Gene Austin, Chief Executive Officer, Convio and Tom Krackeler, VP, Product Management, Convio

Today, with popular websites like Facebook and Software as a Service (SaaS) companies like Salesforce.com opening their platforms, it is incumbent on all software vendors serving the nonprofit sector to join this trend and open additional opportunities for nonprofits to have greater choice and flexibility in pursuing their missions.

The move to openness is an important shift in the software industry, which has evolved from monolithic mainframe systems to client server systems, and more recently to SaaS and participatory platforms of Web 2.0.

Proprietary systems that are not integrated with third-party Web tools or databases create an environment of data silos that makes targeted, coordinated marketing nearly impossible, and force nonprofits to make trade-offs on the depth, breadth and quality of solutions to meet their online and offline communication needs.  

In contrast, more open platforms give organizations the freedom to choose the best solution for their needs without being constrained by the limitations of conventional systems. As the leaders of social change, nonprofits have the right to expect leading edge technologies and solutions. 

To meet the expectations of nonprofits today -- and five years from now -- software vendors need to facilitate interoperability between systems and enable integration between offline and online data and the new Web. And they should do so with one clear purpose in mind: to open the possibilities for nonprofits to find and engage constituents to support their mission.

The NTEN community has been leading the charge for openness. With Salesforce and Facebook, Convio has embraced openness as a way of doing business. A work in progress, Convio Open is based on the following principles.

Software vendors should:

1)     provide nonprofit organizations of all sizes and in any stage of Internet adoption the flexibility to integrate with other web or database applications to exchange constituent and campaign data.

2)     make their Open APIs available to clients, partner and a broad developer community.

3)     expose Open APIs as part of their core product functionality.

4)     proactively use APIs provided by other companies in additional to providing their own.

5)     make their API documentation publicly available and provide a forum for sharing and discussing best practices and exchanging code examples.

6)     publish a roadmap for their API development and encourage participation in the development of that roadmap.

7)     make their APIs accessible to nonprofits at a level that does not require extensive technical expertise to leverage those APIs.

Our vision for a multichannel world is supported by standards-based technologies to provide integration without the complexity of traditional software development. Today, it’s extending our application to integrate Facebook and Flickr. Tomorrow, who knows? To be ready for tomorrow -- whatever the Web may bring -- requires interoperability with other products, including offline databases and social media sites. Facilitating interoperability and integration opens the gates of innovation by giving nonprofits the ability to leverage emerging Internet trends to enhance constituent relationships and reach new market segments.

With our launch of Convio Open, we embrace an open-centric, forward-thinking philosophy that makes interacting with other solutions a priority in providing more choice for the nonprofit community.

Convio Open invites NTEN members to be part of a collaborative community. Please join the conversation at http://open.convio.com.