Dear Blackbaud,
In October, you gave many people a sneak peak at a new product option, The Raiser’s Edge Mobile. This mobile application is being developed for iOS, Android and Blackberry devices, we were told, and will let us access our own Raiser’s Edge database from outside the enterprise using mobile devices. I believe this is a huge leap in the right direction for Blackbaud, and I am very encouraged to see that this functionality is very near useable. However, developing a mobile app is easy; anyone can develop a mobile application, and connect it to a SQL database. Adding mobile functionality to The Raiser’s Edge will not set you apart, in many ways it won’t even bring you up to par. It’s 2011 (almost 2012!) now, and mobile applications were so 2009. What you really need to bring to the mobile space, is the tools for us to build out our own solutions against The Raiser’s Edge: you need to release a mobile platform.
We’re told the initial release of The Raiser’s Edge Mobile will focus on getting relevant information into the hands of mobile solicitors/fundraisers/stewards; those folks who make the money flow in, but who aren’t in the office themselves. This would include predominantly read-only access to constituent biographical information, relationships, giving history; and maybe some edit capabilities for notes and actions. I commend you on starting small but effective; this model will let you get a limited set of functionality (and a limited set of security concerns and liabilities) out in front of a subset of your users, allowing you to redesign, tweak, and respond as necessary.
The future may include dashboards, basic reporting, and eventually a suite of applications to allow event management, volunteer scheduling and other broad functionality. According to one product designer, the distant future may include web services and mobile development.
This is where you’ll go wrong, where your legacy will bite you, and where you have the biggest opportunity to stand out.
The mobile ecosystem is the development platform of today, not the future. And the culture surrounding the mobile ecosystem contains the target audience for consumers as well as developers, right now. While you’ve spent the last few years trying to figure out what The Raiser’s Edge 8 should look & behave like, an entirely new medium has sprung up around you and made RE8 all but irrelevant. Your new “Blackbaud Mobile” product for the UK shows that some of you are aware of this situation, but your insistence on developing a set of functionality for mobile to essentially mirror RE7, shows that the cultural aspect has not yet hit home.
I can hardly blame you, 30+ years of enterprise development imbues you with certain tendencies, strengths and weaknesses. I believe you’re seeing this play out with your Infinity platform. On paper, Infinity is excellent: it provides web service endpoints for everything, role and security access for everything, robust scalability & tailoring, the promise of on-prem or hosted Saas models, and just about everything else that we would have wanted from a big enterprise application, 5 years ago. In conversations in Charleston, it was presented to me as your answer to Salesforce.
But I have to ask, how many third parties are actively developing products against Infinity? How many hobbyists? How many Apps have been built that sit on top of Infinity services? Why can’t I find Blackbaud Infinity on Twitter? Where is the huge interest and excitement around Infinity? I believe Infinity is an excellent platform, but you’ve designed it, built it, rolled-it-out and marketed it like an old-school enterprise vendor. And that’s a problem, because today you’re competing with old-school enterprise vendors, new-school enterprise vendors, fresh start-ups with no baggage, and even garage hobbyists. When all my organization’s VPs and our president can’t pull up any given bit of fundraising data that they want, from their iPhone, you’re doing it wrong.
And you can’t hope to do it right, by doing it all yourself. You must open up a mobile API, and encourage an open, mobile platform for app development to arise around RE7. This will attract developer interest like nothing you’ve done in the past. You see, enterprise developers fall into 2 camps: those who develop enterprise applications; and those who develop enterprise applications AND care about software. The ones who care about software write about it, and create conversation, and develop hobbyist apps, and have a following. You can win quiet enterprise developers, but if you win noisy enterprise developers, half the job is done for you. And then there’s everyone else: the same everyone else who developed the majority of the apps in the iOS or Android app stores, the same everyone else who gives to charities, who’s involved in a church, who knows someone who knows someone who has a problem they need to solve.
You need to attract interest, and it’s really not hard to do so if you play the game right. So, release the interfaces that power the RE7 Mobile application, when the application launches. Get it out there, warts and all. It’ll turn heads, guaranteed. Every time you add a new method or new level of functionality, get it out there. A mobile API for RE7 is not a value-add to the Raiser’s Edge Mobile… it in itself is the product you need to be releasing, right now. The Raiser’s Edge Mobile must be your demonstration of what can be accomplished using the tools you’ve authored. Tools that any developer must then be able to use, to create their own interpretations of what is necessary for their organization to accomplish their fundraising goals. Which is what this is all about anyway.
