September 2005

Online Donation Tool Extravaganza

By Laura Quinn, September 26, 2005

I’m in the midst of evaluating the lower-end online donation tools out there, and it’s quite a task – more than I thought when I began. I have 26 tools on my list, and in general the quality is annoyingly high. Okay, okay, it’s good for the space, as there are a number of good tools for organizations to choose from, but it’s annoying for me at the moment, as I can’t easily just cross stuff off the list.

This is actually a difficult methodological issue that doesn’t really come up in straight software selection for a client. You would never seriously review 26 tools – you would instead start by generating high level criteria, and weed out the vast majority before you really even start talking to vendors. And if you look at a vendor website and it seems obvious they don’t have it together, there’s no need to go any further – just cross them off the list.

But with no specific client criteria and a commitment to compare tools rigorously, you need to evaluate differently – and it becomes a challenge to eliminate tools even when it appears pretty obvious that there are better ones out there. It’s hard not to think, “Maybe this expensive one without many features actually has a big strength in an obscure area, and that’s the one area some organization is going to care about…” Or, “Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions because their website is crappy or the salesperson is hostile – I need to be thorough.”

This is clearly a place where the best is the enemy of the good. No one benefits if it takes hundreds of hours to do each review – there’s just not that much incremental benefit to being exhaustive compared to merely thorough. I’ve been planning to create a set of organizational profiles, so that I can recommend a couple of tools for each - I think I need to do that soon, so I can use them as a guide. That will allow me to say, “Is this tool a good candidate for any of these organizations?” and if other tools are better in every circumstance, then I can weed it out.

And in the long run, hopefully Idealware can help stop this proliferation of tools. Maybe it could encourage people to build things that we really need, rather than just another one of what we’ve already got.

Groundspring and Network for Good Merge

By Laura Quinn, September 21, 2005

Groundspring (www.groundspring.org) and Network for Good (www.networkforgood.org) announced yesterday that they will merge. This is great news, in my mind- Groundspring has been struggling to get the funding it needs to keep up the quality work they do. It’s a sad day when a nonprofit provider of good tools at reasonable prices with several thousand customers and strong name recognition has trouble getting funding to turn the corner to sustainability.

The merger doesn’t look like it will have much effect on actual services in the short term. Both organizations told me that their intention is to build their business around both the donation button tool that Network for Good offers and the higher-end online donation and email services that Groundspring offers. The tools are different enough that there’s certainly room for both. And they’re working on some exciting stuff – it particular, they have a partnership with Salesforce, and they presented a demo of Groundspring DonateNow integrated into a Salesforce database at the recent Salesforce user’s conference.

World, Meet Idealware

By Laura Quinn, September 19, 2005

Well, here goes the public launch of Idealware. The website is launching tonight, and I’m going to post the survey report to a whole bunch of listserves tomorrow morning. I don’t think it will rival the Paris Hilton video for number of hits, but I hope to get some decent interest, start to build a small of amount of recognition and credibility for the name.

And then on to the next thing. In this case, that’s the online donation tool report, where I’m finalizing the criteria by which I’m going to evaluate, and getting a survey ready to assess how widely used each tool is and to get people’s perceptions of service and support.

Idealware, welcome to the world. May you grow and prosper.

I’ll Start Working Any Moment Now…

By Laura Quinn, September 16, 2005

There’s a lot of stuff going on this week – I’m working on putting up the website, finalizing the report from the survey, still talking to key people to gauge interest, and talking to vendors and consultants about the donation tool report. It’s been a long time since I had a lot of work that’s only for me instead of a client – which no one will yell about if it doesn’t get done. It’s hard not to feel like it’s time off. Hmm… if I just take another walk now, what will it hurt? If the report doesn’t get done until next week, what will it hurt?

It’s like doing a job search – its hard to motivate, but you know you have to work if you want anything to happen. It's all about discipline. Posting to the blog is work, right?

The Software Survey Results

By Laura Quinn, September 14, 2005

Just polishing the report from the software survey. The data is pretty interesting, and really does emphasize the need for something like Idealware. There’s a ton of money and time being spent – easily into the hundreds of millions of dollars worth, potentially a billion dollars or more across the sector. But the results of this spending aren’t good – only 58% agreed that they had in general the right tools to do their jobs, only 49% that they were even aware of most of the tools that were likely to be helpful. And this from primarily N-TEN folks – presumably more tech savvy than most.

One of the key questions to me in the survey was what people would be willing to pay for something like this. 52% were willing to pay something, which I’m actually heartened by. And it seems like for a lot of those who said they weren’t likely to pay anything, it was because they were suspicious of a nonprofit charging – hopefully some could be swayed with useful reviews from a trusted organization. Though the overall cheapness of the nonprofit sector certainly shouldn’t be discounted – information will have to be extremely useful in the immediate short term for people to pay.

Where We’ve Been

By Laura Quinn, September 13, 2005

Just a quick summary of what I’ve done up to now, for anyone who’s thinking of starting up a nonprofit themselves. Mostly, it’s been a whole lot of talking to people. I started thinking seriously about the idea of creating a nonprofit devoted to reviews and info about nonprofit software late last year. I started talking to some friends and colleagues in the nonprofit sector, and the more people I talked to, the more it seemed like not just a good idea, but a viable one – not just really useful to nonprofits, but perhaps achievable. So I started reaching out more, to those folks doing affiliated things, or those I thought would have opinions or thoughts – consultants and nonprofit and vendors I only knew in passing, or even some people I didn’t know at all.

In the meantime, I was doing some detailed planning - figuring out how things would work, running the numbers, writing a concept paper to share. As more and more people – including some of the key folks in the nonprofit technology field - were interested in the idea, and willing to help, I started to really believe that it could happen. I conducted a survey of nonprofit folks to see what the state of their software is, and – a key question for me – to see if they’d be willing to pay to access a resource like this.

That brings us up to the present. There’s still a really long way to go, of course. I’m currently working on a number of fronts at once. In the very short term, I’m using the publication of my survey report as a kind of public “launch” of Idealware – I’m putting up a little website for it. I’m creating a proof-of-concept report on online donation tools – a detailed roundup of tools with ways to compare them, and recommendations. I’m working on my legal/ nonprofit status, with the current hope of working with a fiscal sponsor. And I’m continuing to plan – in particular, I’m thinking in detail through ways of generating income to be able to sustain Idealware in the long run.

And Off We Go...

By Laura Quinn, September 11, 2005

It’s a strange thing to be trying to start up something new. On the one hand, you can't help but feel “who am I to be doing this?” It feels presumptuous to hope that I could get something important going by, really, just sheer determination and the help of a few friendly colleagues. But then, to paraphrase Margaret Mead, I shouldn’t doubt that our band of committed people has a chance to change the world… or at least the way nonprofits look at software. And certainly if we all decline to try nothing will ever change.

So as of now, I’m saying “okay I’m really going to do this.” I’ve certainly been putting in a lot of time and thought, but I putting up this website is a definitive statement of intent. I’m going to make it happen if I can.

So hopefully this blog can keep people informally up to date on what’s going on with Idealware, and maybe give a sense of what it’s like to start up a nonprofit for those who may be thinking about doing it themselves. And, honestly, it will make me practice writing quickly in an informal but understandable way, which should come in handy (with, you know, the thousands of future Idealware reviews and articles).