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Blackbaud launches in Spain:

eTapestry, a division of Blackbaud Inc. (Nasdaq: BLKB), announced the launch of a partnership with Daryl Upsall Consulting International to offer eTapestry’s Spanish-language version of its on demand fundraising software in Spain. Kicking off this partnership, eTapestry and Daryl Upsall Consulting International (DUCI) will be hosting a free seminar on Nov. 11, demonstrating how nonprofits can use technology to meet their fundraising needs. This half-day event will take place at DUCI, c/ Caleruega 67 in Madrid 28033, Spain. The seminar will be held from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.

Ok, it’s not really Raiser’s Edge, it’s eTapestry en Español. I wish I knew more about how Spanish nonprofits could use eTapestry but I don’t. I also don’t know much about Daryl Upsall Consulting International except that they seemed to be hiring for positions related to an eTapestry rollout at Idealist in October. What is interesting is that Blackbaud seems willing to have someone other than themselves be responsible for the rollout. Any readers care to fill in here?

UPDATE (11/10/2008): Andrew Mosawi from Blackbaud just sent me an e-mail and filled me in. Thanks, Andrew! :

Spain is a really exciting market for fundraising as it is growing so quickly, with many of the large international NGO’s having a presence here.

We chose to partner with Daryl Upsall Consulting International, DUCI, (www.darylupsall.com) as they are an extremely well respected firm in Spain providing a range of services from Telephone and Face to Face donor acquisition to recruitment services (hence the jobs listed in Idealist). They have a great presence in the market and understand the specific needs of Spanish nonprofits which is why the partnership made so much sense.

Using eTapestry in Spain also made perfect sense as its SaaS nature made it more appealing to Spanish clients as well as being a much simpler way for us to deploy internationally. We have spent a significant amount of time working with DUCI to localize eTapestry for the Spanish market and we continue to work closely with them (we have a team here in Madrid at the moment) as we rollout the solution.

Andrew also gave me a screenshot! eTapestry en Espanol, here it is:

Daily Kos unveiled their new server infrastructure just recently:

Hardware is part of the solution, Bingham says. “To handle the traffic better, we moved to a cluster of six quad core Xeons with 8GB RAM for webheads that all boot off a central NFS (Network File System) root, with the capability of adding more webheads as needed,” he said. Daily Kos also added two 16GB eight-core Xeons and a 6×73GB RAID-10 array for database files running a MySQL master/slave setup [...]

Many database-driven sites facing scalability challenges have looked to the distributed caching system memcached, which helps speed dynamic web applications. Bingham says memcached has played an important role in scaling the Daily Kos site. “I greatly expanded memcached usage with 1GB instances memcached running on each webhead, which they all share,” said Bingham. “The backend also places fully rendered pages into memcached, which a hacked up lighttpd running as the front end proxy then serves these pages from memcached directly to anonymous users. This has helped the sites performance immensely, since not only does it spread the work of rendering these pages around to the all of the webheads, but it greatly reduces the amount of work the backend has to do.”

9 million pageviews were served with this setup. memcached turns out to be a piece of technology that Causes uses for its own servers. I’m quite curious as to why they don’t use an EC2-based infrastructure and why they still use lighttpd but who knows?

It turns out that Daily Kos’ widget for serving election results were designed by Free Range Studios. Ok, to be honest, I used the NY Times electoral results more since I was on my Windows Mobile phone. The NY Times election page was superior to the Daily Kos’ Flash widget in that it rendered very quickly and had better information architecture. Normally, I like the work of Free Range Studios but the Daily Kos widget had all the charm of a NORAD map charting incoming Soviet ICBMs a la the movie Wargames.

I love talking about hardware configurations as they can give you a ton of insight as to how you can architect your own solutions for whatever application you create that gets the same level of traffic. Those of you looking to build a Daily Kos-like site can check out Scoop. I don’t recommend using this software unless you’re prepared to do extensive customization. The last stable release of scoop has a 2006 timestamp. That doesn’t bode well for security updates, etc.

