September 18, 2008 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The software company Convio is introducing a new online product, Common Ground, designed to help charities manage their interactions with donors and other supporters.
With the introduction of Common Ground, the Austin, Tex., company is attempting to break into a segment of the nonprofit software industry that has long been dominated by companies like Blackbaud, whose software is largely installed on an organization’s own computer network.
Since its founding in 1999, Convio has provided Web-based software designed to help charities communicate with their supporters and raise money online.
The decision to offer software that allows charities to keep information about both online and offline fund raising, as well as other interactions with supporters, all in one place is a “natural evolution” for the company, says Gene Austin, Convio’s chief executive.
“Five, six years ago, Convio felt like direct marketing was dead, that direct mail and the more traditional methods were on the way out,” he says. “Now what we see is that not only is direct mail around, but there’s so much more to the online medium than what there used to be.”
Common Ground was designed on an open platform so that information will move easily between the new database and the company’s online fund-raising software.
But Convio says that it remains committed to efforts to improve the ways its online fund-raising software talks with other fund-raising databases. “We’re continuing to increase our investment in integration,” says Tom Krackeler, the company’s vice president for Common Ground. “This is in no way any sort of signal that, ‘No, it’s too hard to integrate’ or ‘It’s too expensive.’”
Common Ground is built on Force.com, an open data-management platform developed by Salesforce.com, a leading provider of corporate contact-management software.
Salesforce.com gives its software to charities free or at reduced cost, and nonprofit technology observers have been excited about the possibility of harnessing the platform to help keep track of donors.
The development of a new fund-raising database built from scratch on the Force.com platform is a real improvement on the “overlays” that have been developed so far, says Robert L. Weiner, a consultant in San Francisco who helps nonprofit organizations select and install software systems and who saw an early version of Common Ground this summer.
For example, he says, one of the problems with using the nonprofit template that Salesforce developed itself is that while the company provides user support, it does not have a deep understanding of fund raising.
Common Ground costs $100 per user per month, with a minimum of two users. Salesforce.com provides charities with 10 free licenses to use its platform, and provides a steep discount on additional licenses.
For more information: Go to http://www.convio.com/commonground.
