Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Clearport?

Clearport was formed in June of 2004 to build a network of business people, IT professionals, and non-profits who care deeply about maximizing the social return they receive on their time and money and to contributing to solutions for a range of problems across multiple verticals including education, hunger, medical relief, shelter and infrastructure, human rights, and the environment.

What is Clearport’s mission?

Clearport is a charitable non-profit dedicated to maximizing the efficiency and capacity of small and mid-sized charitable non-profits and charitable international NGOs through the use of information technology and best-practices in the most timely and sustainable manner possible.

What are Clearport’s values?

Every entity has a social, economic, and perhaps a political perspective. It’s important to be open and clear about this perspective as this provides full disclosure for supporters and beneficiaries of our products and services. Our values incorporate the following:

  1. Equal educational opportunities for all people
  2. Equitable distribution of economic opportunity
  3. Belief that competition is a healthy and productive element in the overwhelming majority of systems
  4. Sharing wealth and technology across communities in a sustainable manner (with a clear plan for self sustainability) to provide the basic health services,  goods, and physical infrastructure that a community needs to be productive and prosperous.
  5. Building an accountable community
  6. Sustainable  environmental practices
  7. The highest respect for human rights
  8. Support for democratic principals

What is the legal structure of Clearport.org?

We are a California based Non-Profit Corporation with 501(c)(3) status.

What is our general model?

Our overall goal is to ensure that a non-profit’s IT resources tie directly to their business needs, are on-demand, low cost, and easy to use. As an integral part of achieving this mission, Clearport provides non-profits with Electronic Customer Relationship Management (eCRM) solutions. . Specifically, our eCRM solution will help non-profits raise funds, communicate and market to their constituents (e.g. members, donors, clients) via web and email and obtain full value from each constituent. . Eventually, we might provide back-office applications such as Payroll and Accounting. Most of the applications that we provide will be sourced from existing and established software vendors, although we will develop some of these applications if a suitable vendor cannot be found. Clearport isessentially the equivalent of a 'Systems Integrator' in commercial world terminology.

What are the main problems that Clearport is solving for our customers and how do we provide Value ?

Groundspring, one of the leading non-profits in this area points out that “There is tremendous pressure on the nonprofit sector to become more efficient, and more effective use of the Internet presents a significant opportunity to economize (see Harvard Business Review – The Nonprofit Sector’s $100 Billion Opportunity).” They go on to state that “Nonprofit organizations face critical financial pressures from increased service demands combined with funding cutbacks by government, foundations and major donors. It is imperative that they become more effective and efficient, and many are increasingly turning to the Internet to recruit, involve and solicit members and smaller donors. But adoption and effective utilization of state-of-the-art systems lag significantly in the small to medium size ($25K - $5M annual budget) segment of the sector. “ See also “What third party market data do you have to support your decision to go forward with the Clearport mission?”

There is a strong demand for affordable, robust, integrated Internet technology services among this segment that is not being sufficiently met at the moment. We’ve identified the following primary business problems faced by the small and medium sized non-profits:

  1. Lack of information technology Continuity, Expertise, and Resources: Small to mid-size non-profits rarely have the IT expertise they need to run their operations at maximum efficiency. Some non-profits are 10+ years behind the for-profit world. In addition, they sometimes are not aware of all of the industry best operating practices. The same can be said of many mid-size non-profits. Clearport essentially provides much of the same value that a state of the art IT department in a commercial entity would provide. Part of this problem they face results, because it is difficult for them to put focus on the area of enabling systems. Smaller service providers (non-profits) often rely primarily on volunteers for much of their operations. Another reason this is the case is because of their forever limited funding. Most non-profits choose to have minimum technology resources. Information technology is an afterthought. Clearport provides smaller service providers with the appropriate cost feasible, on-demand access to managed applications, best practices, and training so that they can have continuity and gain maximum capacity from information technology. An up to date, trouble free, compliant, web based application presence is crucial for operating efficiently. For example, we provide a flexible and self maintainable web presence and publishing toolset so that service provider staff does not have to rely on volunteers or 3rd parties for web updates. This up to date, friction free, web presence helps the non-profit and their constituency communicate more cost effectively and to more efficiently provide value.
  2. Fund Raising and Effective Management of Donor Base (eCRM): Service providers (non-profits) are constantly on the fund raising treadmill. We help relieve the pressure of fund raising by enabling service providers to better know their donors so that they can ensure that they are receiving a maximum amount of wallet share from each individual donor, and a maximum amount of donorshare. We provide a flexible toolset for fundraising which is constantly being updated to incorporate the most up to date regulatory compliance and innovative practices.
  3. Overall constituent relationship management (including the ‘customers’ or beneficiaries)
  4. Communicating with their supporters, members, beneficiaries: many non-profits have static web-sites that were built many years ago and not kept up to date. On the other hand supporters and donors expect to communicate with the non-profit via electronic means such as email newsletters, updated information on the web-site and other electronic means. ClearPort solution bridges this expecation gap by providing easy-to-use publishing tools for the non-profit. Non profits can also save money and voluntee time by going to electronic communications from expensive print paper or phone-based communication.
  5. Loss of critical data: many non-profits keep critical donor and client data on paper, in unstructured Word or Excel files, or worse yet it in a staffer/volunteer’s head. The ClearPort solution enables clean and structured record keeping so that they are not dependent on a key staffer leaving.
  6. Effective Use of Volunteer Base: Volunteers, if not managed properly, could cost more than the benefit they provide. Clearport helps charities maximize the benefit of their volunteer base.

