Mostly I have lots of questions and concerns that the firms won’t be able to address until the merger is completed — if then. My main questions are about product strategies. (How) will this affect Convio’s online marketing suite? Common Ground? Luminate? NetCommunity? Sphere? Raiser’s Edge? eTapestry? (How) will this affect Blackbaud’s plans for, or ability to build, implement, and support Enterprise CRM? Will Blackbaud continue to develop on both the Salesforce and Infinity platforms? Will they really be willing and able to maintain all of these products and codebases?

While I generally think vendor consolidation is bad for the nonprofit world (unless the vendor being absorbed wasn’t a strong player to begin with), I’m less concerned about the impact on small nonprofits. There are tons of choices out there for small and mid-sized organizations. Idealware’s Consumer’s Guide to Low Cost Donor Management Systems reviewed 30 systems, the majority of which don’t come from Convio or Blackbaud. I’ve also been compiling a list of every donor database I come across at https://socialsourcecommons.org/toolbox/show/1661

I’m more concerned about the top end of the market. There were few full solutions designed for large nonprofits to begin with. Blackbaud has already bought Team Approach and PIDI, and (assuming this goes through) Luminate will join that club. On the recent NTEN community call someone asked the panel to name 5 vendors (other than Blackbaud and Convio) to whom we’d send a CRM system RFP for a $100 million nonprofit. It’s a real struggle to come up with five that can handle:

• Millions of records and hundreds of users
• Complex family, social, business, corporate, and financial relationships
• Provides robust, flexible support for all forms of fundraising, membership, marketing, and communications
• Support advocacy, volunteer management, complex events, electronic communications, content management, online payments, and merchandise sales
• Provide strong reporting and analytic tools
• Has an intuitive user interface for casual users
• Supports streamlined, high-volume data entry tools
• Provide data integrity tools to keep the data clean
• Has an open API and flexible import and export tools
• Has strong role-based security as well as strong protection against hackers
• Supports multiple locations or chapters, multiple currencies, multiple languages, and multiple character sets.

In addition, the vendor or consultant needs to understand nonprofit best practices, workflows, reporting needs, fund accounting, and unique requirements like giving societies, membership benefits, fair market donation values and tax benefits, soft credits, gifts that are split between funds or sources, auction gifts and purchases, and how to provide donor recognition credit for gifts that have no tangible value. Finally, the system needs to be backed by strong implementation practices, training, and ongoing product development and user support.  Software alone seldom gets the job done.

I’m also concerned about the confusion this will cause in the industry. I’m currently working with clients that are considering Blackbaud and Convio’s database products (among others). They don’t want to choose a product that won’t get the full resources of the merged company, or could even be killed off. Some independent consultants who implement Common Ground have questioned whether my clients even want to consider that product until the dust settles. (I’ve also heard from competitors that are expecting to pick up new clients because of the confusion).

And I’m concerned about confusion at Blackbaud. My experience with past acquisitions was that it took months or years for sales reps to figure out where their products stood. Sometimes they would pitch competing Blackbaud products against each other. Other times they would refuse to show us a product that a client was interested in because of an internal decision to promote product A over product B.

Although Blackbaud has bought companies and immediately killed off their products, (e.g., Fund-Master and GiftMaker Pro), of late, they’ve acquired companies and kept their products going (Team Approach, eTapestry, PIDI, Kintera). However, in most cases I haven’t seen evidence that they have invested in the future of these products. In some cases (like Team Approach), clients have been told that there won’t be any future product enhancements.

I expect that it will be many months before we have any clarity about what this merger will mean and years before anything significant happens. But it’s hard for me to believe that Blackbaud will be able to support all of these products. I expect that some clients will be given notice that they should make other plans. It’s also hard to imagine that established products will be killed off — at least not any time soon. I’m more concerned about newer products, or those with smaller customer bases.

I do expect that this will create opportunities for existing systems. If nothing else, many nonprofits won’t be able to wait for months or years to see which products will survive. But those companies will need to be able to provide the tools and support that nonprofits need, and have the marketing muscle to get the word out.

It could also open the door to an open source project. During the NTEN call we discussed Tessitura, the performing arts fundraising and ticketing system as an example of a successful effort. But that product started out with development and support from a major organization (the Metropolitan Opera). The Met was able to form a separate company to invest in and support the product, and it’s been a huge success.
 