Here is a pic of the precinct maps

I canvassed in Virginia for the last weekend through Election Day for Obama. I was and still am in the tank for Obama. And yes, I do plan to be at the Inauguration in DC in January.

So anyway, I was really excited to see how microtargeting was working out within the Obama campaign. The vaunted Catalist database was supposed to be the backend for everything that us canvassers were working on. I was in Falls Church, VA because it also contained a fairly significant population of Asian Americans. With myself being Filipino American and my wife being Vietnamese American and our friend being Chinese American, between the three of us we could cover a decent-sized portion of the Asian diasporic population that has settled in Northern Virginia.  We were kind of a East and Southeast Asian Mod Squad.

We were given a packet that contained a list of voters to canvas as well as printouts of Google Maps that showed the locations of all the houses we were to target. I understand that that’s pretty organized for most campaigns. We were also given pens, highlighters, and even Google Maps directions to the precinct we need to cover. There was very little left to chance.

When a voter isn’t around, you still have to leave something on their door

The voter lists were comprised of several dozen addresses in each precinct. Each address contained one or more voters. Those voters had their age and sex attached to them and whether or not they were sporadic Democratic voters or needed supplemental information or needed to be persuaded. I understand age and sex information being taken from existing public source of information but I was very impressed by the notion that the Democratic powers that be knew who to persuade or not. That said, we were to approach these voters and ask them whether they were going to vote for Obama and if not, who they were going to vote for. We would also try to persuade them or at least leave extra literature for them. Some of these folks we even encouraged to go do some early voting. This required manual entry that was, at times, fraught with difficulty. Imagine carrying campaign literature, a clipboard and these sheets while canvassing a hundred homes a day. It was somewhat inconvenient and bulky. Worse, when we entered data into these sheets, new voter lists would be generated the next day for the same precinct and it was as if our data entry was ignored. After a couple of days of walking a precinct, you really get a feel for the people and the pace of a neighborhood. You definitely don’t want to go back to a strong McCain supporter and try to get them to vote for Obama. You’re wasting your time when you could hit three or four houses instead.

That said, here are my thoughts on how to improve Democratic canvassing in the future. I think this would be a fairly easy project to carry out and test in December for the runoff in Georgia between Saxby Chambless and Jim Martin for the US Senate. There should be no more paper printouts of otherwise electronic voter lists. It would be fairly easy to turn a list into either an Excel spreadsheet that can be loaded on a Windows Mobile device or better  yet, to leave it web-based and customized for a Google Android or iPhone. That’s basically formatting a page for Webkit and calling it a day. This would also mean integration with a GPS so that the software can basically tell you where to go next. The amount of data being transmitted from server to mobile phone is trivial, data entry errors would be minimized and it would allow canvassers to move even faster. There’s a bit of a delay between an encounter with a voter and then deciding where to go next. The three of us ended up coming up with a system where one of us would coordinate the other two. Despite the loss of a third canvasser, this actually sped us up. That’s what this canvassing software would do. It would act like an air traffic controller for canvassers in the field. I would not at all be surprised to see this in 2012.

So Beka Economopoulos (who is so cool that she always forgets that she’s met me before hehe) writes me and tells me about the Twitter Vote Project:

On Friday, October 24th, web developers, designers, and activists will team up for a nationwide day-long coding jam session to build out a new project called Twitter Vote Report. Inspired by a blog post by techPresident writers Allison Fine and Nancy Scola, volunteers across the country are moving quickly to build a decentralized election monitoring system that will allow voters to use text messages to report incidents of voter suppression, long lines, broken machines, and other disruptions on election day. The Twitter Vote Report site will aggregate the reporting data, represent it in real-time on a dynamic web map, and notify voters, election monitoring groups, and the media, facilitating rapid response by poll workers and activists.

All the previous talk of Twitter as a disaster reporting tool or as a disease prevention tool has never seemed to pan out with a full case study. I really hope Twitter Vote Report puts up some reasonable reporting after the election. I’m really curious to see how it will all work out. If any of you decide to go to the Brooklyn coding session, e-mail me at abenamer@nonprofittechblog.org. I’m in Brooklyn myself and will accompany any NPTB reader who goes.

