Donor Tools

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Excellent post on why CRMs are not the best choice for nonprofits. One thing that didn't even occur to me is the in-kind type of donation, which I know DonorTools must support.

I used SalesForce for years when I worked at for profit companies, and I know that, although they are extremely flexible, the total cost of ownership is often way out of the budget range for non-profits. Also, as you mention, field names are often not customizable (“lead”, “opportunity”).

Again, great article!

Of course, you need to add in that the reason CRM is attractive to nonprofits is largely because the selection of donor management packages out there is somewhat limited. Blackbaud, Convio are about the only commercial vendors with products running on modern technology and they aren't cheap. The drop-off from their offerings is huge. There are open source options (CiviCRM, Orange Leap), and they might be good choices, but don't attempt them without technical staff to support them.

I'd include Donortools, but I wouldn't place my organization's data in a hosted system whose license reserves the right to delete any of my content “that we determine in our sole discretion is unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, pornographic, obscene or otherwise objectionable or violates any party’s intellectual property or these Terms of Service.” And I don't recommend that anyone else sign up for your service under those conditions. For example, my organization, an environmental law firm, might be involved in litigation against a party that you are more sympathetic to than you are to us, and, as I read this, you would be within your rights to delete our content simply because you found it objectionable. That's really bad news! Safe cloud computing is all about vendors that protect, not threaten, your data.

I'd debate you a bit on this idea that what salespeople track and what nonprofits track are all that different. The basic process of prospecting, converting and tracking income received is not that different for fundraisers and salespeople. The biggest challenge is terminology. You claim that NPO's don't exchange products for services, but I think we do — the donors don't just give us money with no expectations regarding what will be provided in return. It's quite a different equation, matching donations to mission focused services, as opposed to matching revenue to inventory, but it's an important metric that nonprofits should be tracking.

That said, one size doesn't fit all — Salesforce or Netsuite are harder sells for large, traditional fundraisers than they are for small NPO's that have shedded their paper appeals already. But, overall, I would definitely recommend paying $5-10k to customize Salesforce to meet a small nonprofits needs over buying some ancient, unsupported, non-cloud software that gets NPO fundraising, but misses the boat on data management. What Salesforce and the commercial CRMs that court nonprofits lack is an exact match to our language and processes. But what they have are open data platforms and high levels of customization. The latter might be more important to a nonprofit than the former.

In a perfect world, for every Microsoft CRM, Salesforce, Netsuite or whatever there would be an equally modern, open, standards-based, commercially-supported donor management system. But 90% of the Donor relationship packages out there are based on archaic technology standards. I don;t recommend putting critical data in closed, hard to manage systems.

This thread is completely right to point out there is a chasm between business CRM and the needs of nonprofits and that chasm is currently crossed by $15-35K consulting contracts (I diverge from Peter's $5-10K estimate – I don't think you can get the services required at that price point) generally leaving a nonprofit with a customized CRM system that looks suspiciously like a custom built solution leaving the NPO beholden to the vendor (consultant). Or it is crossed by paying $100/user/mo on top of the Salesforce licenses to Convio. for a pre-configured solution.

Organizations like NetSuite (http://www.netsuite.org – I manage the program) built our corporate citizenship program around effectiveness of donations. That means that today we only make donation to people that can deal with the customization challenge. We are actively building the donor management “edition” on top of our platform and actively recruiting partners to deliver a low cost donor management solution. Hopefully then, weaknesses of business focused solutions will be outweighed by the positives.

The end game looks like this (similar to Peter's point): for every Microsoft CRM, Salesforce, Netsuite or whatever there would be an equally modern, open, standards-based, commercially-supported donor management system. Those systems would be built on TOP of the commercial platform, but as far as the nonprofit is concerned they are dealing with sales, support and product development staff that deeply know their needs and serve only their market. Unfortunately, everyone seems to need to build their own technology and radically underestimate the cost of customer acquisition and the fragmentation of the NPO market place.

Unfortunately, the current model (Convio) uses this strategy to “disrupt the donor management market” to take customers away from Blackbaud and fuel their growth serving the biggest nonprofits.

I want to see this strategy used by organizations like Donor Tools to serve the mid to low end of the market.

[edit: PS, going with an established SaaS vendor's platform would avoid the licensing fiascoes that every SasS vendor goes through]

Peter, I certainly understand the concerns that you raised about our terms of service. Believe it or not, the primary aim of our terms of service is to protect our customers' data. The rights that we reserve are designed to 1) prevent people with malicious intent from doing bad things, and 2) allow us to maintain and improve the quality of our service.

Our business model is somewhat different from other commercial software in that part of our job has to be to protect our users from anyone with malicious intent. Donor Tools is designed so that anyone can sign up, create a public fundraising page, and start receiving donations in under five minutes. The key there being anyone. So it's conceivable that someone could come along, create a fundraising page on our system, and post pictures of porn for the world to see. In cases like that we must reserve the right to remove that content – if we did not we (the Donor Tools company) could be in for legal problems, not to mention losing trust and credibility with our customers. That's why we reserve these rights – not so that we can arbitrarily take down anyone's data, but so that we can maintain the quality of our product.