On the other hand, many organizations (and this by no applies just to nonprofits) will throw money and time at trendy projects without thinking about whether they're the right tools, with the right strategy, investment, support, or marketing behind them.  By all means, try new things.  But do it smartly.  Do your homework, test, learn from others, learn from your own failures, and get better at it over time.  And don't neglect what's already working for you.

The nonprofit ecosystem is a way of thinking about how data is shared by and flows across the different departments and activities in your organization. Similar to the interconnectedness in natural ecosystems (for example: marsh, birds, plants), we think of the data ecosystem as the interconnectedness of software tools and the data they hold. Thus, in a well functioning data ecosystem, tools are connected so that the information gathered from online donations, for example, is easily commingled with the information gathered from an event which is commingled with the information collected about other supporters. In a poorly functioning data ecosystem, each pool of data stands alone with little or no interconnectedness.

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NTEN describes the conference as follows:

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Presenters:
Robert L. Weiner
John Kenyon, John Kenyon Technology Consulting
Michael Stein, Michael Stein, Inc.
Eric Leland, Five Paths
Michelle Murrain, Open Issue

Burning Issues:
Getting the word out about my new consulting practice
Scope-creep
Pricing, fixed or hourly -- why choose one or another?
Need for contract?
Communicating what my specialities are.
Valuing my services for the marketplace
How to size up clients if they're a good fit? what are the red flags? how to set boundaries, say no, share bad news?
Pricing structures
Starting out on my own
Trying to re-learn how to work on a team? As partners, as a collective, without creating toxic/un-needed structure?
Employer -- human resources management in hardware consulting
Managing client expecations -- workflow, documentation, contact len
Growing - capitalization and hiring needs
Struggling with letting go of hard-care contracts into a more agile environment.
Should I pull off onto my own practice?
Separation of strategy work and managing vendor neutrality. Client management expectations.
Looking at growth, through partnership, subcontractor, off-load work on to others and still get paid.
Which path should I take, vendor or "soft" consulting?
Used to be independent and no longer am, so how do I handle more of the administration of a multi-person office? And needs new bathrobe to wear at work?
Has always been the accidental techie in arts organizations, starting as a volunteer, so how can can I transition and set a dollar value for my skills?
Juggling different projects efficiently without adding overhead, and working with others with different skills as sub- or co-contractors?
Managing longer and larger-budget projects, with more stakeholders.
Managing a transition from being an employee in an organization to being a consultant in the same organization.
Struggling to communicate what I do to prospective clients and telling them what they need to know. Confidentiality of sharing case studies.
What about franchising consultancies, to make a network of 'train the trainers.'
How do you fight burn-out as a technology consultant given the churn of new technology?

Discussion:

Ideas about telling the story about "what do I do as a consultant?"
You may be a specialist, but come off as a specialist -- focus on benefits of a few things in your elevator speech.
Finding the match between market needs and skills -- try informational interviewing with other consultants.
Be able to articulate what you help orgs do and accomplish, not necessarily the technical products/skills?
In the mid-nineties one could be more of a generalist. A lot of this is trial and error -- what is your experience, what do you like, but you have to weigh if anyone would buy it.
Kept doing actual job interviews and learned about what their needs are, what the core needs are, and then package their plan around that.
You might make mistakes and say you are able to do a project when it is, in fact, out of your skill set -- admit it and give the client a refund if it isn't gonna happen.
Sometimes a niche helps you define clearly.

Understand your proficiency, maybe defined on a likert scale,What up with what to charge? How to decide to do pro bono?
Don't be afraid to ask for what you're worth, and decide by market analysis
Different price structures are ok for different projects
Don't start ask with, how much can you afford? In a relationship building, they will likely understand that certain tasks will cost a certain amount.
There's risk in hourly, if you miss something in the scope of the project -- try to be specific about the functionality. Hourly billing -- it's always in our interests to spend more time, so we could easily spend too much time.
Value-based pricing - what is the project worth, including me, the client, and the market (book: Million Dollar Consulting) -- you get pragmatic -- what is the ROI, what are the metrics and quantification of success?
Models:
Create a capped-rate, a retainer + hourly for tech support, project-based
An option in fixed project cost, Figure out what it's gonna take (time, resources, product), then double it because things will go wrong (recommends quickforms.com)

Contract length can vary by length of project -- put a protection "woe" clause in case other things get out of control or change in a way that will affect the time and resources needed. At the 70% mark of your budget, you'll have these functionalities. After that the 30% we can re-examine additional need and maybe renegotiate.

