Holly on APIs and Nonprofit Technology
Holly Ross has a nice piece on the changes that Salesforce.com has brought to the nonprofit technology landscape. She covers the history of the software landscape nicely, and I think correctly identifies the new things that are now possible because of fully open APIs, like Salesforce.com has.
I’m really excited about the possibilities opening up to the nonprofit sector because of open APIs like Salesforce.com’s. Thanks to a $25K grant from the Salesforce.com Foundation, we’re currently working on an integration between the Plone open source CMS and Salesforce.com. In October, anyone who is using Plone for their website and Salesforce.com for their database can link them so that new website signups drop into your database. What Holly is talking about is real and very possible.
I would add that a major reason this is all possible is that Salesforce.com is making enterprise software available to nonprofits. This software is of a class that most of us don’t get to work with. The nonprofit-specific applications we use have much smaller development budgets, so we live with limitations. The open source software we use isn’t enterprise level either, and has its own set of limitiations. Salesforce.com will knock your socks off if you’ve ever developed database applications…and it’s free to boot. Thanks again to Marc Benioff and the Salesforce.com Foundation for taking the lead in corporate philanthropy.
Another thing to add is that Salesforce.com went the open API route primarially because they had to. Their application lives in San Francisco–how can it integrate with your accounting system that lives in your server room if it doesn’t communicate in open fashion across the Internet? The on-demand model requires an open API if any meaningful integration is to be possible. And if it’s not possible, you can’t sell to enterprise clients.
We’ll see if any of the nonprofit-specific tools can “catch up” as Holly hopes. It’s expensive to develop software at this level, and I understand why the tools aren’t there yet. We’ll see who makes the investments and who doesn’t. And we implementers will continue to watch from the sidelines and pick the best products, now with the openness and robustness of the API as a key selling point.