MPower just issued a news release:

MPower – which provides the most open, flexible, and powerful software for nonprofit constituent relationship management (CRM) and fundraising – today announced that top nonprofit consultant, Matt McCabe, has joined the company as Vice President of Community.

This newly created position on MPower’s leadership team reflects the company’s resolute commitment to developing and supporting the growing community of its clients, users and partners as well as the broader nonprofit market.

Matt is the brother of MPower CEO, Randy McCabe. I had a brief talk with him yesterday and I think he’ll be a pretty open and responsive community manager. If anything, he’s not as coachable as his press handlers would like and I think that’s a perfect match for a community manager position. The folks responsible for growing any open-source community need to have an air of authenticity about them from which they derive their authority and credibility.

I think it’s pretty exciting to watch MPower slowly morph from a desktop-bound .NET application to a SaaS model with what will be a strong API for the scripting language-based community. Those of us who prefer Rails, PHP, and Python over Java and .NET are going to be pretty happy if MPower can deliver on the promise of an open API. Frankly, that’s been the only thing really preventing a full embrace of MPower in the open-source community.

And oh yeah, I’m back and blogging on a limited basis until the election — 14 more days!

As you may have guessed, I have seen the demo of Mpower Open and I was very pleased. So pleased, in fact, that it’s now on the Leaderboard. I’ve had to create a new category — Desktop Donor Management System as opposed to an Online Donor Management System which will be populated soon. For a long time, I’ve looked for a good system with the following criteria given to me by a lot of nonprofit users.

• Cheap to install
  • I usually mean less than $500 to roll out.
• Effective
  • Has the usual suite of donor management tools like a database and business rules regarding contacts management, etc
• No per seat licensing fees
  • Can’t stress this enough as I think it’s a terrible model going forward for nonprofits. The real value of information is in its distribution throughout your organization. Buying a fancy donor management program that’s so expensive that it leaves you with one seat is a prescription for slow growth in the future. Just wait until you have to hire someone to cage your checks — you WILL cry on the seating issue.

I also added my own criteria:

• Open source
  • This just lets you add your own extensions and to add cool little doodads. Also, it means that the system will grow in time as other developers add their doodads to the system. MPower Open has fully committed to open source both internally for their line of business apps that they use and for the app that they build. To that end, they’ll be adopting more open source tools like Jasper, an open-source business intelligence tool instead of Crystal Reports.
• Has a good support plan
  • You can buy a support contract from Mpower Open.
• Lower TCO than existing systems
  • More on this later but with only a support contract to pay for, it compares very well against Raiser’s Edge but not so well against GiftWorks.
• Uses known database backends
  • This is a huge issue to me. I don’t want nonprofits to end up supporting some horrible version of CenturaSQL or worse DBase. Good candidates are: Foxpro, SQL Server, Oracle, mySQL for a backend.
  • MPower Open uses SQL Server Express which is the free edition of SQL Server.

Here is a cavea. You need to know how to install SQL Server Express and have decent system administration chops to install. It’s not for the average user. In fact, the vast majority of people who have downloaded the application end up asking MPower Open for help.

Mpower Open is difficult to install because it’s an enterprise class application. With SQL Server as its backend, it’s designed for heavy multi-user usage just like Raiser’s Edge. My guess is that it’s also easy to host in a Terminal Server environment allowing for third-parties to enter data even though they’re outside your firewall.

Is MPower Open a Raiser’s Edge-killer? No, not yet. Could it be? Yes. Raiser’s Edge is costing nonprofits an arm and a leg right now in terms of licensing fees. If MPower Open’s developer community takes off, Blackbaud will be very hard pressed to match the firepower of a large developer community. The dual pressure of higher licensing fees plus a more desirable feature list with MPower may persuade nonprofit CTOs and CIOs of the need to move to an open source platform just like they have with CMSes.