For more details regarding the industry trends, opportunity and needs see also “What third party market data do you have to support your decision to go forward with the Clearport mission?”

What exactly does Clearport provide?

We provide technology and services. Specifically:

  1. Consulting Services (Strategy and Implementation)
  2. Information Technology On Demand (Sourcing, Development, and Integration): Web based applications, accessible through the internet via any standard browser that enable the non-profit (service provider) to market itself to and manage its relationships with the following constituencies - donors, clients, volunteers and staff. Examples of capabilities we provide include ability to for the non-profit to publish to their own web-site, collect online donations, manage volunteers, conduct online marketing campaigns, conduct online surveys, circulate online petitions, manage outbound e-mail campaigns, publish to an intranet and extranet, and manage grants. A significant amount of capital has been allocated to developing applications such as this (providers include Convio, GetActive, Kintera, BlackBaud, and Groundspring). We will develop missing pieces, and interfaces to other Core Apps, so that the end customer service provider has clean well integrated access to their computing utilities.
  3. Training
  4. Support
  5. Procurement
  6. Technology Grants

How does Clearport measure success?

Initially we will measure our success against targets that we set for the number of non-profits in each budget category enabled with our solutions. We will also take a baseline of certain success metrics at each of our service providers, and measure the incremental gain in capacity and efficiency they realize from using our system. These metrics will include the amount of funds raised online, the number of volunteers placed in jobs, the number of opt-in registered constituents in their community, hours of volunteer/staff time saved, and related metrics. Ultimately we will set metrics for Social Return on Investment that takes into account the number of non-profits assisted and their results using the technology per dollar spent.

Where does Clearport obtain funding?

Primarily, individual donors, grants from companies and foundations, and eventually nominal charges paid by our clients. We would like to be ultimately be self sustaining.

What happens if Clearport cannot obtain adequate funding in a given year.

Fundraising is an ongoing priority, and we plan to build our fundraising capacity in a way where we maintain adequate reserves. Furthermore, we strive to keep our overhead very low with a core team that takes ownership of delivering on our mission and objectives, and a large satellite network of committed and well managed volunteers. We strive to keep our work based on discrete projects with discrete deliverables, so that in years of lean funding only a limited number of beneficiaries will notice a difference in services. We will empower our clients with tools and skills so that they are not completely dependent upon us.

How does Clearport report back to our benefactors?

We intend to use the same systems that we provide to our service providers to run our non-profit. This includes an extranet for donors with success metric dashboard that enables donors to track quarterly progress towards deliverables.

Why does Clearport work with third party vendors in many cases to provide solutions to our service provider beneficiaries?

A significant amount of capital has been invested in development of eCRM applications for non-profits. Some of the current vendors are well established. If appropriate functionality can be obtained for a workable price point, then there is no reason to reinvent the wheel. This is even more true, if we want to deliver a 'timely' solution to our service provider beneficiaries.

If non-profit entities are delivering low cost solutions to the market, why doesn’t Clearport work with them first?

We will certainly take a serious look at what non-profit and for that matter open-source offerings are available, and if it meets the criteria that we look for in a software provider, we will work with the non-profit. An associated question that still needs to be answered is: Even though a non-profit application provider may be able to deliver at a lower license cost or service fee to the end customer, is the mid-term cost of ownership ultimately lower? For-profit providers may ultimately be able to deliver their solutions more efficiently.

What are the criteria upon which Clearport will select third party vendors?

