By the end of Feb we should have another 4 or 5 on top running live or very close and then a similar amount in March so very quickly we will have a solid collection of live customers in place and we’ll be getting some great feedback from real life customers. Additional areas will be live including our volunteer management module that allows detailed skills matching and scheduling.

2012 has had a great start to it generally, we’ve had a lot of interest from a range of places  & countries and thankfully the tools we’ve created to help us manage the next stage of growth look to have hit the mark.

Talking of  those tools, we’ve added specific pages to ‘Sami’, our Sales and Marketing Interface which show how our membership management and Gift Aid (UK) functionality work. From a UK perspective Gift Aid is a  big addition and something we’re very excited about. We have some great plans on that front and we’ve been fortunate enough to have the UK’s leading expert help us pull everything together. Over the next few months we are looking to build that functionality to make sure it collects every penny owed and looks in places you hadn’t had the opportunity to look before.

Similarly with the membership management, we’re lucky enough to have one of Australia’s best experts in the subject as part of our team. Initial customer feedback has been great and will only get better over the coming months.

And last but not least, the same can be said for fundraising too where we have our (growing) team of  guest designers who will be adding a lot over the coming months.

As I type I’ve just got the email from Salesforce reminding me that Analytics will be going out to Enterprise customers in 8 days – that’s a good way to round out a great week.

This has been one of the major missing parts of the Salesforce platform, being able to easily build complex reports and lists based on data from across the organisation.

Today’s announcement that instead of charging extra for Analytics, it will just be *rolled into the Enterprise and Unlimited versions is particularly great news for NFPs who get 10 Enterprise licenses donated (and 80% discount after the first 10).

The main features of include:

• bucketing, a feature which lets you group data and place them in categories – buckets. For numeric data, you can say that deals under $1000 are small, and over that are large
• cross-filtering, that allows you to filter on related objects, for instance, in a report on accounts and contacts, to show all contacts in accounts that don’t have a closed opportunity.
• a new report format – joined reports – where you can join reports together, to report on multiple children of the same parent, for instance, meaning you can have a report showing the products, and team members on each opportunity in your team.
• higher limits on snapshots, scheduled reports and dashboards, and dynamic dashboards.

Roll on the Spring’12 release, this opens up a whole new world of possibilities of what we can provide for our customers and also lets us keep focusing on the core functionality that we want to build into supporter360.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120118006745/en

In 2007 their share price sat at $148 and now it’s down to $16 and who knows where the bottom will be.

Why’s this relevant to the NFP sector? As I’ve said quite a few times here and elsewhere, the very same dynamics are at play all over the technology world, even in our corner of it. Seemingly big players that miss the boat can quickly get into a tailspin, especially if innovation isn’t in the DNA. RIM with all their cash and people and infrastructure haven’t known which way to turn and it’s hard to see how they can be relevant in the future unless someone picks them up and sifts out the useful bits.

Found this great response from Allen Gunn, founder of Aspiration. I don’t agree with every word but the majority of it rings true.

Ultimately I see this as a positive thing for the sector as a whole. The world is changing very rapidly and older business models are being wiped out – you only have to look at the likes of Kodak, RIM, Nokia, even Microsoft themselves wondering where to go.

For these two companies I see a similar outlook, especially now they are joined. Convio probably had a better chance on their own but now they have joined forces with all that other technology baggage just when lack of baggage is the ultimate advantage.

While everyone else now can take advantage of all the amazing new things going on in the world these two are going to be totally preoccupied trying to untangle a complete patchwork mess of technologies whilst trying to keep staff, customers, shareholders, bankers, etc etc happy.

Don’t get me wrong, for sure both companies have some good functionality and that’s why they’ve done well. But Blackberry’s have good functionality as well but they’re just not as nimble and flexible as an Android or iPhone. The same holds 100% true. The way I see it you can match and then overtake functionality much, much quicker than you can change platform or move an entire company with all its legacies, let alone two companies.

