Flickr Photo: Cubbie_n_ VegasIf you're anywhere around my age -- I'm 33, I can admit it -- you don't remember how small the world used to be. Before the advent of the jet airliner in the 1950s, intercontinental travel was long, hard, and expensive. Only the very rich went abroad. Getting around the U.S. was no piece of cake either: until the interstate system, traveling by car was long, tedious, and expensive, too.

Infrastructure improvements, coupled with rising incomes and an increased awareness of cultures other than our own, has caused travel to skyrocket world-wide. The National Academy of Engineering figures that, "Over the past five decades, Earth’s inhabitants have increased their travel demand from an average of 1,400 to 5,500 km, using a combination of automobiles, buses, railways, and aircraft." This has fundamentally changed the way we live.

Now, let's think about your data.

Flickr Photo: MuffetAh, Spring: tulips, sun, clean, crisp air, and email metrics.

Today, we hosted and co-released the eNonprofit Benchmarks Study with M+R Strategic Services. During the live event and webinar, we learned a lot about how nonprofits are using email, and how stakeholders are responding. NTEN Members can get the recording of the webinar for free.

Convio also recently released a benchmarks report of its own clients. The reports don't cover exactly the same statistics, but it's interesting that the numbers they do have in common are very similar.

For all organizations in both reports, we found:

Flickr Photo: booskittyThe late, great Mr. Rogers has been asking us this question for decades now: "Who is in your neighborhood?" Though we have learned a great many lessons from our avuncular, becardiganed friend, the nonprofit sector is still struggling to master this one.

I think we all know, intuitively, that all donors are not the same. They engage with us for extremely personal reasons, and are inspired to continue their engagement for equally personal and diverse reasons.

Technology has come a long way in letting us customize our relationships with donors. Our donors can tell us what issues they care about, and how often they want to be contacted. With social media, we can let super-engaged donors participate in a variety of ways. We can provide financial and other administrative information easily to donors who value transparency and accountability.

But doing all of this, in any way, has always felt like finding that pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. If every single donor has unique needs and expectations, how can we possibly keep up?

This week, Convio released a new white paper with Sea Change Strategies and Edge Research that provides a nice tidy framework for thinking about personalizing donor experiences.In " The Wired Wealthy: Using the Internet to Connect with Your Middle and Major Donors," the authors surveyed more than 3,000 donors who gave $1,000 or more in an 18th month period and had valid email addresses.

There are lots of really useful tidbits in the report, but I thought the most interesting piece was the result of the cluster analysis.

The Convio security breach is in the news again, this time in the New York Times, just in time for the holiday giving season. NTEN members Beth Kanter and Allan Benamer are both quoted, and both raise really important issues that you need to consider.

“This wasn’t the best time for this to happen,” said Beth Kanter, a consultant and blogger. “It’s a matter of donor stewardship, and while it’s not an emergency, you need to treat it as if it was one.”

Beth's right. The holiday giving season is upon us.  Even if your organization was not affected by this breach, you need to let your stakeholders know what you're doing to protect their data, and proactively help them protect it themselves. Remind your stakeholders about good password policies. Let them know you're looking out for them.

A nonprofit's ability to collect the data it needs and personalize the feedback it gives to constituents is becoming more critical with the growth of new Web applications that generate additional constituent data.

Forget workarounds. Think open.

Open APIs and extensions allow nonprofits to link existing data and applications in new ways to deliver totally unique solutions.

Join Tom Krackeler, Vice President of Product Management at Convio, Inc., for the free Product Spotlight Webinar "Web 2.0, Social Media and the New Web: Leveraging Open Platforms to Help Nonprofits Achieve Results" to learn why open platforms, products and tools are essential for nonprofit marketing in today's Web 2.0 world -- and in the future.

>FREE! Register Today!

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

It is incumbent on all software vendors serving the nonprofit sector to open opportunities for nonprofits to have greater choice and flexibility in pursuing their missions.

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 missions.

The NTEN community has been leading the charge for openness. With Salesforce and Facebook, Convio has embraced openness as a way of doing business.

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, partners, 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.

Convio announced on its website today that it's going public. Assuming its bid is successful, it will be interesting to see what the capitalization will mean for its products and clients. The full press release is available on the Convio site.

Every day nonprofits deal with software systems that don't talk to each other or work together. They spend time and money on systems that aren't integrated. They're hampered by the inability to extract needed information from a given tool and resort to entering the information several times in different systems.

Update: The recording of the call is now up and available. You can also read the transcript of our post-call chat.

If you have questions for GetActive and Convio, then join us TODAY, Tuesday, February 6 at 11am Pacific, for a live discussion with Sheeraz Haji and Tom Krackeler of GetActive and Gene Austin and Dave Crooke of Convio. NTEN Executive Director Katrin Verclas will moderate this event. We hope you can participate with your questions to the panelists.

I probably need another 23 hours to process the acquisition news today. But I'm never one to reach reasoned conclusions. I prefer the kind to which one jumps. I justify this by calling it "going with my gut." So I may eat my words later, but here goes.

I'm cautiously optimistic about both the Blackbaud/Target and Convio/GetActive mergers.