The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is a John Fogerty - Creedence Clearwater Revival mix. Fogerty's solo stuff is underrated, but maybe that's because there's not a real stylistic difference between that and his peerless Creedence material. Well, except when he releases a clunker like Eye of the Zombie. Even in CCR's least-distinguished hour - that would be Pendulum - they never bit quite that hard.
Really, the lesson of Fogerty's solo career isn't that all his stuff sounds like old CCR, it's that CCR still sounds fresh:
Jenzabar, a vendor of CRM software for higher education, says that in a survey the firm conducted higher education CFOs identified "growing budget constraints" as their top concern.
Jenzabar discussed financial concerns, major technology developments, and economic challenges affecting higher education at its recent Jenzabar CFO Conference, held in Boston and featuring speakers Kenneth C. Green from The Campus Computing Project and Michael K. Townsley of Stevens Strategy, who addressed CFOs from institutions of higher education.
Jenzabar held a CFO conference at the Harvard Club of Boston for client executives who also attended the 2008 MIT Sloan CFO Summit.
The survey found that the top concern for CFOs, regardless of institutional type, was increasing constraints on institutional budgets. Other top concerns varied depending on the type of institution where the CFO serves - whether public or private institutions, research universities, small undergraduate colleges, or community colleges - but included the need for more effective fundraising, increased competition for students, and rising healthcare and energy costs.
Almost half the institutions in the study noted that they are currently engaged in both cost-cutting programs and active plans to increase revenue.
During the Jenzabar conference, keynote speaker Kenneth C. Green, Founding Director of the Campus Computing Project, spoke about major shifts in IT and emphasized that higher education is a service industry. Continuous developments in technology have raised the level of expectations of students, faculty and administrators and increased pressure on institutions to provide the same services students experience as consumers in other aspects of their lives.
Mike Townsley is a Senior Consultant at Stevens Strategy, a management consulting firm that specializes in higher and secondary education, and also the Dean of Undergraduate Studies and a professor of business at Becker College in Worcester, Massachusetts. Townsley spoke about the economy from a financial perspective and discussed credit, home equity, family income, and their affects on a higher education institution's tuition, investments, and overall financial planning. "Expanding target markets, creating partnerships, and building cash reserves are some of the strategic approaches to coping with the economic downturn," Townsley told the group.
Jenzabar is headquartered in Boston - my, strange place for a company in the education biz - with regional offices located across the United States.
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Vantage Communications, a vendor of managed services, has announced that it is "further expanding" its suite of cloud computing based products for small to medium-sized businesses to include a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) product: vPlatform CRM.
The vPlatform was designed by SaaS vendor Vantage to "address the needs of SMBs," company officials say, touting its "ease of use, which enables better user adoption rates and immediate return on investment."
"With assistance from Vantage's FastTrack Implementation teams, businesses are able to transition from existing CRM systems to Vantage vPlatform CRM within days instead of months," company officials say.
Everybody's running around like Chicken Little under the mistaken impression the economic sky is falling - folks, get a grip, we're not even in an officially-defined recession yet, we have yet to see a single quarter of negative growth, never mind the two consecutive ones that define a recession, so let's hold off on the Great Depression Redux talk, shall we? Wall Street lost $1 trillion in value in November - but later gained $1.2 trillion in the biggest five-day rally in history. The pendulum's still swinging.
First Coffee has no doubt, however, that the FUD atmospherics pumped out by the media, which rarely has a clue how the actual economy actually operates, will prove a boon for SaaS vendors as customers shy away from big-ticket purchases, preferring to rent until they see that no, all we ever had to fear was fear itself, as a famous socialist once said.
Okay, rant over.
Recent research by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company shows that over a five year period businesses may lose as many as half of their customers, and of course it's the received wisdom that the process of acquiring a new customer can be a long and costly one, sometimes costing six to seven times more than retaining an existing customer does. In comparison, businesses that boosted customer retention rates by as little as five percent saw an increase in their profits ranging anywhere from 5 percent to 95 percent overall.
The vPlatform CRM includes, then, customer retention and revenue enhancement tools, sales force automation tools, marketing campaign ROI analysis, analytics and reporting capabilities and business intelligence.
"We have been hearing from our customers that their CRM systems are riddled with hidden costs and overly complicated to integrate and manage, resulting in a low volume of use among employees and less than expected results," says Robert Phelan, President of Vantage Communications.
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Blackbaud has announced that The Salvation Army Southern Territory has chosen Blackbaud Enterprise CRM as its centralized database to support the sharing of cross-division information, facilitate improved reporting and streamline operations.
At a national level, The Salvation Army raised $2 billion in 2007 and recently ranked No. 2 in The Chronicle of Philanthropy's "Philanthropy 400" list of organizations that raise the most funds from private sources. Though donations grew at a national level by 23 percent last year, growth in request for aid has surpassed that amount in recent weeks.
Salvation Army officials say they're "faced with the tough job of bridging the gap between donations and the rising demand for services" due to the economic downturn. So get those bell-ringers out there. Double shifts. Onward Christian soldiers. When the coin into the red bucket rings, the homeless wino out of poverty springs.
When it came time to report at a Territory level or to respond to a regional disaster, TSAS previously faced a significant manual effort to create a connected view of constituent information. Executive-level views were augmented manually to add missing information. Financial and fundraising reporting required manual processes and consumed valuable staff time.
Commissioner Max Feener, who leads TSAS, says it was not only the technology that led us to Blackbaud, "but their people and their expertise with federated organizations."
TSAS leads the mission of The Salvation Army in the southern United States across nine divisions representing 15 southeastern states and the District of Columbia. The Salvation Army across the nation is committed to its branding promise of "Doing the most good" by providing services to the marginalized. Nationally, 29 million people were assisted in 2007.
Additionally, each chapter or "Unit" of The Salvation Army provides region-specific services that make a positive impact within its local service area. TSAS constituents include a broad network of volunteers, soldiers, officers (ministers), congregations and partners in outreach and delivery of services. The Salvation Army, founded in 1865, is, in fact, a fully-fledged evangelical Christian denomination like Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, et al.
Major Ron Busroe, TSAS secretary for community relations and development, says the Army's previous system did not easily support sharing and did not interact easily with third-party applications. With Blackbaud Enterprise CRM, he says, "will be able to integrate our disaster relief system and quickly find responders that are available across the Territory, improving the speed and impact of our disaster relief response."
"Blackbaud is focused on helping faith-based organizations improve both the financial and spiritual impact of their work," said Mark Fetner, who heads up Blackbaud's efforts to serve the faith-based community. "The Salvation Army is a leader in meeting human needs and doing the most good. We look forward to helping expand the social and spiritual impact of The Salvation Army in the Southern United States."
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