When you’re falling into a hole, you try and grab onto the biggest thing you can find. The execs at Blackbaud looked ahead, seeing they’ve spent $50+ million on the wrong technology platform and didn’t know what else to do. I wish them all well over the next few years of integrating teams of people (including lots and lots and lots of hungry sales people) who traditionally were sworn enemies.

Meanwhile everyone else will just plough a merry path with no obstacles or barriers.

PS – any partners out there nervous of the ConBeard future looking for an open, affordable, scalable, user-friendly alternative designed for the sector just let us know, we come baggage-free and designed for the current and future world, not one that’s passing by

Edit: Some interesting comments from worried customers and former staff here.

And here…and here

And if you want the ‘real’ story from the front line check out https://twitter.com/#!/conbaud

On the surface the move look fairly logical but as hard as I try I can’t completely see the value and wonder whether it’s good thing generally for the sector. Keep in mind that debt has been used to fund the purchase so that means  fundraising dollars will be going to service that debt + try and recoup the $275m paid. That’s not for me to judge but those banks are going to want that interest no matter what, just as the shareholders will want their ever-increasing returns or else.

Forgetting all of the business side of the deal it’s the technology that I can’t quite get. Both companies have purchased various companies to build their portfolio of services and the level of integration between some of those systems might not always be as great as it might look at the sales demo (so I’ve heard J). Now take two companies with completely different technology platforms and try and merge the two – all you’ve done is increase the complexity even further. It could take years to unpick.

And then there’s the platforms themselves – Blackbaud have invested heavily in Microsoft platforms, rebuilding their entire system – $50m was the last number I heard but it was a while ago so it could be a lot more by now. Should Enterprise CRM customers now be nervous?

Or should Convio’s customers be nervous?

Or are they just going to keep going with two platforms doing different things?

All the while the new breed of companies minus any of that baggage are popping up all over the place with an open view of things all looking to work together instead of shut out or block off the rest of the world. With the latest technologies like AWS, Heroku, Force.com etc people can build better, more scalable applications without all the headaches mentioned above.

I know which camp I’d rather be in…

I’ve been in technology for about 23 years professionally, another 7 or so before that when I got my first Acorn Electron. So nearly three quarters of my life according to my maths. I’ve either designed and managed or helped design & manage technology for commercial and not-for-profits for most of that professional time. I came into the world of mainframes where things just generally did what they were supposed to do (if relatively little compared to today’s standards). Then came PCs and Windows and it all got much more complicated.

And it hasn’t ever stopped getting more and more complicated. As every year has passed new layers of technology get added to the pile to try and hold together all the different overly-complex systems within the enterprise.

The good news – especially for organisations that would really love to just get on with what they do but still take advantage of all the things new technology brings – is that after all the hype the pendulum is really swinging in the other direction thanks to the maturing of internet-age business technologies (call it cloud computing, SAAS, whatever you like, it all adds up to the utility computing that has been discussed for years but always with a view to the future). And the pendulum might actually just be a full-on wrecking ball knocking through years of too many people getting paid without adding enough value.

We’ve seen these sorts of changes in consumer technology and it’s now starting to hit home in the world of commerical technologies – probably the most conservative area of technology that will only change where there are clear competitive advantages to be had (or strong disadvantages to not changing such as getting left behind).

So what are the advantages and changes down the track that organisations should be looking at?

One of the big pieces of the puzzle missing from a typical small to medium organisation is the ability to store normal files & documents in ‘the cloud’ – there have been lots of offerings for the home use but nothing really practical for an organisation. All that’s changing with solutions like box.com (was box.net). They (and others to follow no doubt) are now starting to offer serious options for ditching the server infrastructure completely…or if you need local servers they can almost act as a local cache for the centralised web store.

What I see as really exciting now is that other web services are plugging into the likes of Box. We’ve used Mindmeister to create some of our snazzy mind maps to show what supporter360 can do…no longer do we need to store those files in Mindmeister as it can work from and save directly into Box.