Clients don't have an understanding about what time things take -- they may think something is hard that we think is easy, and vice versa -- so communicate why something is harder or easier. The client trusts you that you will be worth the investment that way.

During the dialogue for proposal and contract, there is a real opportunity to observe each other, so time spent can have an effect on the relationship.

Teaming up with other consultants
Sharing knowledge was very beneficial -- NTEN and Tech Underground were founded so people could have a collection of trusted consultants to assist, or cover vacations, or handle additional expertise. There has to be agreement on philosophy, of style. A partnership or trusted advisor in a formal relationship can provide necessary balance to assure that workload is reasonable, tasks are managed in a coordinated way. This can be done per project to add expertise, as long as you really know that the subcontractor can do factually (not by reputation).
NPTechConsult is on the NTEN (look for great comments from Karen Nyhus) -- it's got great archives and interesting discussions
http://groups.nten.org/group.htm?mode=home&igid=23747

You can read all of the conference blogs at http://nten.org/ntc-live

So You Want to Be a Consultant?

Presenters:
Guru Master Robert Weiner
Michael Stein
Michelle Murrain
Sarah Granger
Eric Leland

Important tip: The zip/thumb drive that came in the conference packet has a nice hand-out full of consulting-specific links, so be sure to open that zip!

Sarah's list of necessary skills for consultants:
Product management
patience
customer service
organizational
speaking and presentation

Michelle:
Came from a college-level academic background but a side project in grant-writing was very satisfying.
Recommends a book called "Consultants Calling" -- Geoffrey Bellman (it's on Amazon)
Need to meet client where they are in terms of skill level. She's sees her self primarily as an educator in this role.

Michael:
Becoming a consultant seemed natural - he felt compelled to keep coming back to it.
Good consulting Qualities:
Self-motivation
Discipline for processes and organization -- clients appreciate this
Be extremely flexible

"Scope Creep" - your client goes off the framework of the contract, i.e. "and by the way, will you help us with..." Some consultants are ok with it, but it's good to learn how to say no gracefully (it's not in the contract and I can't fit it in yet/now...). Eric didn't refuse clients and learned to work with sub-contractors, but he trained them to work with the clients in a quality control role too.

Work/Life Balance:
Set time to completely focus on family -- no iPhone, etc. during family time.
It's a fundamental step to choose products, agencies, partners who appreciate your lifestyle values.
Don't let clients or volunteers contact you off hours -- let it roll to voicemail and answer it during your office hours.
Ask for deadlines to keep them, and you, on focus -- and build some padding into the deadline to cover for emergencies.
Always respond and always communicate, to give an answer or to say I'll get back to you. Set an internal policy for how long before you'll return calls -- if you're at a conference or out of the office, let them know in advance or as soon as you know you'll be out.

Organizational Decision making:
Some clients are not good at managing decisions because they are not able to support the process in good faith, or they are challenged at, or unable to complete, decision-making. Robert has been told that consultants are "organizational therapists." If there are hesitancy, sometimes there are dysfunctional, subversive or "dark spots' that you have to overcome, or you just have to walk away.

Things to ask for from the client:
pre-assessment (Eric calls it a "jump-start assessment" with a meeting with the client for a few hours, and he generates a report that says what he can or can't do) and priority; organizational chart; proposal process; listen to discussions about roles of the client staff in the process

Marketing strategies:
Decide or develop a niche based on your interests or skills so your marketing focus can be refined.
Build a presence: Public speaking, a lot of writing of books and articles, blogging, volunteering, client referral, meet fundraising consultants if you're a product consultant and product consultants should meet fundraising consultants, LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, apply for open jobs

If you have a product and you're a consultant, how do you avoid conflict of interest?
It's hard or impossible to be vendor-neutral. Transparency is the most important thing. It may be that you are not the right vendor, and if you've got the client's interest at heart, you might refer another vendor you know.

There are no failures as much as learning for the next client...
Try to avoid drama in an organization - sometimes the project scope has unreasonable structure (not enough time, for example - and don't wait to explain delays or concerns in deliverables.
Trust the client's data to tell you what the problem might be, even if the client doesn't agree with that assesment. Learning together with the client can be a bonding opportunity.
Know who pays the bills, who butters the bread, who pays the consultant - don't try to swim upstream against his or her wishes without serious consideration for the stress.