Purple Patch Blog

The most important news about The Raiser’s Edge for ten years

We’re off to BBCon in Washington DC.  It’s billed as the world’s biggest non-profit fundraising conference, with thousands of delegates and exhibitors from all over the globe. As always, we’re excited by the prospect of meeting and learning from the experiences of fundraisers with different attitudes and solutions – there are always great insights to bring home and share.

But this year there is an additional reason to be excited.  Blackbaud, the global technology provider that runs the whole event, will (we hope) be making a big announcement that will impact every one of the 20,000+ charities that use their flagship product, The Raiser’s Edge.

“What can be so important about a database” you may ask?  Well, it’s more than that.  At Purple Vision we understand how the tools and techniques you use to support your fundraising have a massive impact on the ability of your organisation to achieve its mission.   The internet is supporting a fundraising revolution that enables us to build and maintain relationships with supporters in the online places where they are, and in the new ways they want to relate to our causes.

So, technology matters.  It's the glue that holds your supporter community together, and enables you to fundraise well.

 

Blackbaud’s journey to the future

The big story in Washington is ‘Where next for The Raiser’s Edge?’  Love it or loath it, “RE” is the world’s leading system for donor management.  But it’s built on old technology – it’s good at doing the chores that we need to turn the wheels of our traditional fundraising machinery, but it’s not geared for the future.  Try linking it to your website, enabling supporters to build their own pages, or accessing it via mobile devices.  Elaborate integrations are often costly, difficult and inflexible when you want to change something. 

So, Blackbaud will obviously be looking ahead, planning their roadmap of future products in line with the direction the world is moving.  Twelve months ago they announced that development of The Raiser’s Edge was to be curtailed.  In fact, the long-awaited RE version 8 was cancelled!  Curious.  Then, in January this year, came the announcement of the $300m acquisition of Convio, a modern internet-oriented rival with new ideas and impressive results.  Convio’s solutions are more than databases – they have been built for the digital age, focusing on transparency and accessibility, and using modern web-based tools that allow users to connect everything more easily.

A smart acquisition?  We thought so.  We thought Convio’s Common Ground CRM, built on the world-class Salesforce platform, was the new Raiser’s Edge, and we said so.  But we were wrong!  Last month Blackbaud announced, to the dismay of many, that they are to discontinue Common Ground.  Some said they had ruthlessly killed off the young pretender; the company described this as a necessary rationalisation of the many products in their portfolio.

But the Blackbaud management know what they are doing.  Their decision, whilst unwelcome to pioneering fundraisers already ahead of the curve, was based on careful analysis and hard thinking.  They know that the only way to protect their market-leading position in the long-term (and hence their profits and share price) is to retain and delight the majority of their customer base – in other words, all those still using The Raiser’s Edge.

Blackbaud appears to have decided that Common Ground, and indeed the Salesforce platform in general, is not the best way forward.  And yet, with no other significant product development in the past year, what is their alternative vision?  Suddenly, a vacuum has emerged, which they must surely fill with their roadmap presentation on Sunday morning?

 

Speculating is fun

In anticipation of this important announcement, we have had some fun speculating about what they might choose to do.  What will be the replacement for The Raiser’s Edge?  Here are a few of the ideas we came up with, some fanciful and some less so!

 

eTapestry

One of Blackbaud’s many acquistions.  A fore-runner of online fundraising systems, this ageing product was ahead of its time … in 2003.  E-Tap was never developed beyond basic functionality, and is currently offered as a simpler and cheaper alternative to RE.  But its advantage is that it does not rely on somebody else’s technology – it’s a “private” cloud solution, so Blackbaud gets to keep all the revenue.  So, it might be worth investing a pile of cash to produce a new version of e-Tapestry as the online successor to RE.

