Leave it to platforms like Facebook and Drupal to help the current crop of nonprofit CRM providers to get a bit more "open". Both Convio and Kintera have announced open platform initiatives in the past week. The buzz at this week's Convio Client Summit was positive form both vendors and organizations. The tools are light right now, but Convio provides cookbooks for developers to build on some existing applications with Facebook, Google Maps, etc. The promise is there, now it's up to the crafty developers to go out and make it happen for the organizations.
Convio will offer database connectors, extensions to other platforms, and APIs to post constituent data, as an example. I suspect more nonprofits will hire developers and firms to help build or configure these tools to extend into other platforms. It should be interesting to see how developers share their apps with other partners and how the truly creative nonprofits will extend their Convio data to other social network and media platforms.
It remains to be seen what Blackbaud will do now that these two major players have "opened" the marketplace for organizations. And for now, these are not completely "open-source" platforms. But, the days of closed, proprietary systems are now officially over. Welcome to the new tools. Bravo for the new efforts.
You might want to link instead to http://www.nonprofittechblog.org/convio-and-kintera-open-their-apis-but-befuddles-coders
as it looks like Convio's API is not as open as Kintera's. What you have linked to at Nonprofit Tech Blog is a post about Convio filing for an IPO.
Posted by: Allan Benamer | October 20, 2007 at 12:56 AM
Thanks Allan,
You are right, sorry for mislinking. We had about twenty links for different articles and we were trying to determine the best ones to use in the piece. Copy-and-pasting while running to a session can be hazardous to your blog.
The link has been fix in the blog, just in case.
Posted by: Garth Moore | October 20, 2007 at 11:00 AM
No worries! I just didn't want your readers to be confused by the link.
Posted by: Allan Benamer | October 20, 2007 at 03:24 PM