Craigslist Boot Camp Photos August 23, 2006 By

Van Jones speaks about the trials of starting and building a nonprofit. He's one of the best speakers I've seen in a long time, and I really love the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. He's done so much toward improving the prison justice system, and has advanced the cause of human rights in doing so. We both used to advise the human rights organization Witness, back in the day.

Some lucky winners of GiftWorks 2006...

...more lucky winners.

GiftWorks Volunteers is Launched! August 17, 2006 By

6 months later, we're ready! GiftWorks Volunteers is now available at MissionResearch.com. You can turn donors into volunteers easily, track hours worked, jobs, and a lot more. The cool thing is the matching of jobs and volunteers based on skills and availability, and the ability to create Volunteers smartlists and reports. Lots of cool stuff--go check it out and let us know what you think!

And congratulations to the team--especially Steve and Jon, who both cranked hard to make this happen. Ok, back to work now. I'm stuck in a hotel in Burlingame, working on my Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp speech...

giftworks | nptech | nonprofit | volunteer | software |

GiftWorks Volunteers Beta Ships! July 25, 2006 By

Steve and the product team pushed really hard and yesterday released the first beta of GiftWorks Volunteers to a group of customers, who, notably, volunteered to test it. Congratulations to Steve and the team, and everyone involved in making GiftWorks Volunteers a strong addition to the GiftWorks line of fundraising software solutions.

I think about Blackbaud and Raiser's Edge from time to time; less so the other lower profile, expensive software packages. I've said a lot fundraising software should be easy, affordable, and well designed. GiftWorks meets that standard.

GiftWorks Volunteers is pretty close to that standard: it is easy, affordable, and well-designed, but it will take a little bit more up front reading of tutorials and manuals to be able to quickly understand it. It's not that hard--you have volunteers, their skills, and their availability, and you have jobs, required skills, and times needed, and GiftWorks Volunteers matches the two. But like anything, there are subtleties that you learn to appreciate over time. Like recording hours for volunteers--it's really easy and flexible. Or how jobs have different states of being to reflect how a job might change over time.

GiftWorks Volunteers is also our first add-on, and this is significant in a number of ways. First, we're always innovating and solving problems for the nonprofit world; this product came out of a lot of research into our existing customer base of thousands of customers. Next, it's the first example of how a software company--any company, not just ours--can build new applications that plug into GiftWorks. If you're a developer, you'll really appreciate the SDK we're developing.

In August, you'll get a chance to try it out and buy it if you'd like. If you manage volunteers, you'll appreciate this product. And the investment is as always, quite affordable. If you'd like to join the beta group, send an email to gvbeta@missionresearch.com

Thanks!

nptech  nonprofit  volunteers  software  nonprofit  npo  blackbaud  giftworks 

Catching Up: GiftWorks Volunteer Center in testing July 18, 2006 By

So the blog has been silent for a bit--very sorry. We've been working very hard on a number of things, especially on GiftWorks Volunteers. One thing still up in the air is the name: GiftWorks Volunteers, or GiftWorks Volunteer Center? What do you think?

So good news: we're testing. That means we'll have the beta next Tuesday, and a final version a few weeks after this. And I swear next time we'll be more careful about announcing our dates. My bad!

I'll post some screenshots a bit later this week.

GiftWorks Volunteer Center Delay June 20, 2006 By

We've been working on GiftWorks Volunteer Center for 4 months. It's a big project, and we're doing it in phases to make sure we can serve most of our customers in a timely manner. But we've blown past our second expected release date, and I apologize for this. Because it's my fault--I can point to the day I caused the delay, and that is disappointing, but we're learning from it and I promise we'll continue to do our best.

We expect to go to beta in the next week, but I've told the team not to rush it; at this point, it needs to be great, not just good.  I shifted resources to handle the rapid growth (including recipients of the $1 million software donation program through TechSoup). But we're working hard on it and will have it out soon (early July).

You might remember we delayed the release of GiftWorks 2006 last August for 4 weeks. That was my call--I felt the software needed more work, and I was right. The delay cost us some sales, but in the end we released a better product and customers were better served by the decision. We followed that up with an update within 6 weeks to refine a few things, and since then we've updated the software 2 additional times as part of our usual quest for great software. I think we set the bar pretty high.

This time, the issue is resources as we grow. We're growing from 7 last summer to 12 this past winter to 17 now and 23 in 6 weeks, at which point we'll be set for a while. In the future, I will be more careful about advance announcements. i hope you understand, and I hope you like the result--the software is pretty cool. Check out Chris Walker's blog to see some of it.

