theballot.org: create your own online voter guide

Last Updated on Wednesday, 25 October 2006 03:33 Written by Steve Wednesday, 25 October 2006 03:33

My buddy Sam over at the Leage of Young Voters passed on their official launch of theballot.org, a really slick site for creating and sharing voter guides for your area. I created a very simple voter guide based on some good recommendations from the 36th District Democrats. I’m the first voter guide in Washington, but guides are popping up all over the map.

theballot.org allows you to easily create a guide and publish it. Users can view your recommendations, and also join your voter bloc. This puts you in touch with people who agreed with your guide–a nice way to connect to folks.

Check out theballot.org and get your voter guide out there. Nice work Sam and company!

Judi Sohn on what APIs mean to her

Last Updated on Saturday, 21 October 2006 04:43 Written by Steve Saturday, 21 October 2006 02:54

Judi has a nice run down of how she has three technology systems supporting her organization: GetActive, Salesforce.com, and OpenAir. To integrate GetActive and Salesforce, she does a daily manual export of GetActive data, transforms it by hand in Excel, then shoves it into Salesforce.  Based on her estimates, she spends about 10 hours a month doing this. She wishes things were simpler:

My best hope is that at some point GetActive and Salesforce will talk
to each other and come up with a common language between their
applications so when a donation comes in and it hits the GetActive
database, an opportunity record is automatically created in Salesforce.
But I’m not holding my breath.

The connection between OpenAir and Salesforce.com is much smoother. Invisible, in fact.

There are a lot of applications out there that do time and expense
management. I picked OpenAir because I was able to implement it within
Salesforce and our folks can get to it and use it with a flick of a tab.

I got to hear the CEO of OpenAir talk in Seattle about 9 months ago. OpenAir is a stand-alone web app for project management, and expense and time tracking. He said they spent 8 developer weeks making it a 3 click install for Salesforce.com. That’s one developer working for 8 weeks solid–not a large investment compared to what it takes to build an app like OpenAir. And now any Salesforce.com customer can attach OpenAir to their Salesforce.com database.

And Judi gets the benefit of that work by OpenAir. She doesn’t have to do manual steps to connect the two systems–they’re already connected. How much is that worth to Judi? Enough to justify the monthly cost of OpenAir. Enough to make her choose it over other lower-cost options out there.

So, who’s going to be the first to invest 8 developer weeks and make their web action center a two click install into Salesforce.com? I have clients who would buy it. They don’t need donor trakcking–they’ve got that already in Salesforce.com. They don’t need email blasting–they’ve got that already integrated with Salesforce.com. Don’t sell them the whole package, just the piece they need–in this example a web action center.

More and more folks are going to be taking the stance that Judi is when talking to vendors:

Tell me how your product is going to fit in the world I’m already living in…then we’ll talk. If you have to have an API to do it. So be it.

Technorati Tags: NPTech, Open_API, Salesforce.com

NTEN Open API Discussion

Last Updated on Friday, 20 October 2006 08:37 Written by Steve Friday, 20 October 2006 03:35

So I listened in on the N-TEN discussion on open APIs today. In NTEN’s selling of the event, it was never really clear to me what they meant by “open APIs.” The vendors all said they do have open APIs, and some said they are worried about security, and that’s why they haven’t opened their APIs more.

Here’s what crystalized for me on the call today. Nonprofits need technology tools to help support their business processes. No one tool can meet all their needs. So they will have many tools. They need strategies for using more than one tool in their organization.

A common strategy we’ve all seen many times is do nothing. Have more than one system, and do double entry. The systems don’t know about eachother, and nothing is shared. Track your donors in your CRM, and double enter those gifts into Qickbooks, for example. A drag, no?

Another strategy is to build your systems on a platform to which you can add appropriate components. Add some CRM functionaltiy to you CMS by installing some modules. Works great if all you want to install is in the same language, on the same platform, and the same server. If not, you’re back to the first strategy.

A third strategy is to connect technology tools that are addressing related business processes via web services APIs. Send mass emails through an email blasting service, and pull the names from your CRM living with another vendor. Can really simplify things for the users, and give lots of flexibility. You can switch email providers fairly easily. But the APIs have to be built by the vendors, and they have to be connected by someone who knows what they are doing.

Will the vendors build good APIs that will make this third strategy possible? Some have. Others won’t. Some because they can’t pull it off technically, but more because they have business reasons not to. Vendor lock in is one reason. Not wanting to deal with developers and customer questions might be another. Prioritizing other feautures yet another.

Whateve vendors want to do, customers are starting to demand this stuff. It’s the future. Nonprofits are going to start looking at software differently: what are the features and what is the API like? Can I integrate with other systems? Can I power other web-based services with my data?

Thanks to N-TEN for convening the call and everyone who participated. I thought the back-channel chat worked very well. I look forward to future calls!

Technorati Tags: NPTech, NonprofitTechnology, Open_API