Blackbaud to Abandon Common Ground: We Can Help!
About four years ago when we decided to partner with the Salesforce Foundation and salesforce.com to build our PatronManager CRM system, we felt in good company because Convio, a well funded and respected company that focuses on cloud-based fundraising systems, also chose to do the same thing. They built and launched a fundraising system Common Ground and they have done so well that hundreds of organizations are now using it.
However, as you may also know, the industry giant Blackbaud purchased Convio a few months ago, effectively absorbing their largest competitor. Since Common Ground competes with their own Raiser’s Edge product the question in everyone’s mind was what Blackbaud would do with Common Ground. Well, last week the announcement came that in 2014 Blackbaud will kill off Common Ground, leaving hundreds of organizations with a product that will no longer be supported by them.
However, despite what seems like bad news for organizations using it, there’s good news here. Because unlike the traditional software world, Common Ground was built on the Salesforce platform–in the cloud–so these organizations have many options. If they want to stay on the Salesforce platform, our PatronManager CRM represents a great choice, particularly if the organizations also have memberships, subscriptions, or do any kind of events or ticketing.The purpose of this blog post is to ask you to help me spread the word to Common Ground customers to get in touch with us, because we can be of help.
And, on a related note, for those of you that are still running Windows XP, you should know that Microsoft is going to stop the support of XP this fall, which means there are really no good options except to upgrade. When Microsoft pulls that plug, you would be wise to stop running that operating system as security patches will no longer be provided by Microsoft.
Through this blog post I’m sending a message to organizations using Common Ground that we would welcome the opportunity to speak with you. We been working on the Salesforce platform for four years and we know it intimately, and we would be delighted to continue to support your organization’s work.
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Learn More about PatronManager, the powerful CRM platform that helps you sell more tickets, raise more money, and cultivate stronger bonds with your audience, all in one database.
Correction: Support for XP and Office 2003 will end April 8, 2014. Details at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/endofsupport.aspx
Wow. OK that’s different information than I had before. Thanks for the clarification!
With Convio gone and the Common Ground platform history, we need more companies like yours to innovate and make nonprofits more efficient. Blackbaud would not know innovation if it was under their nose. Proof is that they killed the most innovative platform in the market. Good luck to you.