You've probably heard the news, and I'm taking a break from my break to write about it. Convio has registered to go public. This means that the "big three" nonprofit CRM/Fundraising/Advocacy vendors will all be publicly traded companies, and thus completely beholden to their shareholders to maximize profit.
Unlike Salesforce (also publicly traded, where nonprofit paid accounts are a tiny, tiny minority of their earnings,) every single penny of money that these corporations earn come from nonprofit organizations. Thus, every single penny of their income comes from donations that nonprofit organizations raise to, theoretically, fund the missions of their work.
OK, so I'm going to sound like a broken record. But, hey, why not?
How about some community-owned, community-driven free and open source options? How about options where investment feeds back and benefits everyone, instead of a few people? How about bigger bang for the donation buck, where the money that nonprofits spend on CRM/Fundraising apps goes to options that just get better and better - a rising tide that truly lifts all boats?
This is neither impractical nor rocket science. All it takes is leadership, collaboration, and, most importantly, will.
Convio will join Kintera and Blackbaud as a publicly traded company
Submitted by mpm on
Comments
Why do we not see a
Submitted by David Zeidman (not verified) on
Why do we not see a collaborative effort to create community owned software?
In order to create the best piece of software you need the best people. In order to get the best people you need a lot of money. You need to have shareholders who invest that money.
Now it would be great if the community was so motivated that they were willing to do this for free but I don't see it happening.
I don't see it as for-profits milking non-profits. Look at it the other way. I see it as non-profits investing in their missions. It would cost them a lot more money to do this type of work themselves (either with homemade software or without). Good quality software increases productivity and enables more money to go to non-profit's goals. If it did not raise productivity then organizations would never choose these software packages to begin with.
David
Actually, the truth with free
Submitted by admin (not verified) on
Actually, the truth with free and open source software is that it is indeed possible to get very good software without shareholder investment.
Apache is arguably the best web server software on the planet - and it is owned and run by a nonprofit organization (the Apache Foundation). In fact, many, many successful, usable, high quality software projects are not backed by shareholder investment at all. Drupal, Joomla is run by a foundation, as is Mozilla and many others.
And there are other models - SugarCRM is a model of a for-profit company that has a community version - so more people can contribute and benefit from their software.
It's not at all about doing something "for free" - it's about leveraging resources in such a way as to maximize benefit for everyone, not just a few. If even 1/50 of the organizations put the same resources into free and open source options instead of their for-profit CRM/Fundraising vendor, we'd have usable, flexible options that would benefit everyone.
You are correct - good quality software increases productivity. No question. And there are many ways to get good quality software. I'm interested in good quality software with community benefit - it's possible and practical to do this - why not do that, instead of using good quality software that, in the end, benefits the few more than the many?
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