This opens up the possibility of a “Raiser’s Edge App Marketplace”, which only helps to solidify the choice of The Raiser’s Edge as the best fundraising software on the market. Now not only due to your domain knowledge, but due to the rich functionality that is available and continues to become available thanks to the free market. I urge you to open that door in Q1 2012, rather than at some undefined point further down the road “when it’s ready”. The market is ripe, so you need to respond now.
All the best!
Jonathan Puddle
I agree with much of what you have said and in truth, whether publicly or not, I am sure that many people in Blackbaud would also agree.
I think that the intention of the Infinity platform was definitely as you describe the case for opening up the RE7 mobile platform. The reason that there are few professional developers, let alone hobbyists developing for the Infinity platform is that there are so few users on that platform. What is more there is such inertia to get Enterprise CRM (the most obvious choice for Infinity developers but not the only one) implemented that getting the application widespread is far too slow for any developer ecosystem to pick up speed.
I can only assume that is why there was never going to be an easy solution for RE8. It would have been too difficult to implement as is.
Now, faced with RE7 as the current, largest platform that Blackbaud have, it is difficult to see how such a developer ecosystem could ever be built. You are correct that opening up the RE7 mobile platform would be great but it would not guarantee widespread adoption.
For a long while there were calls to make the RE7 API free so that anybody could develop on it. Had that been done ten years ago and had been encouraged then the landscape could have been very different. It is not so much a mobile platform that is required but a modern platform that can interact with all sorts of data sources. Until that happens RE7 will never be a sustainable product of the future. But then again who is pretending that is actually the case.
Thanks David, great comments! I fully agree that RE7 is not a sustainable product of the future, but I do think Blackbaud has the chance to cement The Raiser’s Edge, and themselves as sustainable brands of the future. In my mind, it’s all part and parcel of the same thing. An RE7 platform for mobile development could by extension allow for web-development as well. If BB is displaying a renewed commitment to RE7, which I think is the right step, then this would be a logical, and culturally relevant, further step.
Jonathan, great post. The good news is that we aren’t as far apart as you think. First, you are right in that the initial release of The Raiser’s Edge mobile apps are focused on end-user. While it might look like we are only building mobile apps, that’s where there is a miscommunication. If we were, we would not be working with a platform provider, we would have simply built the apps ourselves, as you said “so 2009”. But by working with a platform provider, we can take advantage of quickly building native apps on multiple OSes, online/offline synchronization, data security and integrity, and proven scalability.
With this first release, we are prioritizing the needs of the end-users over those of the developers. As product management guru Marty Cagan points out:
Our first priority is building a great mobile application for the end-user, but built on a platform that allows us to adapt and scale quickly. So, let me clearly state, we are focused on building an awesome initial app and getting that right, but the way we develop it prepares us for the next step, which is what you are requesting.
While we have kept developers in mind (obviously, we are the first developers on our platform), we will be doing product discovery with folks like you – and hope you will participate – to learn what needs you see from your customers, and how we can work together to meet those needs.
Thanks for taking the time to reply, Tom! I agree with the approach you’re taking, as you’ve described it. If the end-user doesn’t buy in, then it’s a moot point (in the US usage of the word, not the UK usage).
My caution to you, is that you could spend forever perfecting the product, expanding on it, and growing it in all logical directions. If Blackbaud restricts the platform by choosing to develop everything for it themselves, taking care of every possible use-case, then it will die off. And while you’re saying that you do plan to open the platform, if the delay between app launch and platform availability is too long, then it won’t matter: it’ll be RE7 all over again :) This is why I push the issue now, and why I push strongly for an early release of an open API. Don’t wait till it’s “ready”, rather, release, then iterate.
As has been pointed out on Twitter recently, opening up the Infinity API could be a major boon for that platform. It’s encouraging to hear that that is being considered. But as I pointed out, this is more than just a “customers are asking for us to release the API” issue; customers are fundamentally asking for you to become a more open, inclusive, relevant company. Discovery sessions are highly commendable, but discovery sessions (for all their goodness) can often be the knee-jerk reaction from a typically closed company trying to appear open. I’m not accusing you of false-pretenses, I’ll happily assume the best on your behalf, but responding successfully and fundamentally to the drastically changing expectations that customers place on software companies today will be the difference between success and failure for you.
Jonathan, meant to comment on this earlier. We are in violent agreement. We are pushing on opening our APIs. It isn’t just being considered, but being developed and done.
We have been a closed company, and we must make sure when we open things the technology and our support are ready. Using the technology ourselves as a developer is one form of that.
In any case, you (and David and more++) will be the judge of how we do. I look forward to hearing your feedback on our progress.
Thanks for taking the time to respond, Jana. We’re definitely look forward to an open future.