 

Luminate

By contrast, Luminate, the surviving big brother of Common Ground, was proudly on display last week at Dreamforce in San Francisco, despite the fact that it is based firmly on the Salesforce platform.  Blackbaud’s attitude to Salesforce is difficult to pin down.  As recently as July this year the company announced its full commitment but, just eight weeks later, decided to withdraw Common Ground globally, and limit Luminate CRM to North America.  As a radical alternative, perhaps we are about to see a new focus on Luminate as Blackbaud’s premium cloud-based solution?  It’s the best all-round fundraising system out there and it’s built, proven and ready to go.

 

Project X

That’s a name we made up for an imaginary new product that Blackbaud experts have been carefully developing in secret over the past 18 months. Not so far-fetched when you think about it.  If true, it would be strategic genius; remove the main competitor from the field, creating a perfect distraction whilst all the time working on the replacement.  Ta-dah!  What has Shaun Sullivan been doing since he (apparently) left Blackbaud anyway?  ;-)

 

Nothing

Doing nothing is always an option.  At least that’s what they tell you in Strategy 101!  And it is an option for Blackbaud, one that they have been exercising with respect to The Raiser’s Edge for quite a few years now.  RE7 is good software.  Like a second-hand BMW, it is functional, stable and does 95% of the basics really well.  It still looks OK too, but it is not future proof and, sooner or later, it will need to be replaced.  How long can Blackbaud go on without announcing the path to a credible replacement?  The longer this uncertainty persists, the greater the confusion and anxiety for a community that Blackbaud aims to cherish.  On behalf of RE users everywhere, please explain your plan.

 

The Raiser’s Edge 8 – Infinity

The least exciting – but most likely – outcome is that Blackbaud will retrench to its position twelve months ago and announce that RE8 is back on the cards.  Their enterprise-level system, Blackbaud CRM, was developed with significant resources using Microsoft’s .net technology and is known as the Infinity platform.  Originally, it was intended that RE8 would run on Infinity but snags crept in and this never happened. This is good solid technology, available in the cloud with an open architecture that supports integration of data and third party solutions.

 

Our money is on this last option as the preferred way forward.  We await the answer, and we'll bring you the news and views that matter as soon as we find out.

Purple Vision’s Steve Thomas and Bertie Bosrédon will be at BBCon in Washington DC until Tuesday 2^nd October.  You can find their blog posts at blog.purple-vision.com/ and tweet updates @purple_vision and @cafedumonde.

Blackbaud/Convio merger ... progress update

See and hear the latest news in video from Jana Eggers, Blackbaud's Senior VP for Products.

Although we await the definitive announcement on the product roadmap, each time Blackbaud releases a bit more information, we get to see the emerging shape of things to come.

Last month they announced their commitment to the Salesforce platform for future cloud services, which of course underpins a number of the solutions they acquired with Convio. Now we learn they will be making available some of the de-duplication tools from Luminate in other Blackbaud products.  Also, in the coming months The Financial Edge (a Blackbaud accounting solution) will be integrated with Common Ground (the Convio online CRM system).  Lots of clues to those products likely to survive the imminent "streamlining"!

We are slightly confused by Jana’s calculation of dates and deadlines.  On May 8^th CEO Marc Chardon announced three targets of 30, 60 and 90 days.  By our reckoning this would mean announcements on Jun 7^th, July 7^th and August 6^th (next week).  However, yesterday's announcement appears to be the 60-day target (three weeks late!) and in her accompanying email Jana says there is another 30 days to go to the final target? 

Perhaps we’ve got something wrong, but it seems that a month may have gone missing in Charleston?

Blackborg. Resistance is futile – you will be assimilated!

 

 

As every Star Trek fan knows, this chilling statement is the rallying cry of the Borg, a race dedicated to incorporating the unique characteristics of everything it encounters. 

“Just like Blackbaud”, you may say!  But is it?  We think the “new Blackbaud” emerging from the merger with Convio is beginning to look more like Convio than old Blackbaud.  Who is assimilating whom? 

