Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

What happens when your website helps you seamlessly collect donations (or registrations for events and classes), when your newsletter lets you select your contacts from your database, and when your website displays the class schedule from your database?

You’re getting close to effective use - your database integrates with your enews tools, your website “talks” to your database, your website visitors participate by giving or signing up, and you can track them in your database.

Create once, use many times.

My colleagues here at NPower Seattle have been working hard at identifying and integrating tools - and while we have a lot to learn - we’re getting really good at integrating these tools.

We use Plone and Salesforce for many of the web and database needs of our customers, and we’re gradually helping nonprofits integrate Vertical Response and the payment tools offered by PayPal.

Kudos to Evan Callahan and Jesse Snyder for both their hard work and their strategic thinking. Obviously, every nonprofit applies business rules in a different way, so we’ll always have to think and code creatively. But now that we’ve integrated these, working out the unique kinks and logic that is particular to another agency won’t be as challenging.