Now back to the drawing board--literally! (feel free to vent under Comments below--I do read them!)

Usability March 26, 2006 By

Last night I had a discussion with a new friend at Intuit about Intuit QuickBooks Point of Sale. I'm pretty straightforward and unbridled; I say what I think and did last night. I think QuickBooks could be simpler, as good as it is. And so does he, I'm sure, as do many people at Intuit. It's a great product with lots of stuff, but it's become so big it's easy to get lost in it. It's still easier than any other accounting software package. It was great to meet him and his family, and the homecooked meal was a nice respite from hotel food.

We're working on a redesign of GiftWorks to make some things more obvious. Most things are, but as I've said before, we've missed it on a few things. Today I met up with Vic Cho in downtown Burlingame; Vic is an adviser to the company and a friend, and after chatting and then looking at some pianos he went on his way and I stopped into the Apple store.

I've lusted after an iPod for some time. Not so much that I want to be part of the whole Apple thing--I don't--but just because the design and navigation are supposed to be very slick. I tried a bunch of the computers, including the new dualcore notebook. I agree with the critics; "MacBook" isn't a great name, but it does get the main Apple brand back into the mobile lineup.

I tried the iPod and figured out the navigation pretty quickly. What I couldn't find--and looked for--was how to adjust the volume. After a few minutes of trying a bunch of things, I finally asked for help. A very well-versed, young sales guy informed me--move your finger around the center navvy thing when the song is showing. I said oh, ok, easy enough, but it wasn't obvious. He said it had a quick-start manual and they offered Getting Started classes in the morning  before the store opened.

We're trying to make things as obvious as possible in GiftWorks. Sometimes we don't follow PC software conventions, because frankly, they aren't obvious. We have Getting Started Classes, and a very thorough manual. But I suspect with a few months of work on usability, we can make everything obvious and easy to use, not just most of it. GiftWorks is really great--we do love it. But we're also tough critics, like many of you, and through that process of paying attention to details and your feedback, we make very good software even better. It's still the best fundraising software for most nonprofits, but we'll make it better.

So here's the story: GiftWorks 2007 is all about improvements. Not necessarily more features, just more obvious paths to existing features. The obvious stuff where you can't believe we missed something given how good GiftWorks really is. In May, we release GiftWorks Volunteers, which will make it obvious and easy to manage volunteers and the time they contribute. And in late May, we'll release an improved QuickBooks integration, so it's obvious and easy.

let me know what you think we should do to make GiftWorks easier to use by clicking on Comments below. Thanks!

GiftWorks Update 3 Released to Some Customers February 23, 2006 By

We've released GiftWorks Update 3 to about 40 customers. It's been through weeks of testing, and contains a lot of fixes and enhancements. One fix is the housholds donation mailing issue (ya know what I'm talking about if you tried it before), and another is making the mail section more obvious.

This is the last scheduled update before GiftWorks 2007. But we have a number of new things coming out this Spring, including Volunteer Management, deeper QuickBooks integration, online donations, and the SQL Server beta. So we're definitely busy serving your fundraising software needs!

What other features woudl you like to see? Let us know : )

US Grant Site Doesn't Work for Macs February 14, 2006 By

GiftWorks doesn't run on Mac without VirtualPC installed. We made a conscious decision to develop only for Windows 2000 and Windows XP, because maintaining two codebases isn't easy. But VirtualPC allows you to run Windows software on a Mac. We have a friend who works with us occaionally who has run it and it's pretty slow on his 4-year-old Mac, but newer Macs should have no problem with it.

But our sites do work for Macs, unlike some government grant sites...

New Product Announcement? January 23, 2006 By

I'd like to say I can give details, but I can't. Here's what I can say: GiftWorks Online will launch this Spring. What it includes is Online Donations (almost ready), Online Printing integrated with GiftWorks, Address Validation (convenient!), and some really cool Web 2.0 stuff. There's a lot going on...Sit tight!

The Hazards of Hosting: No Dialtone at SalesForce.com December 21, 2005 By

SalesForce.com was down most of the day yesterday. We've been slowly weaning ourselves off it and using GiftWorks ourselves more and more, but we still lost a sales day because of it.

If your critical data is hosted at an ASP like SalesForce, and it isn't available 100% of the time, it's simply not useful. We're looking forward to our full transition off it.

Here are news articles about the outage.