Last week Blackbaud Europe announced its new-look management team, which includes  three former Convio managers, two recent hires and only three longstanding Blackbaud staffers.  This isn’t the only signal that things are different this time.  Back at corporate HQ in Charleston, Convio’s former CEO, Gene Austin, has been appointed to the executive team as President of the Enterprise Customer business unit, and a number of other Convio execs are emerging in key roles in new Blackbaud.

Unlike previous acquisitions, where targets have simply been absorbed into the product portfolio, this time things are different: this time they mean to reinvent the company.  But why change the habit of a lifetime?

These people are smart; they are doing this for good reasons. We have discussed previously in this blog how the culture at Convio is very different to old Blackbaud.  Open not closed; collaborative not isolationist; modest not proud.  In short, Convio is a fresh new organisation, conceived and built in the online social world, and in tune with a new generation of fundraisers. This is the kind of organisation that Blackbaud knows it needs to be like if it is to achieve its ambition to become a billion-dollar company.

It has been said that this cultural difference is a threat to the success of the merger, but we wonder if this was in fact the very reason for it.  Blackbaud will achieve the change it needs to make faster and more effectively, not by smothering Convio, but by adopting these vital characteristics and changing itself.

So when can we expect to see more concrete signs of this change, and how will this impact non-profit organisations?  The clues are to be found in the various announcements, press conferences and videos that have been released.  A few themes are coming through loud and clear:

1.  Cloud/Software-as-a-Service

Almost all of Blackbaud’s technologies, and in particular its principal mid-market product, The Raiser's Edge (RE), is based on old client-server technology, and is starting to show its age.  In late 2011 the company announced that development of the long-awaited RE8 had been scrapped.  Given that Blackbaud has repeatedly stressed its commitment to cloud computing, they clearly had an alternative strategy in mind to achieve this, and Convio brings the know-how to fill this gap.

2.  Products

This points to a key role for Convio’s online products and Services in Blackbaud’s future product range, such as Common Ground, Luminate and Team Raiser, and we expect to see initiatives to help migrate RE clients to these new platforms. And there is further evidence - in his video message in early May, CEO Mark Chardon announced a series of challenging deadlines to deliver specific changes in 30, 60 and 90 days.  These are fast by any standards, and you can be sure that we’ll be watching out on the days these deadlines expire, ready to bring you the news here at Purple Patch!

 3.  Collaboration

Chardon and others have also been at pains to stress a new openness – listening, engaging and interacting, rather than just announcing.  This has been directed towards relationships with clients, whose satisfaction levels are known to have been slipping in recent years, through a refreshed consultation process.  But also we are seeing signs of new behaviours in the way that Blackbaud engages with other professionals in the market, such as digital marketers, system integrators and other software vendors.  For example, at Purple Vision, we have had more contact with Blackbaud in the past three months than all the years we have been working with their products.

Just as Apple and Salesforce have pioneered the explosive development of their businesses with open platforms and well organised app exchanges, Blackbaud knows that Convio has grown fast by exploiting the power of innovative independent partners.  They understand the concept that involving others in your business is an investment that enhances the attractiveness of the platform, and grows the whole market, resulting in greater value for for everyone. 

 

So, what does this mean for Blackbaud and Convio clients?  Many people fear that with fewer suppliers in the market, innovation will be stifled and choice reduced, leading to neglected customer service and scope to increase prices.  On the other hand, if you are an RE user, there is precious little on the product development roadmap, and nothing that addresses the opportunities for fundraising in the cloud.  But now, with Convio joining the Blackbaud family, you have access to a range of innovative new products and services, delivered not by one monolithic vendor, but by your choice from a network of independent partners.

Time will tell if Blackbaud can boldly go where no-one has gone before.  Stay tuned for the next episode!

Get the Social Media Edge

Wouldn’t it be great to find out what people are saying about you on social media – and record those comments to your CRM system?  … to automatically create new records on your database for anyone who mentions you on Twitter?  … to open a window on a major donor record and see their latest Facebook or LinkedIn update before you go in to meet them?

All of this, and more, is already possible with Salesforce.  And, given that the Salesforce Foundation will donate 10 free licences to any charity that applies, what’s stopping you?

