Community First

 

Matt McCabe, VP of Community

I am so excited about our announcement today that Matt McCabe is joining MPower as Vice President of Community. This is all about the ethos at MPower that puts community first. Always.

Noticing Matt’s last name, you may be wondering if we are related. Matt is my brother and, naturally, I am thrilled about getting to work together. But, I am even more excited by Matt’s “journey” and resulting vision for community that he has as a result of his years working with nonprofits here in the US, the UK and elsewhere around the world.

Having both grown up in the nonprofit community–our father has been working with nonprofits on marketing, fundraising, management and more for nearly 35 years, we have both spent most of our careers working in and around the nonprofit sector. However, we have taken very different paths on our respective journeys, rarely getting to collaborate directly.

Over the last 12 months, though, our conversations about the market and what organizations need truly began to resonate around two common themes:

1. Nonprofits need better technology with greater flexibility, more choice and lower costs. This is why MPower is open source.
2. Technology is a powerful tool, but users require support, training, expertise and strategy to be effective and derive strong results. From implementation to business processes to best practices, there is a wealth of information, knowledge and technology widgets out there dispersed across nonprofits and the organizations that serve them. No single company or small coalition of service providers can meet all of these needs effectively. That is why MPower is the platform committed to building community across nonprofits. This is why community will always come first.

I encourage you to connect with Matt to hear his vision and where it came from in more detail. He has consulted for the largest and most well-known organizations in the world. But he has also consulted with nonprofits with less than $250,000 in annual revenue. Whether working with groups large or small, Matt has seen the need for community, and his passion has both influenced me personally and also led him to MPower professionally.

With the addition of Matt, I am more confident than ever that we have the best leadership team in the industry. Beyond each of our company leaders proven expertise and innovation in their fields — whether it is Leo who has been developing and deploying open source solutions for leading companies for more than 20 years or Bryan who has implemented collaborative, value oriented software distribution models for top software companies, we have a leadership team that has not only talked about putting nonprofits’ needs first, but has a consistent record of operating that way.

So, please join me in welcoming Matt. He welcomes input from anyone with any interest in or advice about building  community, to email him at matt dot mccabe at mpoweropen dot com. In building community, we will partner with nonprofits and those who serve them. Community first!

Nonprofit Software Superstar Embraces Open Source

The irrefutable momentum of open source platforms as the right solution for nonprofits – as well as Fortune 500 companies – continues its exuberant pace. Although the old software model still dominates at most nonprofit organizations — due to the clawing grip of legacy systems, entrenched costs and fear-driven hostage tactics of proprietary vendors, the savviest insiders in the nonprofit marketplace understand this model is dying.

One of the most significant validations of that for me is the decision of Bryan Klann to join the MPower team as Chief Sales and Marketing Officer. There is no one I have met in the past six years who better understands the confluence of nonprofits’ unique needs, limited resources and need for best-of-breed software so they can reach more people, raise more money to fund important programs and services, and ultimately fulfill their missions. Bryan is both a visionary and a practical implementer who drives real results for organizations.

While Bryan could choose to work with just about any company in this space, he has chosen MPower. The heart of that decision, Bryan told me, comes from his fundamental belief that open source constituent relationship management (CRM) is the right model for nonprofits both today and tomorrow. This is due to the cost-savings, robust feature set, and freedom that comes from the ability to expand the software’s functionality and adapt to changing situations and needs exponentially faster than any proprietary system.

Empowering nonprofits is something Bryan has been passionate about for well over a decade. In fact, Bryan helped pioneer a partner eco-system for nonprofits with Sage Software that uses service partners to design, deploy, support and extend the software. Unlike the other major players in the nonprofit software space, Sage did not try to lock-in clients with full dependence on the company for all support and services. Rather, Sage empowered nonprofits to choose from a range of partners to serve them. It is one of the reasons Sage has become the leading provider of fund accounting software to charitable groups (and why Sage is one of our valued partners).

So, when someone like Bryan steps away from the old model because he believes that the open source model is not only the best, but really the only, model to serve nonprofit organization’s long-term strategic CRM needs, I can’t help but be a little exuberant myself as well as humbled.