Understanding What Motivates Technology Companies

To the Editor:

I took great interest in your September 16 articles (“Building Better Technology” and “A Drive to Unleash the Internet’s Power”). As a 30-year fund-raising veteran, I concur with Chuck Longfield in his assessment, “The fund-raising software industry has been discovered.”

Capital investment that helps nonprofits fulfill their missions is a good thing, but capital investment with the primary goal of making multiple millions from the nonprofit sector feels more than a little out of place.

As the management expert Peter F. Drucker wrote recently, “We talk today of the social responsibilities of business. I hope we will soon begin to talk about the nonprofit organization as the great social opportunity for business.”

Instead, it would seem that Harry Gruber and his colleagues are heading as fast as they can into making the nonprofit organization the great financial opportunity for business.

If your article is correct in assessing Dr. Gruber’s goals, it is disturbing to me that someone with his entrepreneurial history now wants to “dominate the nonprofit technology market.” For what good? If one’s past actions are reliable predictors of future actions, the implications are cause for sober reflection.

Those of us who have dedicated our lives to serving the nonprofit sector need to make a living, and, if we are running a company that serves the sector, as I did for 16 years, to make a reasonable profit. Financial stability and viability demand it. But to go into business to reap a financial windfall at the expense of those who are striving to help the human condition betrays motives that we must rightly question.

Certainly the Internet is an important communication and fund-raising channel for the nonprofit sector. And it requires new strategic and technological solutions. With that in mind I applaud companies like Blackbaud, Convio, [which Itero collaborates with to offer assistance to nonprofit groups] and Target Software because they show a commitment to helping nonprofits rather than simply helping themselves to the coffers of 501(c)(3) organizations.

Motives matter. I hope my colleagues in service to the nonprofit sector will weigh carefully motives, sales promises, and claims that go beyond reality when choosing technology solutions.

And on every level, people matter. And money — especially when there is a lot of it on the table — is known to compromise people. The net effect can be ugly if greed rules the day.

Jim Killion
Chief E-Strategist
Itero
Richardson, Tex.

To the Editor:

Your article “Building Better Technology” was well-written and informative, but distressing on a certain level. Year after year I see an incredible growth in the number of for-profit companies that develop a service to help nonprofit groups improve their operations, increase their funding, or make life easier. Each year, these rescue-type products get more costly, more complicated, and more profitable for those who create them.

In my career, I have worked with a number of small and midsized nonprofit grass-roots enterprises that struggle to garner revenue to pay decent salaries and benefits to dedicated personnel and provide equipment and space needed to conduct programs to help the homeless, the battered, the elderly, and others.

While these agencies sweat to keep up with their communities’ growth and the overwhelming need for services, they are inundated with sales pitches for databases, accounting software, Internet site development. You name it, the products come at unbelievable costs and incredibly little technical assistance. End result? Agencies that can’t afford an information-technology expert to advise them trust the pitch, purchase things to make the organization function better, and end up with a white elephant and a large bill.

The mega-charities based in Los Angeles, New York, and Washington can always seem to find money to buy the latest bells and whistles, to expand their administrative toy box, and they have time to be interviewed by the media about how progressive they are. But is money donated to them with the intent to power up the administrative offices, or with the intent to directly assist people in trouble? It seems obvious, doesn’t it?

We could use a little less high-tech philanthropy and more philanthropy aimed at getting to the roots of the problems that exist in every community in America. Put the money where the need is.

Maryan Pelland
Spring Hill, Fla.