Last week Blackbaud, who acquired Convio's Common Ground fundraising software product a few months ago, decided to eliminate the product altogether, leaving recent purchasers stuck with a product that will be unsupportable in 18 months.
This webinar will help you recover from such an occurrence. While you may not be able to recoup your investment, we will provide tips for evaluating products at a deeper level and helping to ensure that your next acquisition will be the right one.
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What To Do When Your Vendor Kills Your Fundraising Software
1. What To Do When Your Vendor
Kills Your Fundraising Software
Cheri Weissman
September 25, 2012
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4. Today’s Speaker & Host
Cheri Weissman
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5. Reselecting Fundraising Software
What to do when your vendor kills your
software
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6. Define your options
Where are you in the process?
Just committed and paid vendor
Data conversion and implementation in
process
Within three months of going live
Live for longer than six months
7. Determine your action
Just committed
Switch to another product provided by vendor
Request full refund and begin search for another
solution
Conversion and implementation in process
Request full refund and begin search for another
solution
Switch to another product provided by vendor IF
vendor will waive costs of aborted conversion
8. Determine your action
Within three months of going live
Data conversion and training costs fully
refunded
Live with software
Use the sunsetting period to prepare for
another solution
9. Things to avoid
Taking the first option offered
Give yourself some time to consider before
jumping at another solution
Sticking with the vendor because its
easier
Really? The vendor that just killed your
product?
Taking your second choice
How distant a second was it?
10. Be Better Informed
Release date of product
Fundraising software takes time to develop well.
In general, don’t consider a product that’s been on
the market less than 5 years
Number and frequency of upgrades
With Software As A Service becoming the norm,
it’s easy for vendors to “upgrade” their software
very often. From an end user perspective, the
best case scenario is no more than 4 upgrades a
year.
11. Be Better Informed
Ownership history
You’re better off with a product that has
been developed by one source
Number of users
If a product has been around more than 5
years and has less than 200 users, you
have to wonder
History
Initial release date, # of upgrades, size of
staff overall, # support staff, training staff.
12. Decide to be proactive
Talk to references
Discuss at length things like quality of
support, ease of upgrade process,
knowledge shown by support staff, etc.
Get names of people who switched from a
product you are considering and ask why
they chose to switch
Vendors will be happy to give you names of
people who dumped another product for theirs
13. Starting Over
Platform
If you decided to go with a hosted solution
(SAAS), restart your search in that arena
Don’t consider in-house software unless
you are unable to find an online solution
that will meet your needs
Budget
Do your best to find an alternative you can
afford
14. Dig Deeper
Search for information about a possible
vendor and product.
Google the software and actively look for
articles in which they are mentioned, news
releases, etc. that are NOT found on the
vendor’s website
Tech Soup (www.techsoup.org) is a great
resource for information
Find published software comparisons to
see where your next choice might fall
15. Dig Deeper
Look for forums on vendor websites
and see what other users are saying
(pro and con) about their experience.
Unmonitored forums can provide
valuable information
16. Decide to be prepared
What else do I need to think about?
Staff time needed
Who will be involved in conversion
Training
Where is the training
In what format is the training
Project timeline
Recreation of output
17. Decide to be prepared
Costs (known and hidden)
Costs vary widely for products and services, so it’s
not feasible to consider this question until the
desired solution is found. Then, consider:
Conversion
Implementation
Training
Hardware
Time
Ongoing costs
Support
18. Keep your options open
Frequently when products are sold or
sunsetted, vendors will reach out to
you, sometimes offering the ability to
buy into another product at a discount.
Consider these options carefully,
remembering that a lower price for a
product that won’t meet your needs isn’t
worth anything.