Community IT Innovators. Established 1993. Serving social mission organizations with integrated technology services you can trust.

I’ve recently helped a client implement Blackbaud’s NetCommunity (NC), and this report is my initial assessment of its capabilities.  NetCommunity is Blackbaud’s online tool built to provide a content management system (CMS) with Web 2.0 features that allows clients to not only manage their website and use the full featured broadcast email and analytics tool, but to integrate online transactions and constituent profile updates into Raiser’s Edge.  My client’s main reason for purchasing NC was for the integration, which as Raiser’s Edge customers have known has previously been a challenge.

Summary of Project

My client is implementing NetCommunity through Blackbaud’s Grow program, a limited-scope offering of the full product intended for organizations with simple websites with limited number of pages.  Since we were not going to be doing a full implementation of NC, but mainly using the form building capabilities of NC to integrate with our WordPress website, we purchased the Grow offering.  The costs for Grow include a year of hosting, implementation consulting & training, and emarketing consulting, and a certain level of email volume.  First year costs including hardware can range from $25 – $35,000, as opposed to a full blown implementation of NC which can cost 2 to 3 times as much depending on the complexity of your website.

If you don’t use Blackbaud’s hosting services, you will need to purchase and install a server on your local network and configure the appropriate firewall security.  As far as limited-scope engagements go, the project management and consulting provided were sufficient, albeit a little too scripted – we had to break the mold a bit since we were not implementing the CMS as usual.  Support was generally responsive, although as is common with all implementation consulting, sometimes there was a 2-4 day delay on responses if the consultants were onsite with other clients.

Benefits

So far my client has been satisfied with the new level of integration between their website and Raiser’s Edge.  It’s very nice to be able to transfer online donations straight into the database after a fairly simple process of review and confirmation.  There will be no laborious process of getting the gifts into RE, or the tedious reconciliation process at the end of the month.  Blackbaud has created a plug-in for RE that serves as a bridge, and allows the fundraiser to confirm whether a gift is coming from a new donor or a constituent already in the database.  RE evaluates for duplicates using criteria that can be adjusted slightly and allows users to search the database as well.  If a constituent creates an online profile, RE will automatically link future gifts to their record, and the donor will be able to see their giving history.

My client is looking forward to having event registrations that also transfer into RE, eliminating a lot of duplicate effort that is currently the status quo.  They already greatly appreciate that the email tool is integrated, which allows us to much more easily manage new subscribers and those that unsubscribe, and thus eliminate the need for separate distribution lists that have to be manually reconciled.  It is great to pull the recipient list straight from RE, based on criteria that can include donation, volunteer, event, or profile demographics.

In summary, they are enjoying the benefits of integration. This is one example of why the whole industry has moved toward integration, whether offered through open source, APIs, or web services.

Challenges

NetCommunity’s CMS features are decent and sufficient to manage a website – e.g., styles are CSS-controlled – but they do not yet stand up to a more full featured, best-of-breed CMS.  It does not have advanced file and site management, almost no image editing, or advanced survey building.  It has some flexibility in form-building, but not enough, especially if you are used to open source products.

Like all vendors, Blackbaud is working on upgrading the features of its products.  I hope they make the registration forms more flexible by allowing the re-ordering of parts and editing of sections, and that they also make registration for free events flow more naturally by removing the language and feel of billing. They need to fix the events page WYSIWYG editor so that it is full sized. The event registration does not have maximum capacity limits or wait lists, and the volunteer management does not have a schedule that allows volunteers to sign up for available opportunities.

We have also experienced some technical issues with Internet Explorer and iframes linked to their donation forms. Performance is also a bit slow.  As might be expected, I would like to see a reduction in costs as well, as implementing, hosting, and licensing of NC is not cheap – affordability has never been Blackbaud’s main selling point.

One of the features I would most like them to add is page versioning and support for draft mode.  One cannot take a current live page, start making changes in draft mode, save intermittently, and then publish the new version when fully ready.  While one can preview a change, as soon as you click Save on any change to any part of a page, it is saved to the live site.  To be truly safe, it requires one to create a copy of the page, and then to create copies of all the parts of the page, and then make changes on those copies, and then when ready to link the new page to the navigation so that it becomes the live page (hopefully it’s not a page that you have a lot of intra-site references and links to). NC also does not come with any built in fundraising reports, so one has to log into RE to see the actual gifts coming through the system, which is not always convenient.

Conclusion

If you get NetCommunity for the basic gift and event integration with Raiser’s Edge and broadcast emailing capabilities, you will likely be happy.  But do not expect a lot of flexibility out-of-the-box, or more advanced features in terms of events, volunteer management, or members-only portal capabilities. If you want complete flexibility and the latest and greatest CMS features, you will likely be disappointed. Blackbaud does offer an API for those that need more flexibility (usually $10,000 or so, but included with NC), and it does allow building of new modules, but as with most customization projects, expect it to require significant hours, expertise, and money. Blackbaud will continue to develop the product, so I don’t doubt it will improve over the coming years based on customer demands and trends in the market.

As I was looking through the piles of information I gathered from last month’s NTEN Conference, I came across some information about Amazon Payments for Nonprofits. I decided to do a bit of research and compare the Amazon Payments to Google Checkout and Paypal.

Across the board, the fee structures were the same for transactions over $100,000 (1.9% + $.30 per transaction); however, if you are not collecting quite that much, here is the fee breakdown per transaction.

There are a few things that are different about the three, if you are a Google Grants awardee, all of your transactions are free and Amazon Payments charges fees based on the dollar amount of the transaction. If the transaction is less than $10 you are charged 5.0% + $0.05 regardless of the transaction total.

