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>>;At the end of the day, nonprofits do not, for various reasons, have the core competency or the technology available to them that the for profit world does and has had for years. Even with the will and the expertise of senior management, it will be difficult if not impossible for nonprofits to catch up to the capabilities of the rest of the economy with respect to technology. This suggests very strongly to me that there is a need for a leveraged competency that nonprofits can subscribe to - we already see this in point solutions such as the online fundraising tools. Such an entity would be able to attract the sort of skills that will help bridge the technology divide for nonprofits - which isn't going to be cheap, but with the benefit of leveraging those costs against many nonprofits.>>
This is a job for Nonprofit Technology Assistance Providers. But there are real barriers to NTAPs having access to qualified staff and to funding. Most philanthropic funders can't bring themselves to fund the high risk and highly disruptive players that would move nonprofit technology forward.
At CivicSpace, we are trying to bridge the technology divide for nonprofits by building an open source technology infrastructure with a business model that is designed to maximize benefits to the nonprofit sector rather than profits for CivicSpace, LLC. The first step has been becoming leaders and leading contributors to the Drupal & CiviCRM open source communities.
The important next step will be releasing CivicSpace On Demand, a low cost hosted service that allows groups to get a website, CRM database, online donations and email newsletters. Our unique contribution is that anyone can create and configure a Drupal/CiviCRM solution for any nonprofit (community organizers, homeless shelters, etc.). And that solution could be delivered as a free download or hosted solution.
Already over 2,000 civic groups and nonprofits use CivicSpace, but to make an impact in the sector, we and thousands of other affiliate companies and NTAPs needs to serve 20,000 or 200,000 groups with CivicSpace technologies.
If you are interested in investing in the vision and mission behind CivicSpace, please drop me a line.
The key here, though, is that the movement is not about a single entity, it is about a technology platform (Drupal/CiviCRM) that employs hundreds of people across 20 different NTAPS and vendors (only slightly fewer employees than Kintera).
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David Geilhufe
Managing Partner, CivicSpace
http://www.civicspacelabs.com/
skype: dgeilhufe
T: 409-781-1580
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