What we like about Salesforce is their innovative, entrepreneurial culture that drives them to investigate technology trends and incorporate them into their software. They’re totally focused on “social enterprise” and, with a large network of developers, there’s always someone looking to build applications to extend the functionality of the product, whether that is an integration for Mail Chimp or a special version of the software for membership management or fundraising.

Over the last 18 months we have watched and learned as the capabilities of Salesforce for relationship building have developed, and we like what we see. As a sales and marketing system it performs excellently – so well in fact that we’ve adopted it for our own business. We think Salesforce offers integration with social media tools on a level unmatched anywhere else.

But perhaps you’re not ready to throw out your current CRM system just yet, after all you’ve invested enormous time and effort to get it to where it is, and switching databases is a major undertaking. Point taken!  So, instead, we’ve worked out a way to leverage the power of Salesforce for social media without having to go through a total system migration. We’ve developed a concept we’re calling Get the Social Media Edge or GiSME for short.

In this solution we build on our knowledge of nonprofit CRM tools and use Salesforce as an “edge” application.  This means it sits alongside your current system and data passes back and forth, keeping you up to date with the latest social media activity so you can make use of this in your relationship building activities.  All the power, with none of the pain.

To find out more about how to Get the Social Media Edge for your organisation, please contact info@purple-vision.com.

 

  

Where does the Convio acquisition leave Blackbaud users?

So, one week on from the big announcement that Blackbaud is buying Convio (see our previous post), and people everywhere have been furiously blogging and commenting about what it all means. Some are asking questions, some are showing signs of fear, and some are just plain gossiping! Here are a few we enjoyed:

• The Agitator – Any colour you like as long as it’s black
• Nonprofit Force - The Convio-Blackbaud merger - one customer's perpective
• Appichar – Blackbaud/Convio: a match made in heaven or hell?
• Event 360 – Why I’m optimistic about Blackbaud’s acquisition of Convio

What we haven’t seen so far is very much serious consideration of what it means for a charity that has a Blackbaud product right now. Here in the UK, that is predominantly The Raiser’s Edge 7, since Blackbaud’s wider range of products (such as Enterprise CRM, BBDM and eTapestry) are less well established.

At Purple Vision, we work every day with clients who use The Raiser’s Edge. Most of our team have known it for many years as client-side database managers and practicing consultants. We’ve put in a lot of hours, and we know it to be a robust, reliable and trusted fundraising database. But we also know that the foundations have started to creak of late, not only with the announcement last year that development of RE8 has been discontinued, but also with the emergence of smart new alternatives. And now that we learn Blackbaud is buying Convio, organisations that use The Raiser’s Edge will be thinking about succession planning for their CRM system. A scary thought, but one that needs to be considered by anyone who is serious about ensuring excellent stewardship as well as real efficiencies.

Although Blackbaud’s product plans are not yet known, it seems clear that they have absorbed their emerging competitor because of their technical know-how; they understand that the future of fundraising lies ‘in the cloud’. This trend is accelerating, and we think it means that RE7 could soon be retired.  That’s OK for future clients, but existing customers will need to work out how to replace it. Just think about that for a second; it’s huge!  Imagine your CRM system – not just the database, but also the people and processes behind your strategy – taken out of the equation and replaced. And think about the project that will need to be built to support the process – business case, SMT buy-in, trustee engagement and support, scoping, project team, resourcing etc., and then the migration project itself. Are you ready for that? Can you afford not to be?

We’re not trying to be alarmist. Really, we’re not!  No matter what size your organisation is, it’s daunting, but not impossible. We work with many nonprofit clients, and can think of a number with projects already underway that this will affect:

• One large charity, looking to move up from RE, is not too far down that road – luckily they can stop and reassess now – or at least pause – to see what happens.
• Another client is just setting out to integrate its website and operational database with RE. They might want to take a step back and rethink that, as the risk of building a system based on an ageing product is a significant one.

