Naturally the emphasis was on using constituent relationship management (also known as customer relationship management or CRM) applications; that's Convio's sweet spot. However, Fred only devoted about two minutes to discussing what Convio has to offer in that department. Instead, he turned the floor over to the highly-respected and articulate executive director of MassVote, Juan Martinez, who spoke enthusiastically about using Convio tools to move his organization from dependence on foundation grants to developing relationships with citizen donors.
Bringing Juan forward is a brilliant strategy for Convio. The company's marketing team is smart and helpful, but they work for a for-profit vendor. I'd much rather listen to - and ask questions of - a nonprofit executive that that I already know and respect in the context of local civic projects.
One of my questions for Juan was about how Convio's suite of applications might compare to CivicCRM, the free and open source product that the Social Source Foundation has released. Naturally, Juan's response was that it came down to questions such as "where is your organization starting from?" and "what do you need to do?"
Pretty soon, I found myself visualizing some sort of workshop in which proponents of CivicCRM and Convio (and perhaps several other purveyors of CRMs) gave parallel presentations, answered questions, and allowed prospective users to sit down at a desktop and mess around a little with each product. We could really use an event like that here in the Boston area.
Disclaimer: I'm biased. All other things being equal, I prefer open source solutions. And of course, David Geilhufe, Social Source Foundation's CEO, is a buddy of mine. But different nonprofits have different needs, and I'd love to see both the proprietary and the open source solutions compared and contrasted in a friendly setting.
