The CTK Foundation’s "Heroes with a Heart" Grant Award wants YOU to nominate a “Hero with a Heart,” and give them a chance to win $5,000 as thanks for the hard work that they do.

There are three awards:

• $15,000 for Three Heroes One Hero with a Heart from each of the three categories of Health and Human Social Service, Animal Rights and Environmental Protection and Arts and Literacy will be awarded $5,000 USD and a professionally produced video about their affiliated nonprofit for use in public awareness or education.
• $1,500 for One Hero The CTK Foundation will also be offering a $1,500 (USD) President’s Choice Award (the Susan Lee Winter Grant Award) for an individual working to provide creative and innovative approaches to HIV/AIDS education or prevention.
• Blogger's Choice Award Lastly, there will be a Blogger’s Choice Award of $1,000 (USD). The CTK Foundation will choose a blogger (hopefully me) who will -pick one winner from any category.

Applications for all Heroes with a Heart grant awards open on Wednesday, February 1st, 2012 and close Wednesday, February 29th, 2012 at midnight. Finalists will appear on the CTK Facebook page for public voting during April and winners will be announced on May 1, 2012. This award is open to registered nonprofits or charities of all types and sizes, worldwide.

Go to www.communitytech.net/foundation to nominate your Hero with a Heart today!

For regular updates on the Heroes with a Heart Grant, check out the CTK Facebook Page.

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.

Let's say the following donations will be processed by different nonprofits in the United States on Jan. 2, 2012:

1. A check mailed (and postmarked) on December 29th that arrived in the office on January 2nd.
2. A voice mail donation via credit card left December 29 (yes, it happens). A staff member heard the message on Jan. 2 and charged the credit card that day.
3. An online donation made on December 31st. The credit card was charged immediately. The nonprofit was notified of the gift on Jan. 2.
4. An online donation made on December 31st to a different charity.  That charity's online giving system did not charge the credit card immediately -- instead it sent an email (ideally, an encrypted one) to a staff member that the donation needed to be processed.  The staff member charged the credit card when she returned to the office on January 2nd.

Which tax year are they each for? 

The answers below are based on IRS Rules and Regulations: What You Need to Know to Stay Out of Trouble by Alison L. Paul, Executive Director of the Montana Legal Services Association, from the book Advancement Services: A Foundation for Fund Raising, 2nd ed., published by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education.
 

1. "The IRS has stated that a charitable gift made by check is complete at the time the check is delivered or mailed, provided the bank eventually honors the check." The check would be considered a 2011 charitable contribution even though the nonprofit did not receive the check and the funds did not clear the bank until January 2012.
2. "A gift made by credit card payment is complete when the charge is made." (Note that is doesn't matter when the credit card bill is paid.) The charge is considered made when processed by the recipient. So if the charity did not process the charge until January 2012, the donor would be treated as making the gift in 2012 rather than 2011, as she intended.
3. Unlike scenario 2, the online donation service charged the credit card immediately.  Even though the nonprofit wasn't notified of the donation until 2012, the gift was "made" in 2011.
4. Scenario 4 is the same as scenario 2.  The credit card wasn't charged until January, so the gift is for 2012.

Now, nonprofits should not set themselves up as tax advisors.  The donor is responsible for documenting their gifts in case of an audit.  On the other hand, nonprofits are required to provide correct information to donors and can be fined for knowingly falsifying tax receipts.

For further information, see IRS Publication 526, Charitable Contributions, and Publication 1771, Charitable Contribution, Substantiation and Disclosure Requirements, and John Taylor's "Annual Date of Gift Message".

If you have an urgent call to action, a way of reaching a mass audience, and don’t mind not being able to identify, steward, or resolicit most of the donors who give via text, mobile giving can definitely be effective. But those are big “ifs” and most nonprofits don’t meet those criteria.

I do expect this to change over time. There will be more ways to give via cell, like PayPal for Mobile and XIPWIRE. That will bring down the startup and monthly costs and allow you to identify your mobile donors. But we’re not there yet.

If you want to learn more, Mobile Active published a great overview of the mobile giving landscape last year called Texting for Charitable Dollars: The Definitive Guide
 

Donor Retention
AFP's Fundraising Effectiveness Project: http://www.afpnet.org/Audiences/ReportsResearchDetail.cfm?itemnumber=3113
The Agitator’s post “No New Donors!” http://www.theagitator.net/dont-miss-these-posts/no-new-donors/

Attracting New Donors
“Homer Simpson for Nonprofits: The Truth about How People Really Think and What It Means for Promoting Your Cause”
Ebook: http://web.networkforgood.org/201002ebook/
Archive of their workshop at the NTEN conference: http://bit.ly/cTvvSq

Donor Databases
Idealware's "Consumers Guide to Low Cost Donor Management Systems"
http://www.idealware.org/reports/consumers-guide-low-cost-donor-management-systems

Social Media
My own resources page: http://www.rlweiner.com/resources#social%20media  It includes links to articles like:
Should Your Organization Use Social Networking Sites?
Before You Jump in with Two Feet in Social Media - Important Boring Basic Stuff First
Tips for Entering Your Nonprofit into the Social Media Environment
Using Social Media to Meet Nonprofit Goals: The Results of a Survey
The ROI of Social Media
The Six Signs That Twitter Isn't For Your Nonprofit
Ten Things a Nonprofit Should Do Before Setting Up Social Media

The Paperless Choice Challenge is rewarding successful, creative, replicable campaigns that use electronic  fundraising tools by giving away eight prizes totalling over $20,000. Entries can be submitted between June 15 and September 15, 2010. 

For more information go to http://www.paperlesschoice.org/. And while you're at it, check out more resources on going paperless from the GreenTech Initiative's paper reduction campaign.

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It describes the process of raising funds via SMS from the donors' and the nonprofits' perspectives, including costs and tips for getting started. The guide is available for free at http://mobileactive.org/mobile-fundraising.

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