With that in mind, it would appear that PayPal offers nonprofits the better deal allowing you to keep more of your money. Also, with PayPal all you need to start collecting money online is an email address and a bank account. As will all of the other companies, in order to get the nonprofit discount, you will have to provide proof of your status.

The Washington Post’s article yesterday To Nonprofits Seeking Cash, Facebook App Isn’t So Green (subhead – “Though Popular, ‘Causes’ Ineffective for Fundraising”) was sure to raise hackles in the nonprofit tech blogosphere. The bloggers who have been exploring social networking for nonprofits had had this discussion already.

Beth Kanter issued a concise rebuttal: Hello, Washington Post: Dolllars Per Facebook Donor Is Not the Right Metric for Success. Even if you’ve followed some of the discussion in the past, it’s worth reading her post, and the links therefrom, particularly the one to Allison Fine’s blog. Between the two of them, they nicely summarize what you can and can’t expect out of an investment in social networking for your organization.

Allyson Kapin’s post on Frogloop includes a link to the Frogloop Social Networking ROI calculator. The calculator is a nifty tool for looking at the costs vs. funds raised. It doesn’t pretend to calculate the indirect and non-financial benefits that Kanter and others point to, but it does provide the opportunity to decide what those other benefits are likely worth to you before diving into a social networking campaign.

According to a recent study, the majority of donors want to hear about an organization’s impact, its success stories and other organizations they may partner with. This can go a long way in gaining that all important donor trust and, most importantly, donor dollars.

The Social Media for Social Causes Study, co-authored by Qui Diaz, Beth Kanter, and Geoff Livingston, took a look at social media as an area of growth for donations. The statistics look promising but the demographic breakdown is not surprising.

Across the board, demographically, those who engage in social media fall into the same patterns as those who do not. Those 30 and under are less likely to give more than $1000 while chances for getting a high dollar donation increases after 50.

Don’t Give Up on Email

According to the survey, email is the the preferred method of contact from charitable organizations among those 30 and up. To a smaller degree, 45 percent of 30-49 year-olds prefer social networks and 31 percent of those over 50 also use social networks indicated a growing interest for getting information through social media.

When you are communicating with donors, whatever the medium, be it web site, email or social media, here are a few tips:

1. Show – A picture is worth a thousand words. Show your organization in action.
2. Tell - Share stories about your organization and how it is accomplishing its mission.
3. Remind - Remind them about your mission and what your a trying to accomplishing. Is your organization ending world hunger? Remind them of that.
4. Ask - Don’t forget to ask for their support. Give them the opportunity to help you to achieve your organization’s mission.

Today’s alertbox summarizes Neilsen’s new report on donation usability. The most important question the users wanted answered in the usability study was the organization’s mission, goals, objectives, and work; only 43% of the organizations they studied made that clear on the home page. Only 4% of organizations made how they used donations clear on their home page, though this seemed much less important in terms of conversion.

Neilsen found actual donation page usability to be decent, though he says that even small usability issues can cause a 10% drop-off in donations.

The study is based on the scenario that potential donors actually start on your home page. This is just one of many possible starting points, and quite possibly not the most common one, though only your web stats know for sure. You’re driving traffic to special (optimized, let’s hope) landing pages, or people are finding interior pages via a search engine, but this is no excuse not to do things right starting on the home page. (And in his post, Neilsen notes that email is still the driver of most donations. And guess what, he’s got a post and a report for that, too.)

Here’s the link to the full report on donation usability. My pile of things to read just keeps getting bigger.

They’re popping up all over.

Today it’s Target Analytics’ 2008 donorCentrics Internet Giving Benchmarking Analysis. The 24 organizations studied are all large, and surely have robust direct mail programs, and, it’s safe to assume, well-developed online solicitation programs. They do offer a decent spread of missions.

I started to try to summarize some of the key takeaways, but realized I’d pretty quickly be duplicating their entire list. Click on the link and read the summary on page 2 — a long list of interesting points comparing online giving with direct mail giving. Different donors, different behaviors.

There’s a new M&R Strategic Services study on offering premiums with your fundraising pitch. In this case, they did A/B testing on the 2008 end-of-year appeals for four organizations.
The results? Tasty numbers when offering gifts in exchange for donations: a 95% increase in response rate, a 37% bump in average gift, and a 51% increase in net revenue – that’s after the cost of the premium has been factored in!
The report also lists best practices for premium-based appeals. It’s a short read, and well worth your time.

I think we’re all hearing and thinking about what the tough economic environment is meaning for fundraising for social mission organizations – with economic uncertainty for many nonprofits looming.  This post from Bruce Trachtenberg at Communications Network points out a flip side to raising less money is attracting more scrutiny of the money you do raise.  Particularly in light of the Maddoff scandal and the losses to foundations there.  As Trachtenberg puts it,

Seems to me that if you are responsible your foundation’s communications you better become ultra-familiar  — if not already — with your organization’s finances: your balance sheet; how the endowment is invested, including types of asset classes; the returns (and losses); as well as how your foundation selects, monitors, and evaluates its investment managers; the performance benchmarks it uses, etc.

Many if not all nonprofit staff have trouble addressing most of these points, depending on the savvy-ness of their finance and development staff.  And of course the culture of communication within the org.  With fundraising databases and software, you know from both an ethical and a PR- standpoint you should know what you’ve got going on, but social mission orgs often have fundraising data one can politely term … disorganized.

Of course, whipping that data into shape isn’t as sexy as using social networks to raise small sums instantly – yeah, right – but in this climate, knowing your data is rock solid may be the best investment you can make.  Because if your list is right, you can better reach the right people with the right ask.  Whether or not your CFO makes the right investments - and whether you have the right checks and balances in place to know – is up to you.