Now, for the Citizen Software update.  Despite all of the above, and perhaps even because of it, I have continued to focus relentlessly on bringing CitizenCRM to market.  Why?  Because I believe so deeply, in my bones, that the people who devote themselves to great citizenship, by working for nonprofits and great causes, deserve to have world-class tools available to them to help them achieve their mission.  When we started Citizen Software, as an idea back in 2008, we surveyed a nonprofit software market where the vast majority of the nonprofits (the “Other 95%” as they are called – those which are small to mid-sized) had a dearth of great software tools available to them.  The tools were either (1) exceedingly expensive, or (2) didn’t talk to other software very well, or (3) were powerful, but VERY complex, cumbersome and difficult to use effectively, thereby costing these organizations ridiculous amounts of time and money on training implementation, fixes, you name it.  Sometimes, and much too frequently, they were (4) “all of the above.”  Then there was the seemingly endless stream of poor souls in organization after organization who continually told us, every time we spoke to anyone in the nonprofit sector, that they were constantly exporting data from one database or application, just so they could import it into another database or application, simply to accomplish mission-critical every day tasks — like send out an email blast, or update data from payment processor transactions into the donor database, etc.  THE SOFTWARE SHOULD WORK FOR YOU AND YOUR CAUSE, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND!  These people should be working on strategic value-added work, leveraging their true passions and talents, not pushing data around from one database to another simply because the software itself can’t do that heavy lifting.  This is why Citizen Software was founded; to scratch that itch. As we got deeper and deeper into it, we realized that what we are really trying to create is connection – connection between your cause, your community of constituents and donors, their social networks, and yours, and your data.  In other words: creating social CRM that enables and empowers connected effective efficient citizenship.

“The Revolution will Not Be Exported Into a Spreadsheet.”

Believe it or not, despite everything we’ve encountered and suffered since November of 2010, and perhaps even because of it (believe me, when you are working on surviving cancer and have little people sleeping under your roof, being CONNECTED to a supportive community is a HUGE asset) and thanks to an extremely talented team of software wizards, princesses, and their patient clear-headed leaders, we actually have CitizenCRM ready to launch in beta version NOW!  Please sign up, kick the tires, take it for a test drive, completely free during the Beta period, of course, and TELL US WHAT YOU THINK.  Your feedback is crucial to us.  This company has always been, and always will be, relentlessly focused on delivering tremendous value to its intended customers.  We need your help to move to the next stage.

Here is where you can get the goods.

We hope you love it.  Please tell us, if you do.  Please tell us, especially, if you don’t.

Thanks!

If the software applications that you use to perform the essential functions of your organization don’t “play well” together, don’t share data between them seamlessly, and chances are, right now, they don’t, then you and the others in your organization are wasting huge amounts of time exporting data out of one database, only to be able to import it into another, all simply to perform tasks that are essential to your organization’s fundraising efforts.  Frustrated?  Yeah, we know, and we were too.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.   We created a simple, yet powerful, web application with CRM deep in its DNA and heart.  Then, we made sure it plays well with others.  We listened carefully to dozens of folks in dozens of organizations just like your’s and they told us which third party applications they tended to use regularly in their operations.  Then we brought all of these apps, and our’s, to Citizen’s “kindergarten” and made sure they learned the new rules: the software works for you, not the other way around.

You simply cannot ignore that this tool, and others like it, are available for free to your organization to deepen your engagement with your current constituents, and to connect you with millions whom they know, but you might not . . . YET. Still not convinced? Consider these astonishing statistics regarding the growth of social networking usage and mobile platforms to access them. Your constituents “get” the power of these tools and are using them every day. Sheryl Sandberg also had some terrific insights regarding how nonprofit organizations ought to leverage the social Web and Web 2.0. Sure, you can invest a great deal of time and effort trying to craft a grand strategy. There are certainly some very bright, experienced folks out there who can help you do that. Idealware.org has some terrific posts about this topic that are worth a look. But that is definitely not what Sheryl Sandberg suggested. She suggests convening a team of passionate, motivated, dedicated college interns and — setting them loose. Now, of course, you’ll have to manage closely the content that these young folks post; that can be done fairly easily. But make no mistake, these young people know how to leverage these tools in emergent ways like nobody’s business. And, if you are looking to develop a connection to a younger demographic; one that can grow and deepen its relationship with your organization over decades, there is no better place to start, than with the social citizens on these Sites. I am very involved with the Business Leadership Council of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco. The BLC has a Facebook presence and leverages it regularly to get the word out to its constituents regarding its forthcoming and recently past events and content that is of interest. Now, imagine that the interactions that your constituents are having with your social networking assets are automatically being populated into your CRM donor database. Think that might provide some powerful actionable intelligence you could use to drive fundraising? Yeah, Citizen Software thought so too.

If you would like to watch the entirety of Sheryl Sandberg’s 53 minute passionate and informative keynote address to the Business Leadership Council’s Gala Annual Breakfast, you can find it here. Some terrific insights. The first question posed to her is from your’s truly.

First, the good news: for nonprofits and political campaigns trying to watch every dime, managing on ever-tightening budget shoestrings, there are some powerful applications out there that are offered free of charge.  However, the old adage “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” certainly remains true in this context as well.

Now, for the bad news: even though license fees or other charges for the software application itself might be waived or nonexistent, the other costs associated with actually using these apps might negate any savings you would see by choosing them.  In short, you must evaluate every software offering based on a total cost of ownership (“TCO”) analytical framework.  The costs your organization might incur simply to install, configure, customize or otherwise implement these “freeware” applications can be quite significant.  Some of the issues that organizations consider in evaluating these implementation costs, can be found  here, here and here for example.  The fact that the Nonprofit Technology Network offers a webinar to help organizations identify and evaluate these inherent costs, ought to tell you something pretty significant about the “free” nature of free-ware.  In fact, at least one outfit I contacted that regularly performs CiviCRM and Salesforce implementations and custom development work related to those apps, explained to me that for the MOST BASIC implementation possible, most organizations would be looking at an initial outlay of $4,000 for the requirements gathering phase, and $5,000 for the implementation/customization.  That’s $9,000!   Even amortized over the course of your first year on that solution, its still a whopping $750 per month!  Of course, for implementations beyond the most rudimentary, you’re likely looking at tens of thousands of dollars.

But a thorough TCO analysis certainly doesn’t stop merely with the costs of implementation.  Oh no.  If the “free-ware” you are considering is not offered as software-as-a-service (“SaaS”), and therefore is not hosted for you in the cloud, then that means you need to acquire the hardware and other equipment to run the application and maintain it.  These costs are also quite significant, particularly for smaller organizations.  They may include, for example, the acquisition of one or more servers, operating systems and other third party applications needed to effectively operate the “freeware,” peripherals to backup your data, etc.  Combine those costs with the inherent costs associated with having your personnel (or a contractor) manage the process of updating the “free” software, backing up and securely storing your data, the costs of training your people on how to use these not very user-friendly apps, and you get the idea, “free-ware” isn’t really free.  We’ve heard pretty routinely, from executive directors and development officers, that one of the biggest costs involved in using Salesforce, in addition to the implementation, are the costs of adequately training their folks on how to use it.  It’s a powerful tool, but not the easiest, most intuitive thing to use.

Contrast the uncertain, fluctuating nature of some of these costs, and the inherent insecurity of constituent data hosted on-site, and you can begin to see that, on a TCO basis, paying a relatively small monthly subscription service fee to a trusted software vendor for a reliable, intuitively easy to use, hosted SaaS offering may be a much more efficient use of your organization’s scarce resources.