Metacentricities

For some of you, this is relatively old news. And for many of you, this will be completely new. A while ago, in my not-so-long-ago life as a nonprofit technology consultant, I had reason to come across a few large companies (I like to call them the 800 pound gorillas) in the nonprofit software field. One of those companies is called Convio. They, along with Kintera and Get Active, are very expensive (most of my clients could never afford them) but fairly powerful web based applications that help nonprofits do what they do - keep in contact with constituents, build community, raise money, etc. Kintera is publicly held, from what I know, Get Active and Convio are privately held.

For a long time, Convio has been working with many leftish-leaning organizations (like Howard Dean’s campaign, Planned Parenthood, etc.). There was quite a brou-ha-ha in the blogosphere recently about their taking on an anti-gay organization as a client, the Alliance for Marriage. AmericaBlog and Daily Kos (with a follow-up,) among others had some interesting comments about it. Some have called for a boycott. Ed Batista has a couple of good comments on his blog about it, and raises some important questions, ones that I’ve had in a general sense for a while.

As activists, we often talk about using our power as consumers to affect change. We buy organic, boycott Exxon-Mobil, don’t darken Wal-Mart’s door, etc. As someone who has been in the position of giving advice to nonprofit organizations who have activist and advocacy missions, I am always aware of how sometimes our advice to them goes smack dab against some of the ideals they hold. (Example: advising a nonprofit that cares a lot about the environment to upgrade their computers regularly, so that they will spend less money on hardware issues, and more on their mission.)

I think it’s perhaps time for many nonprofit organizations, and the progressive nonprofit community to think carefully about this issue. Few of us think that the ends always justifies the means. Some of us (me included) think that the means by which we work to achieve our mission, affects the mission, sometimes deeply.

I’ve been an advocate for the use of open source software in the nonprofit sector for a while now, for a variety of good reasons. One of which is that are a whole host of really good open source (in fact or in spirit) advocacy tools out there, home grown, with expertise around to help implement it. It is not necessary (nor necessarily cheaper or easier) to go with a service like Convio. There are good choices out there, ones that will help continue to build expertise and good code in our own community (rather than build good code that investors make money off of.)

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