In an economic climate uglier than any for the past quarter-century -- at least -- nonprofits of every size are facing potential shortfalls in the lean years ahead.

If you're in that boat, maybe you're looking at a CRM-sized hole in the budget and wondering:

Can we possibly afford to put our CRM fee to a more critical use?

Can we possibly afford not to keep the efficiency and impact our online data services give us?

Tough choice.  Luckily, you don't have to make it.

Say hello to Salsa Enterprise -- everything that large, complex nonprofits need, at a price that doesn't break the bank.

Join a Salsa Enterprise webinar on Tuesday, Nov. 25 to find out how to save tens of thousands and get the robust CRM toolset -- mass e-mailing, online donations, advocacy, and an integrated view of supporters -- plus free data migration from Convio, Kintera, GetActive, Blackbaud, Capitol Advantage or any other system; personalized training; strategy support; and a dedicated account manager.

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Since we're on about APIs lately, the Development Seed blog's description [warning: geeky] of using our API to internationalize StandAgainstPoverty.org by melding Salsa and Drupal is a timely comment. Beautiful.

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October 15 is a milestone for DIA and our users: it marks the end of support for our legacy codebase. You may have heard already. From here on out, everything is in Salsa. While users of the original system can still log into and use their accounts, and old pages calling that system will continue to function (well into the future, if not indefinitely), there is officially no development, patching or support available for it. It's a day ripe with the auspices of history: this date in 1582 marked the introduction of the Gregorian calendar, an overnight 10-day leap forward to correct the backwards drift of the old Julian system. We've been on in this space about Salsa's bells and whistles -- the dashboards, custom reports, and other exotica. And we've been talking about and working on it for well over a year, and lately had scarce time for much of anything else. But as we finally make the break, it's worth a few words about the deeper change Salsa represents and the bigger-picture reasons why we're making the move.

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It's your chance to talk about us -- or any other CRM tool -- behind our backs. NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network, is rolling out a CRM satisfaction survey. In a year of industry shakeout -- Convio gobbling up GetActive, and announcing plans to go public; Salesforce establishing an influential position; Kintera stabilizing but seemingly washing its hands of the market's lower end; humble DemocracyInAction revamping our software tool -- it'd be interesting to watch the results roll in. How are any of these (or the many other) CRM tools affecting and afflicting your work?

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Kintera yesterday announced an "upcoming open application integration platform" that appears to kinda-sorta mark the long-awaited first hint of the giant CRM providers prying open their APIs and letting outside developers build out the power of their tools for custom cases without forking over a couple grants' worth of fees. NTEN is promising a forthcoming call to get into what's really opening and what's not, but as an open API shop since day one, we'd like to welcome the big K to the party, and assure them that it's a real blast if you come in past the cloakroom. And the party only improves by more guests bringing APIs.

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Training -- though sometimes stressful -- is one of the best parts of my job, largely because of what I get to learn from people with completely different outlooks who pose incisive questions I would never think to ask. On the orientation-to-Salsa webinars we've been running for current clients, I got a great question the other day about running reports to help campaign managers identify possible mistyped e-mail addresses so that they could manually correct them in the headquarters while the relationship was still retrievable. A perfect occasion for both our custom report builder and a forehead-smacking "why didn't I think of that?"

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Hey, everyone has to be a first-time buyer sometime. For anyone just getting his or her bearings, feeling asea amid the cacophonous web 2.0 suq, a basic orientation to evaluating CRMs. This isn't meant to read as marketing copy, but I need hardly add the caveat [emptor] that we're an interested party ourselves. The text below reprints my draft of an article that appears in the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet's new publication "Constituent Relationship Management: The New Little Black Book of Politics. A Guide to CRM in Politics.". Enjoy. Or if you prefer, you can get the text below as a .pdf.

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Just as every army travels on its stomach, every NGO travels on its data. For fundraising, advocacy, case management, communications, and every other way a nonprofit touches its community, good information has always been the lifeblood of the third sector.

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And in characteristic DIA style, you're invited to the party. Please join us after hours, and deep into the wee hours, at Rumberos just a block north of the Columbia Heights metro on the Green Line. (map) Users current and prospective, friends, consultants, and interested parties of every stripe (and attendees of the Politics Online Conference, which kicks off that day ... and for which you can register at the DIA-discounted rate of $250 using the code polc031507) ... come join us at the christening.

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There's a conspicuous absence from the sponsorship credits at the NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference home page I stumbled upon in preparing yesterday's low-key upcoming events post. A dependable occupant of the conference's logo rolls the past few years, it's nowhere to be found in 2007. It's a fact of no special importance on its own (except perhaps to NTEN!), but easily read as another milepost in the struggling firm's departure from the data management and CRM universe of rank-and-file nonprofits. Naturally said reading is utter speculation; we have no special insight into this from either side of the [non-]transaction.

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DemocracyInAction campaign managers yesterday were invited to the birth of our new user interace, Salsa, which reached its public beta phase. We'll have a great deal more to say about Salsa, whose innovations and extensibility extend very far beyond the more obvious boon of usability, for weeks and months to come. That will of course include more structured webinars and feature presentations. But for now -- for any admin-permissioned campaign managers who haven't checked it out, and for anyone in the broader world who wants to know what they're missing -- we've got baby pictures. You know how it is with proud parents. Here's what you'll see the first time you log in (and click any of these images for a larger version): More on the flip ...

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