Attributes that we look for in choosing a software provider include:

  • Does their software meet the key functional requirements?
  • Are they likely to meet the evolving functional requirements? What does their roadmap look like? Do they have committed future release dates? What is the process of upgrading from release to release?
  • What is their deployment profile? What skills are needed and how long does it take to implement the solution?
  • How do they ensure data privacy?
  • What skill sets does the customer require to operate this?
  • Well defined and mature training program?
  • Well defined and mature implementation methodology?
  • What types of training do they provide?
  • What is their SLA (service level agreement)?
  • What are the support policies?
  • Is their a staging environment?
  • Is it truly multi-Tennant?
  • How hard would it be for someone else to host them?
  • How open are their systems? – XML WS Support?
  • Does it scale appropriately?
  • Do they have an adequate security model?
  • Will they be in operation in 2 – 3 years?
  • What happens if they are not in business in 2 – 3 years? Source code? Data?
  • Data backups
  • Do they have at least 3 referenceable non-profit customers for each module under review?

How does Clearport charge our service providers (beneficiaries) for the value that we bring to them?

Clearport is initially funded through donations and grants and we will investigate how we charge nominal fees ultimately paid by our non-profit clients. Once we do find the appropriate cost model, it will ultimately need to be based on the benefit we bring to our clients and the resources that they use. The size of the nominal charge could be ultimately based on the size of the non-profits total budget.

What happens if a non-profit sees value in the technology and services that Clearport provides, but is unable to pay for them?

Initially we will often make grants to the service providers to wholly or partially fund the implementation of the Clearport solution.

Why should someone support Clearport with their time or donations of money, goods, and services? Why would they not just support the individual non-profit (service providers)?

We recommend a well balanced portfolio of giving across non-profit verticals that are important to the donor.

Because Clearport provides essential enabling-infrastructure, by giving to Clearport, the donor is able to provide benefit to small focused charitable non-profits across multiple verticals (hunger, human rights, shelter and infrastructure, medical relief, education, and the environment).

Alternatively, a donor can make a donation allocated to a specific charity (service provider beneficiary).

Without the essential infrastructure that Clearport facilitates and provides, the charities donor dollars and volunteer time might be wasted on mundane tasks that could be automated and made more efficient. We provide tools similar to that the corporate world uses but are both economically out of reach of non-profits and not tailored to their specific needs.

See also: ‘What are the main problems that Clearport is solving for our customers and how do we provide Value’

How does Clearport leverage the Open Source model?

In addition to the technology that we acquire from third party providers (some or much of which will not be open source), we will also develop interfaces between commercial systems and applications that fullfill a specific need for multiple non-profits but cannot be effectively sourced from an existing vendor. Where possible, we will use open source technology to develop these systems, and make the end products available under an open source license model.  Any systems or interfaces that we develop will have a high degree of granularity and will be based on Java and XML Web Services standards.

How does Clearport ensure that we deliver what our clients actually need? Want?

We have a well defined customer design review process to ensure that we deliver the functionality that is most needed first. The result of discussions from our design partners is that: Each requirement is logged, categorized, prioritized, and associated with a client. If a new feature falls within the domain of an existing third-party offering, then we work with closely as a design partner with our third party vendors to ensure that when it comes time to do the detailed design for the feature, the client is consulted to review the design. (See also 'Which specific clients use our system?')

How does Clearport facilitate industry best practices?

By consulting with a wide range design partners, and staying current on the industry, we identify the current (and hopefully future) best practices and model them in our software applications so that our clients can benefit.

What third party market data do you have to support your decision to go forward with the Clearport mission?

Groundspring.org did some pretty good work in pulling together the market and industry analysis. The following states their findings almost verbatim:

“Several forces are re-shaping the nonprofit sector in the early years of this decade:

  • Reduced funding by foundations, major donors and government creates severe financial pressure.
  • Continued privatization of social and other public services, combined with recession and high unemployment, are increasing the demands      on the sector to deliver services.
  • Major scandals have undermined the public’s trust. (See Giving USA      2003, published by AAFRC Trust for Philanthropy, p. 62 for a discussion of     individual giving and other trends in the sector.)
  • Online technologies are reshaping the scale and form of stakeholder communication, relationship management, and civic engagement.

The consequences and implications for the sector are dramatic:

  • Organizations are increasingly focuses on raising funds from smaller individual donors who are less impacted by stock market devaluations.
  • There is intense pressure on the sector to become more efficient and effective. (The Nonprofit Sector’s $100 Billion Opportunity, Bill Bradley, et al.  Harvard Business Review, May 2003).

Online fundraising and engagement technologies are in the early stages of adoption, but growing rapidly. A recent study by the Chronicle of Philanthropy found an increase of almost 300% in online donations among 124 organizations from 2001 to 2002 ($41.4 million to $123.3 million) - Online Donations Make Gains, by Nicole Wallace; Chronicle of Philanthropy, June 12, 2003).

