I first became familiar with eCRM, not as an employee of a SaaS company (Convio, which is where I work today), but as an end user of Convio's eCRM software.

A charity bike ride I had helped to start in Austin, Texas, in 2000--Hill Country Ride for AIDS--had stumbled along in its first couple of years with around 100 riders and $100,000 revenue for its annual charity ride. When we first encountered online marketing, we were primarily excited about its ability to accept online donations for our event. That first year of using eCRM, we almost doubled our ridership and income!

Over the last six years, our sophistication as a fundraising organization has grown as the functionality of eCRM has dramatically increased. We have delved deeply into the fundraising functionality for teams and individuals through online mail campaigns, team and individual web pages, individual fundraising events like house parties, and viral marketing through social networking pages. This year we are anticipating around 500 riders and we expect to pass our raised income of $550,000 from last year!

That's a pretty impressive rate of growth over the past 8 years. I attribute much of that growth to our ability to promote our ride through online marketing and fundraising. Feel free to stop by my page and make a contribution! :)

Welcome to Connection Café, a blog created from the hearts and minds of the employees of Convio. Our vision for this blog is to aggregate the latest trends, ideas and best practices for nonprofits online. Through discussions about online communication tactics, the latest in Web 2.0 strategies and integration of offline and online campaigns, we hope to share insight and create an open and honest dialogue in the nonprofit technology world.  

Unlike other corporate blogs you may have looked at, you won’t find information or sales pitches about our latest product and service offerings here. Instead, we are venturing out and doing something different - we’ll be writing about the issues you care about and the topics that can help you succeed online. From time to time that means our products and technologies and how clients are using them to get results will be part of the discussion, but we don’t want it to be a sales pitch, so let us know if we cross that line.

Connection Café will discuss how the Internet is fundamentally changing the way people connect with causes, forcing nonprofits to rethink the traditional models for communication, advocacy and fundraising. We want to share our internal resources and expertise with you, as well as information from our Fusion Partners and point you to other online sources that are having the same, or better, discussions. Bottom line, we want to keep you better connected and engaged with the people, ideas and technology that are driving the industry.

Over the past eight years, we’ve kept you connected with our Convio Connection newsletter, presence at industry events and our online client community. Now I’m inviting you - the nonprofit Executive Director, the weekend volunteer, the marketing/communications expert – to connect with us once again by being a part of our online discussion.

So, when we think we have something valuable to share, you’ll see it here. And while it may be natural for us to draw from past work experience, this blog is not about Convio as a company but rather the people, ideas and technology that are fueling the industry we serve. If you see us veering off that path or becoming too Convio-centric, send a note or post a comment to let us know. You have my word that we’ll listen to what you have to say.

I hope that each person who reads this blog will find something beneficial in the editorials, news and multimedia content we produce.  We also want to read your comments, get your suggestions and do our best to answer your questions – or find someone to answer them.  I encourage you to reach out and give us feedback from time to time on what we’re doing well and what we can improve on.

 -Gene, CEO