MPower Open has all the usual donor management tools. There’s enough firepower in the package to handle 80% of what Raiser’s Edge does now. That’s MORE than enough for nonprofits to consider MPower Open before they look at Raiser’s Edge.  Here are a couple of screenshots:

Gift Entry screen shot from Mpower Open

Add Account screen for MPower Open

If you’d like more screenshots from the system itself, I’ll be more than happy to accomodate you. Just place your requests in the comments below. For more information on MPower Open, check out my earlier podcast. Josiah Ritchie also has blogged about MPower Open.

I’ve been having a great time working with Karina Qian over at TechY on trying to get a mass texting tool into the hands of activists in China. The great thing about working with activists in China is that that they have cell phones. The only problem is that those cell phones may be the only way they have to access information. Be that as it may, it’s clear that SMS and traditional voice will be the only way to work in the less developed world for the foreseeable future.

Karina wanted activists to be able to SMS their constituents about new developments regarding the environment. I’m a Web guy not a cellular tech dude (believe me there’s a pretty huge gap) and I didn’t really know how to start and didn’t think we’d be able to do it. Do a search on SMS gateways on Google and you’d find they’re all fairly expensive. Worse, they require Web access to use.

However, I managed to luck on to Frontline SMS somehow and latched onto the software really quickly. It allows you to use your computer and your personal cell phone to send SMS messages to your entire pool of constituents. If you have the kind of cell phone that has a USB or Bluetooth cable and if it’s the right model of phone that accepts Hayes AT commands, it will definitely work with Frontline SMS. This is the list of phones and GSM modems that work.

Alternatively, you can use a Clickatell gateway which you can sign up for, add some money to and have working within a day. The Clickatell gateway offers an HTTP gateway to SMS. All you have to do to use the gateway is construct a special URL and paste it into your browser then press return. It’s so easy I accidentally sent an SMS several times this way by hitting return a few too many times. This gateway can be used by Frontline SMS to send text messages anywhere in the world. This has the added benefit of the Frontline SMS user not necessarily being in the country where the SMS messages would be seen.

As a demonstration of this, Karina scheduled a time where I would manually send text messages through Frontline from here in Brooklyn, out to where she was in Changsha, China at the Fifth Environmental NGO Cooperation Forum of Chinese College Students. It didn’t take long to send the messages through Frontline. We had already created a group of 76 users. She typed their contact info into Skype. I then pasted them into Excel and imported them into Frontline SMS. We had a bit of a problem in testing at first as we didn’t realize that a “+86″ (China’s country code) had to be prepended to every cell phone number.

We achieved a 70% success rate. Apparently, the lower success rate was due to the fact that many of the participants were on roaming networks and sometimes, SMS never followed them around. We suspect that you’d have a higher success rate if your SMS recipients were on their home networks.

One of the problems that had to be surmounted was the use of Chinese characters in SMS messages. Apparently, there’s a way to use Unicode in SMS but it requires a Unicode to SMS conversion. It’s tricky but it works. However, because of the conversion process, a single SMS message is shortened to 60 characters. This works well for ideographic systems like Chinese but I imagine a language with liberal use of diacritical marks like Vietnamese would have a lot of problems. Vietnamese just drop diacriticals when doing SMS apparently. I bet this can lead to some funny misunderstandings though.

Still, I heartily recommend Frontline SMS for SMS-based communications in areas where Web access is spotty but cell phone access is good.Also,  a new version of Frontline SMS has just been released so you  should definitely look into it.

I’ll be experiencing the long-awaited MPower Open demo at 2 PM EST tomorrow and hopefully will have access to a sandbox version of their hosted edition soon. Do you have any questions about MPower Open that you would like me to ask the MPower folks? Please put them below in comments. Thanks.

More screenshots of Blackbaud NetCommunity, courtesy of Blackbaud’s Melanie Milonas:

Captions
You can manage all the site captions here. For instance, instead of naming users of your social network friends, you can name them Fellows or Advocates or whatever your nonprofit needs them to be named. I prefer to call them “Great Old Ones of Cthulhu”. Your mileage may vary.

