There is a lot of debate in the technology space about what the best solutions are for nonprofit and charitable organizations. The power of volunteers contributing to the Linux, SugarCRM or Mozilla open-source community are clear examples of great, low cost tools available to broad public, providing high value to its user base. In many ways, the values in the open-source community are 100% aligned with ours.
However, in our office we make technology decisions based on how well technologies can talk to one another. This is our first and foremost consideration. We consider integration across all office productivity needs and relationship/program management requirements.
The second consideration made when adopting a new tool is how easy is it for our team to make changes as we fine tune our programming. We don’t want to code ourselves into a box.
Other considerations include cost (comparing off-the-shelf products versus web-based services), and how much external consulting resources are needed for specific or custom configurations.
These consideration points are critical because want to support hundreds more local artists. Thousands more Charities. Tens of thousands new citizens who want to be engaged.
To accomplish this, our small team must select technology tools that best enable our people to connect with our content. We are calling it an Open Architecture approach. If our email isn’t connected to our CRM – it’s no good. If our CRM isn’t connected to our FTP file sharing system, no good. If our FTP doesn’t allow easy access to new users, no good. We need these tools to be deeply integrated and accessible.
As I described in a recent post, we use Box.net for our FTP File sharing needs and EchoSign for our e-signature services. These two services plug into Salesforce.com very nicely. Most of Salesforce.com’s third party apps can be installed within hours by our team of non-technical people. Our modest integration got us into the Power of Us Appy Awards at Dreamforce 2009. It was a great honour.
There is much more to come in the discussion of Open Architecture, and exciting new projects ahead.