What next then, and how best to proceed? To be honest, it is too early to tell. We recommend that anyone using The Raiser’s Edge should “pull up a chair” and watch as this acquisition (still to be approved by the US authorities) unfolds. The effects on the UK charity market will be real, profound and imminent. At Purple Vision, we’ll be keeping our eyes and ears open and, as always, we will be on hand to help charities that need guidance and support. Your CRM strategy should never, ever, be just about the database. That piece of technology represents your supporter community, the very heart of your organisation. Fail to protect it at your peril!

 

Meet The Raiser’s Edge 8: It’s called Convio Common Ground

There was surprise and excitement yesterday when it was announced that US nonprofit technology leader Blackbaud will acquire rival software firm Convio. The $300million price tag represents a 49% premium over Convio’s market value, so somebody really wants to make sure the deal goes through!

Few people in the UK have even heard of Convio, which up to now has provided fundraising and CRM solutions in the US and Canada, including 29 out of the top 50 charities.  However, last year Convio acquired Baigent Digital, a leading web agency in the UK, and are expected to launch here in the next few months.

So why pay out so much cash to buy out a rival?  The simple answer is they had no choice. Blackbaud has not delivered the much vaunted upgrade to its ageing flagship CRM product, The Raiser’s Edge, whereas Convio’s Common Ground, building on the massively successful salesforce.com platform, has become the solution of choice with its modern, cloud-based software oriented to the needs of digital fundraisers and online supporters. So Blackbaud bought Convio before Convio overtook them.

“That’s a shame”, you may say, “Convio never fulfilled its destiny and usurped its rival!”  But such is the nature of public companies in the software business.  Rumour has it that this wasn’t the first time Blackbaud tried to buy Convio. When faced with an offer they can’t really refuse, boards of directors sooner or later recommend shareholders to sell. 

So, what does all this mean?  Less choice, perhaps? At the top end of the market there is keen competition for the biggest international clients, and it will be interesting to see how Convio’s new Lumimate system shapes up against Blackbaud’s EnterpriseCRM.

But what about the quiet majority – charities working hard to build positive and beneficial relationships with their supporters?  Having supported Blackbaud technologies and clients for many years, at Purple Vision we think this deal could be a good thing, and here is why: Readers of this blog may remember a few weeks ago we reported Blackbaud Marketing VP Jana Eggers explaining on YouTube how the company had abandoned development of RE8, and instead described the company’s various other tools in a kind of mix-and-match solution.  That was a sad day for Blackbaud; both the company and its many thousands of customers deserved a lot better.  But now the solution that they need may be coming their way after all. Convio’s Common Ground has been described as “Raiser’s Edge in the Cloud”.  If this turns out to be true, it could be a tremendous kick-start for digital fundraising, and a great opportunity for fundraisers everywhere.

 

The Americans are coming!

By Steve Thomas

To be precise, more Americans are coming! In the UK we already have dominant CRM solutions from Blackbaud and ASI, and soon they will be joined by US competitor Convio.

Earlier this year Convio bought Baigent Digital, the well-respected UK digital agency focusing on non-profits. Since then we haven't heard much - no doubt they are preparing their plans and products for the UK market. What can we expect when they launch here? Judging from the products and services available to US fundraisers, some very interesting things could be coming our way.

To find out more, we subscribed to Convio's US mailing list and this week a newsletter arrived about their main CRM tool, known as Common Ground. Convio products make use of the powerful SalesForce platform, and with Common Ground they claim that users get straightforward, easy-to-use tools to create, launch and manage fundraising campaigns direct to their social media sites.

A single, integrated solution delivering a true 360-degree view; all securely hosted in the cloud for a fixed monthly fee. No servers to manage, no technology snags and no integration headaches – all you need is a browser and you are away. That is quite a promise!

Watch the video for yourself here.  It lasts 6 minutes. This is a tantalising glimpse of how a CRM system should be – we look forward to seeing what it will look like when it becomes available to UK fundraisers. We’ll keep you posted – watch this space.

(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