Purple Patch Blog

(Virtually free) charity databases - market update May 2011

'The revolution will not be exported into a spreadsheet' - not my words, but those of Citizen CRM.

Now I know very little about Citizen CRM, other than it appears to have taken it's marketing spiel straight from Citizen Smith - and therefore may well be marching on Tooting Town Hall any day now...

But what I do know about Citizen CRM is that it's one of a new breed - one of the new software as a service ('SaaS to those in the know') solutions designed to give charities a decent database system without a) all the cost of something like Raiser's Edge b) all the complexity of something like Raiser's Edge and c) all the IT headaches associated with something like R...you know what I mean.

There are others out there - Convio, a non-profit solution increasingly popular in the US of A and based upon Salesforce. CiviCRM, an open-source, not necessarily hosted solution aimed perhaps more at those in the non-profit sector with a few more techy skills, and who have a Drupal or Joomla website/CMS.

And then there's DonorForce - a new solution, again based upon the Salesforce platform, developed by AppiChar and recently soft-launched at the Institute of Fundraising.

CiviCRM and DonorForce are/will be available in the UK - and are/will be developed to meet the needs of the UK non-profit world. Convio and Citizen CRM - well, who knows. However, the Salesforce platform looks very strong - and now that it's being taken and developed away from it's traditional, vanilla sales-pipeline management functions, is surely going to be an ever stronger rival to those of Blackbaud, ASI, ThankQ, Iris etc.

Watch this space...comrades

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's membership, Jim, but not as we know it ...

At the NCVO's Annual Conference last week, Matthew Taylor led a thought provoking workshop on the future of membership.

Working with membership organisations quite a lot, we see all sorts of clients with various kinds of stakeholders at different stages in their lifecycle (birth, growth, maturity etc) and most are struggling to work out how to relate to (what they call) their 'members' in light of new technology.

One client recently described our work to help introduce web 2.0 as 'giving the organisation back to its members'. Those that don't understand what he meant are beginning to lose out, their old momentum, thought leadership and influence is seeping away to spontaneous new spaces - like online groups, wikis and open media.

In this way, open source disempowers traditional membership organisations but also nurtures new forms of social capital. I agree with the conclusion in the workshop that "membership as we know it" is seriously under threat - but I regard this as refreshing not depressing.

I wonder what happens to organisations after they get to maturity in that lifecycle model? Is there a further stage? Could they disintegrate, regenerate, or regroup? I see parallels with the classic Boston Matrix. It's all rather interesting and I will be following closely the progress of the research project initiated by Karl Wilding and his team at NCVO.