Discover Top Posts Tagged with #convio

@benjixxberry

“Babe... I Uhm.. I haven’t told my dad that we’re engaged or Elliot or Isla, how do i tell them?”

WordPress.com is bad

I hate wordpress.com. #wordpress @wordpress #angry #failedtechnology #nonprofitfailure

There appears to be major differences between wordpress.org and wordpress.com. It leaves the impression that nonprofit is good and business is bad. Final conclusion – you can’t use Pintrest’s rich pins with .com because you can’t add meta tags. That means I have to move my sites. My goal was to have my Pintrest page active to communicate with those that visit my event…this Saturday and Sunday…

I…

View On WordPress

#Convio #crafting #Drupal #Entrepreneur #Girls in Science #GoDaddy #nonprofit #Pintrest #web platform #Website Development #wordpress

Nonprofits Deserve a Better CMS: Our “F” Review of Convio CMS

As software nerds, we sometimes forget that not all organizations are driven by sales. Your average CRM, project management, or CMS tool is loaded with terms like “leads,” “customers,” and “sales funnel” — not exactly helpful language for the ~1.5 million nonprofits operating in the United States.

Convio CMS - our first "F"!

Unfortunately for nonprofits, great cloud-based software systems that “get” nonprofit workflows are hard to find. Blackbaud dominates the sector, and frankly their offerings are pretty poor. These include Convio Luminate, a CMS system that’s designed for nonprofits, but that’s grossly behind the times. We’re giving it 29 points out of 100, which on our scale makes Convio our first ever “F” — poor usability, archaic functionality, and significant security concerns make this a solution best avoided. Read on for our full review.

Convio CMS Functionality = 10 points (out of 30)

A content management system (CMS) should help you organize, create, and maintain web content. Leading CMS solutions—such as Wordpress or Drupal—are popular because they’ve balanced great functionality with great usability. Convio does neither.

Convio users rely on a “windows explorer” type file structure to find and modify web content. Don’t remember where the page is nested? No shortcuts here—you’ll have to dig through folders and sub-folders, or wrestle with the awkward search.

Once you’ve found the content you’re looking for, updating it is a multiple-click, inflexible, 1995-inspired disaster. Seriously, try adding anchors without arbitrary spaces entered into the HTML. Or try inserting dynamic media. I dare you.

Just about the only redeemable feature is the “preview” link, which you can use to share unpublished content with non-Convio users. That’s helpful.

Overall though? 10/30 for functionality.

Convio CMS Usability = 10 (out of 20)

Functionality and usability go hand in hand, so it’s no surprise we’re displeased with Convio’s user experience.

Endless windows and lists aside, there are some serious head scratchers here: when inserting an image, why doesn’t Convio remember where images are stored (within their own system)? Why aren’t display preferences saved between sessions—or, you know, within the same session? Why is the system so slow?

In the interest of fairness, Convio might be liked by users who love windows explorer (crazy I know, but I assume they’re out there). The author toolbar—which lets you edit pages by navigating to their URL—is another nice touch (though it comes with security concerns, detailed below).

At the end of the day though, Convio is about as user friendly as a pack of razor blades. 10/20 for usability.

Convio CMS Security = 0 (out of 20)

This is convio.com's file structure - revealed using their own authoring tools.

Any self-regarding web application should have a clear security statement, detailing where and how data is stored, along with encryption and redundancy standards. Convio doesn’t offer this (though, on the login page, there’s a quaint reminder that unauthorized access is “forbidden”—thanks, Convio).

More troubling, however, is that if users enable the aforementioned “author’s toolbar,” they’re then able to view the file structure of ANY Convio hosted site—not just their own. While folder structure isn’t necessarily private information, it doesn’t always correlate with URL breadcrumbs, and often contains unpublished “test” folders. Not informing users of this backdoor, however benign it may be, is a major security oversight.

To add to our displeasure, Convio has an unsurprisingly atrocious security record. 0/20 for security.

Convio CMS Integrations = 2 points (out of 10)

Convio CMS integrates with other Blackbaud products, but they mostly suck. There’s an open API that’s related to the CRM side of Convio (not reviewed here), but virtually no 3rd party integrations with the CMS. Pretty terrible.

