Soapbox Engage Blog

As a frequent flier of JetBlue airlines, I was as disappointed as others to hear the news of the horrible delays, poor customer service, and general lack of strategic planning that the company had during the weather problems of mid-February 2007. One thing that I knew about JetBlue, however, was its roll-up-the-sleeves mentality.

With Allan from the Non-Profit Tech Blog, the news never closes in the non-profit tech world. Thanks to his late night posting, we've learned some interesting news in what is becoming the year of the CRM shakeout.

In what is probably the most scathing review I've read of a corporate CEO by shareholders in our sector, especially one in our protected non-profit technology world, a large chunk of Kintera shareholders have politely asked CEO Harry Gruber to see the door.

I use the world "politely" kindly.

"With Mr. Gruber at its helm, Kintera has not demonstrated a sufficient ability to achieve its own projections, to drive operational efficiencies and the integration of acquisitions, to manage a productive salesforce which delivers organic growth, or to even provide a credible estimate for when the Company will be profitable."

Warning: the graphic after the jump may not be suitable for Kintera shareholders. On the other hand, Blackbaud shareholders should click with glee.

Not too long ago, I wrote a piece called Islands and bridges: why Soapbox will lead the way to CRM and CMS integration for non-profits, where I detailed our vision on breaking down the walls between important technology silos in the non-profit community.

At that time, we spoke only about content management systems (CMSes) and constituent relationship management (CRMs), and while feedback on the blog was quiet, offline we got an earful.

A full three months have passed since then, and I think it's about time to open the lid on how our bridge engineers are laying down the first strong links between these islands. Especially with postings like that of Allan Benamer from the Non-Profit Tech Blog, where he writes about his favorite stack of stacks, it made me think a response to his post might be in order.

Just when I finally figured out how to get off Orientation Island in Second Life (strictly research purposes only, of course), I've now found out that the virtual world is starting to ever more replicate the real world.

President Bush now has a handful of online avatars that don't like him either. That can't help the approval rating!

On January 29, 2006, it seems that a small cadre of Second Life users "marched" on "Washington", and were successful in crashing a part of Second Life and getting interviewed by BBC News. Oh, and getting blog attention from people like me.

My quandary is this: if my real life is as hectic as it's going to get (something I say every Monday), how in the world am I going to keep up with my avatar's life in a second reality?

Even more important, should I care?

We PICnetters use Basecamp for project management and when we learned they had released an API and saw the interesting things people were doing with it, we thought, "hey let's integrate". Not because it's cool (though the closer we get to Web 2.0 tools, the cooler we all seem here around the office), but because we saw a need, at least internally, for some extended functionality: easy time tracking and reporting.

Basecamp allows time tracking and it is very nice when checking off a task to record how many hours you spent getting it done. But sometimes we get so engrossed in our work we forget when we started. So, we built a sort of stop-watch application which allows us to punch-in, punch-out, write up a description then send it off to Basecamp.

Another pet peeve of ours is when we run over the number of hours we've dedicated to a project, and with several people contributing time to a project that can happen easily if the time isn't closely monitored. So next up on the integration effort is to develop a warning system which will alert project managers when we're nearing that limit.

In what will likely be the email heard round the NPO tech world, we just received a partner email from GetActive that states the following announcement:  Convio is buying GetActive.

While it's too early to understand the ramifications of this for the companies' clients and the sector as a whole, I'm rather confident that this will likely be just the beginning of a year of mergers and acquisitions in the sector.

From the letter:

I'm writing to share the exciting news that GetActive is to be acquired by Convio, Inc. This is a significant milestone for the nonprofit sector, our company, and our product. But most important of all, this is great news for our partners and clients.

I predicted the consolidation of the marketplace last year, but I didn't think these two big hitters would be the happy couple we see today.

See the full letter after the jump.