’s Edge, the CRM/DMS tool that this integrates with, is inarguably one of the most important tools out there. Some call it the gold-standard. For many other CRM/DMS vendors, it’s the red spot at the center of the dartboard in their office.

The demo was pretty cool. But you know me, I fall for shiny, especially when it comes to data. The integration between the web front end and the RE back end is bi-directional and sweet. There were a lot of things you could do, including accept donations, track personal donation pages, and the like. and a lot of different ways to track what your donors and constituents did, both online and off, and have those show up in really interesting ways. It is, in many ways, the kind of CRM/CMS integration that lots of organizations want and need. Organizations can get this package in three different ways: On premises – installed inside the firewall, hosted, or SaaS. Their SaaS offering is called “NC Grow”, which provides sets of fairly simple CMS templates to start with, designed for organizations that, in their words, “are ready to reap the benefits of richer online marketing and communications, but may not have the resources or expertise in place to make such a website come to life”

The big kicker, pretty much as always with Blackbaud, is the price tag. There is a $10K license fee that you have to pay if you use the On premise or hosted versions. Expect a $35-45K price tag for development and integration. Their SaaS offering, NC Grow has a $20K/year price tag. This all is, of course, above and beyond the megabucks you’re already paying for Rasier’s Edge.

I didn’t get a very close look at the CMS (I’m wishing in retrospect that I had), but the little bit I did see of it suggested to me that it was somewhat more limited than CMS systems such as Drupal or Plone. Even if, perchance, it’s not, you still don’t get the vibrant community of developers making cool modules and add-ons to do just about anything you can imagine – you’ll have to either wait for Blackbaud to do it, or, perhaps (I’m not even sure if this is possible, but correct me if I’m wrong in comments) have someone custom develop special custom features for you. And, you’ll have an automatic $10K price tag tacked on that you won’t pay with the open source tools. I have a hard time believing that that translates to $10K worth of feature value (one could argue it’s $10K worth of integration value, though, but I’m not sure about that.)

Bottom line: If you are an organization which has Raiser’s Edge, and is committed to keeping it, and you want to do sophisticated integration between it and a web front end, then NetCommunity is probably your best solution. But before you jump in, make sure that the CMS is going to have the sophistication and power you need. And know that because RE doesn’t have open APIs, you are unlikely to be able to create the kind of sophisticated integrations with a different CMS that NetCommunity provides with RE.

But, if you are not a RE user, or are considering migrating off of RE, I don’t think that the combination of RE and NC is especially cost-effective. You can get this level of integration with Drupal/CiviCRM for sure, and likely Plone/Salesforce, and Drupal/Salesforce (with a bit more work.) More on those later.

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