2/10 for integrations.

Convio CMS Price = 0 points (out of 10)

Lack of transparency means you can’t find data on pricing structures, a tell-tale sign of an archaic system. We do know, however, that Convio contracts aren’t cheap, and include significant price additions for storage space (which, in an age of sub-$50 terabyte hard drives, is downright extortionist).

0/10 for price.

Convio CMS Support = 7/10

This is one area you won’t find us complaining too loudly. Convio support is fairly responsive, and offers detailed in-depth training webinars with friendly and helpful staff. There’s also a fairly robust helpdesk center, and quick email support. No user forums as far as we can tell though, and no feature request or bug reporting avenues.

7/10 for support.

Conclusions

Convio CMS is a poorly designed, archaic CMS that organizations should avoid like the digital plague: look to more established solutions like Wordpress or Drupal. If Blackbaud’s CMS is any indication of the general quality of their other products (which include the ever popular "Raiser's Edge"), we’d recommend staying away from the lot.

As a tangential sidenote, Convio is a good example of why we don’t generally recommend vertical-specific software. While it sounds like a good idea to invest in software built specifically for your industry, it's too often inflexible, outdated, and poorly conceived.

VM Associates is a New York City based cloud computing consulting firm. We help companies (and nonprofits!) transition into newer, better, smarter software. Contact us to talk about your organization, the cloud, and how we might help.

#Better Practice #blackbaud #cms #convio #Future Proofing #General #raiser's edge #Real Talk #Reviews #software

Open Rates Dropping: Old News, Same Problem

485 organizations included in this study delivered email newsletters to their constituents. More than 47,000 email newsletters and over 1.04 billion individual emails were sent. On average, these organizations saw an open rate of 19 percent. This is down from 20 percent fundraising experienced in 2009. These results suggest that organizations need to continue to refine their subject lines, content, and use of segmentation to resonate with subscribers.

From Convio's 2011 Benchmark Report

What kind of difference does 1% make for your organization?

(Hint: 1% = how many donors x value of those donors)

#advice #convio #donations #donors #email newsletters #newsletters #nonprofit #soundcheck #open rates

Welcome to Soundcheck: the Team Encore blog

No matter how you heard about us, we're just glad you're here. Welcome to Soundcheck: the official Encore team blog.

You must be thinking, who are these smart-asses who think they're good enough to write a blog giving me, the nonprofit professional, advice? (I would). Hmph.

Well, you're exactly right. We actually don't know much. And we think that's the beauty of it.

We're a team of (mostly) Georgetown University students who are diverse in our skills and the causes we support, but unified by our passion for social entrepreneurship and making a real social impact with our work. Over the last couple of years, our company, REaction Strategy Group, has worked with charities in Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Kenya to develop unforgettable donor experiences (online and offline) and build lifelong relationships with supporters.

In our work, we realized there was a huge need for a powerful web app that would help charities delight their donors with more meaningful conversations and relationships--something beautiful and easy to use that would even save charities their precious time. And that's what we're working on now: Encore. It's going to be the most effective e-newsletter you've ever had, it's going to be fun to use, and it's not going to look like it was designed in 1998 (the only impressive effects back then were by James Cameron, and even he's relaunching).

Along the way, we've landed big contest wins, had some freaking amazing people give us advice, struggled to the verge of quitting, been shot down countless times, had a few regrets, and experimented relentlessly (hundreds of hours of interviews and testing).

And that's exactly what this blog is about: a journey, together with you, to wade through all the speculation and "advice" that we've seen on the interwebs and get to the heart of learning. On Soundcheck, you'll find three types of posts:

-What We've Learned: concrete and actionable advice/learnings accumulated from REaction and Encore. We'll be providing our own hard evidence and test results wherever we can, along with reports and stats published by powerhouses like NTEN and Blackbaud.

-Inspiration: awesome things nonprofits around the world are doing with media, storytelling, communications to make us laugh, cry, and give.

-What We're Doing: product development updates, new features, power tips, and what we're excited to let you know about Encore.

We're writing the blog we'd want to read, and we hope it's something you want to read too. If you agree, please talk to us (comment or email) and spread the word to your colleagues and friends!