I just read on Beth’s Blog and PDF that Convio have just bought GetActive. These are two of the biggest providers of web 1.0 engagement tools for nonprofits. I spent some years working for a very large customer of GetActive, in fact I was the resident GetActive “expert” on staff. While I always had suggestions for improvement, I shared my colleagues’ widely-held relief that at least we didn’t have to use Convio!
So while this may be good for GetActive, Inc. I’m not optimistic about the impact on the online advocacy space. Beth raises some excellent points about interoperability, and links to other blogger reactions.
Also more info and some useful thoughts by Michael Silberman at Echo Ditto: “Will this encourage more healthy competition from the other vendors and providers? (I hope so.) Or will Convio innovate less due to their massive new market share and potential perceived lack of competition? (I hope not.) And will this make open source solutions even more attractive to potential clients and users? (I think yes.)”
I’ve used Convio and GetActive, and they both kind of…blow. The one thing I had heard lately about Convio was that their database had gotten much better than GetActive’s… if so, at least that would be an improvement on GetActive’s side of the deal.
One big issue is when the sky falls and every non-profit in DC has to send out an email. I worked at the same large customer of GA as Ruby, and when the O’Connor resignation happened in 05, we rushed to be the first to hit send on our message, knowing if we weren’t first in the queue – it would be hours until our message went out…and that was when only half the city was on GA. Now that everyone is on the same system…they better take care of that problem pronto.
Ruby:
Are there any connect the dots between what you heard at sunlight/berkman and this issue of interoperability. Will look forward to your further thoughts on the Sunlight session.