(This article is part of a series of guest columns written by innovators in the nonprofit sector. PNNOnline will be featuring a new "Challenges of the New Century" guest column each Friday.)
By Tom Patterson
Everywhere you turn you see something about leveraging "the power of the Internet."
The ability to streamline administration, reduce operating costs and offer better customer service through the Internet is exciting, but requires an intense knowledge of technology. For most nonprofits, simply maintaining their site on the World Wide Web is a major undertaking.
Some organizations consider developing custom Internet solutions in-house, but consulting fees, Web programming costs, hardware, maintenance, security upgrades and data processing capabilities can run into the $500,000 to $2 million range.
Most nonprofits face two major obstacles when trying to travel this high-tech road alone: lack of capital to invest in expensive hardware and software, and little or no information technology (IT) staff to support these applications.
The United States Olympic Committee recently selected an outside company to provide a donor interface for them. According to Tony Basile, the organization's chief information officer, "We would have had to invest in a three-tier server, 128-bit SSL encrypting technology, packet filtering firewall, specialized Web programmers, a payment processing engine, secure data warehouse, credit card verification vendor, ACH Network, and more just to handle online donations. Clearly it made no sense for us to make these investments internally, so we went with an ASP... who could meet all of our needs."
Application Service Providers (ASPs) offer their services based on a month-to-month subscription or per-transaction fee. The ASP basically allows organizations to enjoy the benefits of the Internet by "renting" the ASP's services and software rather than buying their own.
"GSAE was looking for a way to allow participation online that did not entail downloading a form and mailing it to us," said Lori Spear of the Georgia Society of Association Executives. "We looked into e-commerce packages, but they cost more than we were prepared to invest. An ASP emerged as the ultimate solution. Our link to it allowed us to accomplish our objective without costly up-front investment."
An ASP can provide nonprofits with Internet solutions such as online donation processing, data collection, secure payment processing, group e-mail correspondence, and searchable information databases. ASPs that have built their applications upon robust, scalable technology will be able to take the online information and feed it into your existing accounting and fundraising software to truly streamline operations and reduce costs.
The functions provided by an ASP can be seamless to site visitors -- almost indistinguishable from the Web site itself. In addition, with an ASP supporting and maintaining the tech-heavy back-end processing, a nonprofit can concentrate on its own core goals.
A final bonus to using such a service is the ASP's ability to provide the latest upgrades to their service over the Web, in real time, without significant costs. For the majority of nonprofits searching for an Internet solution, an ASP may be the perfect fit.
What to look for in an ASP:
1. Flexibility - Choose a vendor that offers customization to meet your needs. The functions the ASP provides will be of most help to your organization if they will integrate with your organization's infrastructure.
2. E-mail - You'll save on costly mailings and phone calls by selecting an ASP that offers e-mail correspondence for confirming donations, orders, registrations and payments.
3. Reporting - Check out the ASP's ability to produce reports based on information collected online. The ASP should also have import/export data capability.
4. Privacy - Protecting your members' data will help foster their faith in your organization. Select online partners who have stringent privacy policies. Check the policies for clear statements on who owns the data collected, how the data might be "shared" with sponsors or advertisers, and how "opt-in" or "opt-out" e-mail policies are addressed.
5. Security - Payment information should be transmitted using 128-bit encrypted technology via secure socket layering (SSL), the highest level of data encryption available today.
6. Cost - Carefully weigh the pros and cons of different ASP pricing structures. ASPs generally charge a setup fee, a monthly service charge, a transaction-processing fee, or some combination of these pricing structures. By selecting a transaction-based fee or fee per data volume structure, your association can take a "pay as you go" approach to the ASP's services, paying only as your members actually adopt the online option.
7. Customer Service - By all means, check the customer service record of the ASP you are considering and talk to existing clients.
(Tom Patterson is co-founder and chief executive officer of Data Center Company (DCC), which launched iSignUpNOW.com in January to offer online registration, donation, and payment processing capabilities to existing Web sites. Patterson has more than 30 years experience in the development, operations and marketing of high technology and information service companies. He holds a BS in mechanical engineering and an MS in engineering mechanics from the University of Alabama.)
(Anyone interested in submitting story ideas for this series can do so by following this link pnninfo@mindspring.com. Please include contact information, topic proposal and a brief description of specifics related to nonprofit sector technology and/or innovation included in the column.)
