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Silas Notes

Kintera may open up

A rumour, but an encouraging one
Posted by Jacob on May 10, 2007
2

This would be big news! Allan Benamer over at Confessions of a Non-Profit IT Director is heaaring that Kintera may open up their platform.

That would mean we could write Wordpress hooks to allow a Spress site to talk to a Kintera DB for membership and giving information.

A lot has happened of at Kintera over the past few months. One thing that hasn’t been widely reported is how they restructured overage fees. The take away from that change is they were trying to make the fee structure more consistent and fair. A very good thing for resource crunched ministries. If they do open up their platform it would be more clear movement that the new management is committed to serving the non-profit space in a way that acknowledges the budget constraints everyone is facing.

However, I’m not so sure Kintera opening up their platform is going to be an immediate boon to ministries. The Kintera system, while powerful, is very complicated. Any API they offer will take some serious development know-how in order to harness. While I know we have the people and resources here at Silas Partners to help ministries build websites that could use a rumored Kintera API, that custom development doesn’t come cheap.

The bigger good to come out of this is simply the fact that Kintera is moving in this direction. Perhaps this will prompt Convio and Blackbaud to open up their platforms. Open platforms encourage innovation and make it cheaper to move to the best solution. It also makes it easier for us at Silas Partners to build websites to the unique needs of each ministry.

Kintera has a conference call today, check back in this space for updates.

  1. Well,
    Everything about Kintera seems mysterious and professional, secretive and requiring skilled help at every stage. This may be an unfair criticism because I’ve never been the end user but I have had ministry clients use Kintera and be disappointed at how inflexible it seemed to be.
    God bless em! I’m for open everything but the whole web database world is still Greek to old guys like me.
    Dr. Bill Bray, Donor Communications Specialist

    Posted by Bill Bray May 31

  2. Bill, I see what your saying about Kintera. I wouldn’t use the word secretive, because I’ve found Kintera helpful and forthcoming with fixes. However, I can understand how it can seem a bit like smoke and mirrors when you have to ask three or four people to help you solve a seemingly simple problem.

    Posted by Jacob Jun 04

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