Entrusting your data to anyone necessitates a certain level of, well, trust. How can you trust us, such a young company, with so central a part of your organization's life – its data? Well, obviously we haven't been in business as long as some of our competitors, but look at it this way, we must not be malevolent, or we would have gone into the spam business. Our motivations are to serve nonprofits with a great product, and to make a profit. If we were to violate the trust of our customers by exercising our rights inappropriately, then we would quickly be out of business.

I will say this in closing: your comments have certainly made me want to review our terms of service. My first gut reaction was to respond defensively, but I always want to do what's right for our customers. The last thing we want to do is to set ourselves up as draconian datamongers. There may be a way we can clarify this message in our terms of service so that we can simultaneously maintain our rights and the rights of our customers.

@Peter

Thanks for bringing this up for discussion. It seems like you are an expert on nonprofits and technology and have an idea of what our terms of service should be. As with the rest of our product we are always looking to improve and we are always open to input. Would you mind sharing your thoughts on how we can make our terms of service better? Some example language we should use would be fantastic.

I look forward to hearing your input.

Thanks for the kind words John.

We sure do support in-kind donations.

This is why you guys rock!

David,

I would love to hear some more about your thoughts. Can you expand a little on what you think our strategy should be?

We are very proud that our cost of customer acquisition is minimal in comparison some of the products you have mentioned. We pay a lot of attention to our conversion funnel. Happy customers such as the ones mentioned on our page http://donortools.com/testimonials is the best source of new customers. It is how we can keep our price low enough for nonprofits.

I would also love to hear your thought on licensing fiascoes. Can you explain what problems you have experienced?

Some food for thought:
Using Peter's estimate of setup for some of these large “solutions” for $5-10k a nonprofit could purchase the use of our midlevel package for 5-10 years. Setup and support included.

Thanks David!

Ryan — that does shed some light on it; I wasn't thinking about the free accounts, and I agree that you have to protect yourself (and your customers) from that kind of abuse. So it certainly seems like there should be two licenses — one for the free services and one for paid accounts. And the paid terms don't need to strip you of the ability to manage abuse — it should just be in a form that doesn't do harm to a client that that is either falsely accused of something, or the victim of another kind of attack. And it should not include deleting customer data.

Reserving the right to shut down an account in response to a legal order; a severe abuse of bandwidth; or the presence of pornography or extremist materials should be in your toolkit, with adequate review and third party involvement. I was particularly put off by “delete content” and “sole discretion” phrases. Where I look for SaaS vendors to land is at a place where, of course, I don't have free reign to monopolize resources or abuse the service, but I have some assurance that my data is not at risk, even if it's controversial.

Here's an example. I'm a fan and a supporter of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit that provides support and legal services for graphic artists who face sentencing for making art that some might call pornography. In many of these cases, it's the political content that is really offending the prosecution, and they use the artist's sexual content as a means to suppress them. So CBLDF is an upstanding organization, similar to the ACLU. Their donor database might well include documents and correspondence that depict or discuss things of a pornographic nature. But they are not, by any definition, purveyors of pornography.

Under your policy, you could determine that their donor records are obscene, in violation of your terms, and, therefore, you could delete them. I'd rather see terms that suggest that you will give customers who are out of compliance with your policies a fair review and time to relocate their records should a discontinuation of service be in order. Coupled with a good review process before accepting their business, this shouldn't be asking for trouble. And, again, this is the paying customer's policy, I support being more flexible with the demo accounts. That way, if you're uncomfortable with the type of records that CBLDF might need to store on your system, you can reject their account application. or, you can agree that secured retention of those records is serving a greater good (free speech protections) and is quite a different thing from using your system to share obscene materials, which, I presume, is what you're really trying to accomplish. Either way, you can have a policy that isn't going to harm the client's ability to do their business.

So you know, I'm a nonprofit IT Director who has deployed ETapestry, Salesforce and Blackbaud Enterprise systems in my career (in that order). Salesforce was a great match at the org where I deployed it, replacing ETapestry for a 100% online program. Since Salesforce supported numerous other business functions as well, we had key integration and the product meet our needs. We paid $10k to sharp consultants to set it up for our needs. Had our operations been more complex, or our in-house staff less savvy, it might have cost a lot more.

I also blog regularly about software and nonprofits at my blog (http://techcafeteria.com/blog) and Idealware (http://www.idealware.org/blog), present at NTEN, Netsquared and other conferences, and regularly urge NPOs to take advantage of cloud services, but stay away from the ones that assert any rights to their data that should be in the the nonprofit's sole control. What I usually am referring to are restrictive contracts that will, say, void a support contract if a customer does a mass update to their system. But a vendor that reserves the right to delete customer data does not get on my good list.

Thanks for opening the discussion instead of just dismissing me; I'll check back in to see where you go with this.

Hey, David, what are Netsuite's terms like?

With your window cleaning business and your excellent website (I looked at it, all of it, when I answered your last question) with its web-forms, I am guessing that you wish to manage both customer relationships (CRM) and prospect relationships (PRM, my invention, so you won’t find much about that particular acronym on the web yet!)

In addition you might wish to offer customer service aspects from the package in order to speedily resolve any issues arising from on-going work and perhaps an e-marketing facility so that you can send out different special offers to prospects and valuable customers.

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