Gartner Group top 10 trends for 2010

Last month the Gartner Group analysts highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends for 2010. Number one is Cloud Computing – up from third position last year.

So for a small to medium sized charities what are the benefits of Cloud Computing?

Firstly, there is an acronyms you’ve most likely heard in connection with Cloud Computing: SAAS.

SAAS (Software-as-a-Service) is where a service provider gives access to their software via the Internet. All you need is a PC, a browser, and Internet access. All the back end hardware and software is managed for you.  So let us consider the SaaS aspect of Cloud Computing – what are the opportunities of SaaS for small to medium sized charities:

• No support costs – though there may be an annual license
• No need for in-house IT support staff – all installations, upgrades, back-ups, and on-going maintenance are handled for you
• No server – so no purchase, maintenance, or support issues. You don’t need to worry about installing the latest patch, replacing ailing hard-drives, the replacement funding strategy.  They’ll be no annual license, or support contract
• Access: staff, and volunteers, can access your application from almost anywhere. Just a PC, web browser, and Internet access
• No urgency to upgrade in-house computers – less powerful PCs will do fine

But there are risks:

• You are dependent on Internet access – but you could always access the system from home, a library, or even the local coffee shop …
• The up time and response time – see for example the System Status page at trust.salesforce.com
• Backups – you still must take back-up copies of your data!
• And maybe, depending on the size and nature of your charity, Security and Regulatory compliance issues

Garner Group Hype Cycle 2008

In the Gartner Group’s Hype Cycle special report of 2008 Cloud Computing was highlighted as “the latest super-hyped concept in IT”, with 2 to 5 years before main steam adoption.  It’s already main stream!

For small to medium sized charities, then, with limited capital, limited space, limited access to technical staff, do consider choosing SaaS and reduce your dependence on hardware.

Salesforce.com is the poster child of SaaS. It can be used for SFA (Sales Force Automation), or as a CRM (Contact Relationship Management) tool.

Consider fund raising as an example.  Salesforce.com has created a special configuration of it’s SaaS for non-profit organisations, and charities.  This Non-profit edition of Salesforce.com provides:

• Tighter communication with your donors
• Stratification of donors
• Collaboration between staff – fully manageable by Salesforce.com.  Merge all those disparate spreadsheets, databases, and notes into one easily accessible system …
• Creating and managing a donor development pipe line
• Manage contacts, accounts, and communication sequence: you can also richly manage the relationships between contacts and accounts such as affiliation, board member, reporting relationship, …
• And, with Salesforce.com you can always add new screens, adjust the layouts, add extra fields, include relationships between records, install new applications from AppExchange (“… the complete marketplace for cloud computing“, many of which are free for non-profit/charities) – essentially fully adapt their software to your organisational needs

Obviously, much of this can be handled by a custom built database – but the long-run costs of developing and maintaining such an application can become prohibitive.  Using a SaaS CRM like Salesforce.com to deploy a streamlined application is almost always going to be faster, and more flexible.

Finally, keeping the theme of fund raising, using Salesforce.com is about gaining and retaining donors; not about “managing” them – it’s more about managing the increasingly rich information you gather about them.  But ultimately it’s not about “donor” strategy, process, or the technology.  It’s people – and this includes your staff.