A March 2003 study funded by the Kellogg Foundation (From a Connected World to an Engaged World, A Report to the 2003 Online Engagement Conferences, March, 2003, by NetworkForGood and The Bridgespan Group, http://www.bridgespangroup.org/BSGweb/briefs_detail.asp?id=31 ) verifies the growing use of the Internet in the nonprofit sector: 53% of American nonprofit organizations now use the Internet to raise funds; 28% of nonprofits expect to add Internet services during 2003. Current Groundspring users of DonateNow have raised 125% more money online in 2003 YTD compared to 2002. The Chronicle of Philanthropy notes in a January 22, 2004 article on ‘New Year-End Online Appeals’ by charities (Charities Try New Year-End Online Appeals, by Nicole Wallace; Chronicle of Philanthropy, January 22, 2004) how online fundraising has surged in 2003.

Groundspring’s extensive research and analysis of technology trends in the sector lead to the following conclusions (these conclusions are supported by extensive direct and indirect research in Appendix B):

  • Internet fundraising and engagement is growing dramatically.
  • The Internet is helping to radically reshape forms of civic engagement.
  • As use of Internet based systems grow, the need to integrate data and      disparate technology systems increases.
  • Nonprofits want and need modularity in the selection and deployment of technology solutions.
  • Small to medium-sized nonprofits are being left behind, creating a new      technology gap. 
  • Among technology service providers, there is considerable market-driven      consolidation occurring. Nonprofit providers face funding challenges, and      for-profit service providers have experienced continued shakeout from the     dot com bust.

In 2002, individuals donated $184 billion (of a total of $241 billion from all sources) to approximately 1.3 million nonprofit organizations and churches (Giving USA 2003, AAFRC Trust For Philanthropy). Of the nearly 1 million 501c3 public charities, Groundspring defines 270,000 organizations (approximately 28% of the total sector) as small- to medium-sized, with annual operating budgets between $25,000 and $5 million. – Guidestar 2003

Factoring out portions of this segment organizations that are heavily reliant on foundation grants or not engaged with large numbers of individual donors or members, as well as organizations such as hospitals, universities, and grant-making institutions, reduces our estimate of Groundspring’s market segment to about 190,000 organizations which receive about $31.6 billion in donations from individuals.

Groundspring has done extensive direct and indirect market research. In total, we gathered information from over 300 nonprofit users in the form of phone conversations and online surveys. About 95% of those organizations have annual budgets of less than $5 million. (Supporting data are available upon request.) The high-level takeaways from our research are:

1. Small nonprofits believe technology is critical to their success. Our surveys found that eighty-seven percent rate technology as “extremely important” or “important” to their success as an organization; 75% of organizations spend more the $2,500 annually on internet-based and database technologies, and 59% turn to outside consultants or outsourced firms to help run their systems. Says Andrea Freedman, director of operations for SF Jazz: “We have a lot of interest in our newsletters and web site. We use them to inform members and sell tickets. We’ve also seen a tremendous shift in giving. The web is one of our fastest growing channels of giving. Of all individual gifts, 25% come over web in terms of dollars. That’s a 110% increase over last year.”

2. Email and Online Engagement Tools top the list of desired online technologies (databases were excluded from this question).

3. The future of e-advocacy is promising, but its form is rapidly evolving. Discussions with sector leaders such as MoveOn.org and DonorDigital provide insight into e-advocacy trends. Key learnings:

  • Some legislators and government bodies are devising ways to block mass-generated emails, or are disregarding them as “machine-generated” and not really representing constituents. The legal status of this is unclear, and its future uncertain.
  • Alternative strategies are evolving for e-advocacy, such as securing online signatures on petitions (including zip code and congressional district), printing them out to deliver by hand or snail mail to the campaign target
  • Even if email petitions diminish in effectiveness, online engagement systems are still powerful tools for mobilizing people in a variety of ways: e.g., meet-up’s, action invites, sign and or fax a petition, tell a friend, download voter registration form, etc.

4. Database systems are a significant technology challenge.

Interestingly:

  • 64% say their database is the biggest technology headache, citing issues such as back-up, maintenance, and synchronization between multiple data sources;
  • Campbell Research found that 4% of nonprofits currently use an online database, but that satisfaction with online ASP systems is significantly higher than with desktop software;

6. Training needs are significant. According to NPower, 55% of nonprofit staff members do not to receive the technology training to meet minimum levels of competency required for their job. (NPower’s “Technology Assessment (2003)”, http://techatlas.org/tools/results.asp?asid=252) Furthermore, Npower reports that 68% of nonprofit organizations lack the money for staff training. (NPower’s “Technology Training Assessment”, http://techatlas.org/tools/results.asp?asid=198)

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