I had to miss MCN this year for the first time in a while, I’m now suffering from PTMCNSD (post traumatic MCN stress disorder) hearing about the great time everyone had. I missed it partly because my boss was travelling and someone needed to fend off the mountain lion and partly because I had another trip. I was in Charleston, South Carolina, y’all, at the Blackbaud annual conference for non-profits. We don’t have any of their products and I’ll leave it at that.

I haven’t been to a vendor conference for few years, not since the good old dot-com days and it was odd to be at a conference and not know lots of people and not have to prepare a presentation. I had a sense of guilt for the entire time and felt as though I should’ve been more involved. Although I did appear to be very popular. If you are a large museum with a large endowment, vendor conferences can be very enjoyable and it was hard to be incognito. The conference badge and lanyard has ribbons attached to it to display which Blackbaud products you have – and they have a lot of products.

Sadly, I suffered from ribbon envy, but this made it difficult for me to walk past anyone from the sales team without becoming their immediate BFF… or until I sign the purchase contract. There were many offers which reminded me of the famous (in Britain) Not The Nine O’Clock News sketch parodying American Express, which goes something like: That’ll be £47.50, sir. American Express? That’ll do nicely. Would you like to rub my tits as well? Naturally, you can see this in all its glory on youtube.

Actually, I’m being unkind. Their soft-sell approach seemed out of step with their aggressive acquisition strategy and their installed based of “about” 20,000 units if you talk to the sales people, but 14,000 if you talk to the techies.

It was good to be at this particular conference at a time when the economy is all doom and dispair. The keynote by the CEO was gratifyingly “old school” – engaging smart guy who knows his products better than most of his employees and can cheerlead the crowd. Koolaid was available. This was followed by the chief technology guy who appeared from behind the curtain in his jeans and teeshirt and everyone thought he was the A/V guy – to the Blackbaud faithful, he was the main event. I chuckled to myself as he dug into the weeds of the various platforms and architectures to a crowd of people in their 40s, 50s and 60s. Surely, this must be way over their heads?

I was wrong. The first session on the technology track was standing room only, about their social network support, essentially APIs and integration points for social network sites. The presenter asked how many people have a facebook page. Everyone did. Even the “old” people. Awesome. Most of the session attendees were membership people who are using social networks to their full capability to build communities and generate revenue.

The most interesting session of the conference was the technology strategic direction, presented by the teeshirt-wearing CTO. Same teeshirt, different day. They are re-architecting their entire suite of applications, necessary because they have acquired a bunch of companies (applications) and want to make the current suite integration easier (read: its difficult right now). They are redefining their data model to be person-centric, since most of their applications are about people: donors, members, visitors, etc,. Single database + suite of applications + 14K-20K installed base + data model re-architecture = big brass kahunas. I’m still stepping through it in my head, but its makes perfect sense in the 2.0 world – it and they are all about people, but it makes me think they have bigger fish to fry in their strategic plan…

Oh, and if a friend tells you that Shrimp & Grits are the tastiest thing on the planet or you have to go to “The South” to taste real grits, they are not your friend. People really eat that? Yup, people really eat that. And for breakfast too. I’ve eaten some strange things in my time, but…

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