Preferences
This is a user management page. I like the friendly URL idea. This means users can pick an easy URL to distribute to their friends instead of something horribly difficult to remember.

Administration
This shows basic statistics of your social network. My guess is that this is the piece most likely to be made more robust over time as it gives you aggregate statistics that can be further borken down into detail reports. I can imagine all sorts of charts and graphcs here.

Accounts Administration
Typical user admin screen for the admin to lock/unlock/reset passwords.

Group Administration
Same as Admin-Accounts but for groups.

Groups
This is the interface that users use to manage their group interactions. It seems more like an e-mail list more than a group but I’m sure this will be built out too.

Group Administration
This is how a group manager administers the group. Fairly similar to the way Facebook manages groups.

Editor
This seems to be the admin screen for superusers on the network. Ten bucks to the first person who is a “user networking manager” that uses LordBritish as a username.

It looks like Convio’s CEO, Gene Austin, had a talk with Fortune Magazine’s Jon Fortt. The most telling quote is here:

It’s not like Convio it trying to be the next Google (GOOG). The company has 335 employees, most of them in Austin, with satellite offices in Berkeley and Washington, D.C. Revenues for 2007 were a respectable $43.1 million, though there are no profits yet. In its most recent quarterly earnings report, the company posted revenue of $14.7 million, $1.3 million in operating cash flow, and a GAAP net loss of a little under $1 million. So the company seems to be on basically stable footing, though it certainly doesn’t have a lot of room for error.

Look to see that paragraph referenced a lot if Convio is pitching its products to you… As for the prospects of Convio returning to raise more capital via an IPO…

Austin says Convio will give an IPO another go when financial markets are more stable (”not up 200, down 200?), the U.S. economy has settled down, and software-as-a-service companies are getting healthy valuations. Of course, that might not take too long – but it will almost certainly be more than a year.

Personally, I would love for more nonprofit CRM vendors to go public. It makes it easier for me to cover them because of the added transparency.

Check out Shaun Sullivan's picture of himself as Locutus of Borg.

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Read about how native social networking can be integrated into your organization's Web site with Blackbaud NetCommunity and what that means for your organization.

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Yes! They actually exist! Read about great nonprofit tech vendor blogs.

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Techsoup is Hit by SQL Injection Attack -- Please change any information you have stored in Techsoup that matches any other account information you may have!

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According to the Austin American-Statesman, Convio bowed to the inevitable and withdrew its S-1 filing today:

Convio Inc. said it will withdraw its planned initial public offering Tuesday, nearly a year after it filed to raise about $86 million in an IPO.

“It’s still part of our future down the road, but right now, the markets really are in pretty bad shape,” said Gene Austin, chief executive of Austin-based Convio, which sells software and customer-management tools to nonprofit organizations.

Not really Convio’s fault, really, all hell has broken loose in the markets and a Convio IPO is merely collateral damage.

On the other hand:

Today, Convio reported revenue of $14.7 million in the second quarter, a 35 percent increase from the year-earlier quarter. The company lost $893,000, compared with a loss of $2.1 million in the second quarter of 2007.

If Convio can get on the positive side of the balance sheet, especially if Common Ground takes off, who knows? As for IPOs, ii’s been the worst time for tech IPOs since the early 1970s with ZERO tech IPOs being offered last quarter. That’s about as bad as it gets. Apparently, it’s a combination of cheaper startup costs allowing startups to not have to raise VC and the horrific economy that is leading to very few IPOs.

I would again suggest that Convio’s move to Salesforce.com is a great move in terms of driving down provisioning and set-up costs per seat. I just hope that they have the audacity to really embrace SaaS for the rest of Convio’s software line.

This also means that Convio is finally coming out of its quiet period. I’m still curious as to what they have to say about that lawsuit that emerged in April for that charged that they had allegedly violated a credit card reporting act.

Read more about Blackbaud's new API for Blackbaud NetCommunity

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