The really big one in this is Google docs – instead of now having to store your files in Google, you can store them directly in Box which means it can sit with all your other docs so you don’t end up with different bits of information sat all over the place completely unconnected.

And of course supporter360 and Salesforce.com integrate into Box so those letters to key supporters that once sat isolated either in your database or on your server now sit in Box and you can access them from your iPhone using supporter360, Microsoft Office, Google, whatever.

When you start to tie all this information together and have it accessible by the people who really need it, when they need it wherever they happen to be and whatever device they happen to be using – without the hassle of your IT department (if you have one) slaving for months and spending buckets of your supporters’ money – it turns into something that can really enable an efficient and fast-moving organisation, something everyone is going to have to be one way or another to stay successful in the coming years.

In Australia we’ve been heavily focused on developing supporter360 and after a rocky start – we decided our first efforts weren’t good enough so we took the tough decision to redo a whole chunk – we’re now headed into a great place. It’s made this year a painful one but we’re seeing already it was massively the right decision – what we have produced is awesome and most importantly, the lessons from the first go allowed us to really get the underlying structure of the system to a place that will make it much more flexible and adaptable. The team has had to work silly hours to try and make up ground lost and we’re almost back to where we wanted to be.

Our managed services & infrastructure team in Aus has gone from strength to strength, we’ve built a truly fantastic team that has quality running through it from top to bottom. Going forward we’re going to have some great opportunities to see how we can integrate cloud services into our offerings, the technology world is changing quickly and it’s great to have to a group of people who are keen to be part of that. Alongside supporter360 we think we’ll be able to really move organisations 100% into the brave new world in a sensible and sustainable way.

So what for 2012?

Through the hard work of a lot of people we find ourselves now in a great place. We’ve got opportunities coming in from pretty much all over the world so the challenge now is going to be making sure we stay sensible and focused. A lot of work has gone into how we can get supporter360 out in innovative ways so that we’re not limited by the size of the team in any one location. That starts with the ‘Sales Machine‘ and we’ve got similar tools to help with the actual scoping, design & implementation that flow through from the Sales Machine’s initial work…once everything is fully in place we think we can really speed up the implementation process and maintain a consistently high standard.

Already we have a number of partners keen to help us get supporter360 out to the world which is great at this stage, something that we hope will become even more once it’s up and running in 10, 20, 30 and so on organisations across the world.

Technology is changing incredibly quickly so it’s almost impossible to look too far ahead – that’s why it’s crucial to be working with the most advanced systems. Salesforce definitely provide that and I think together with all the other advances in mobile and the cloud generally, we’re going to really start to see much faster moves away from the traditional complex Microsoft world.

Getting über awesome

The year started with a lot of ‘awesome’…of late we’ve moved onto ‘über awesome’ – awesome just wasn’t enough! Here’s a to an über awesome 2012 for everyone from everyone at appiChar!

PS – last, but not least here’s a message from the appiChar Sydney team!

The questions so far have been around how to take advantage of the opportunities new social media platforms bring. There has been endless talking but the results have been harder to see.

The Salesforce platform that supporter360 is built upon has been leading the way in building ‘social, mobile’ into its very heart. This has been one of the most exciting aspects of working with such a forward looking technology platform – we know full well that whatever happens in the world, our customers will be ahead of the curve compared to older style systems.

Check out the Social Hub:

These tools will allow organisations to engage directly in the most important conversations going on out in the real world. Being able to actively thank someone for a positive comment or answer a complaint that you otherwise would never have known about. Being able to track in real time the response to campaigns from real people.

The options are pretty much endless as the tools have been designed to let you get creative, not just try and tell you exactly how an organisation should act so everyone does the same thing.

Those organisations that take advantage of these sorts of tools first will have a big advantage, building loyal support-bases and helping demonstrate how in tune they are with their supporters.

To find out more about supporter360 visit http://www.supporter360.net