Succellerator SaaS

Succellerator SaaS offers the following service lines tailored towards the fundraising, membership and constituent advocacy space

• cloud computing strategy & configuration services, including as-is and to-be business process and architecture development
• ETL (extract, transform and load) data modeling & hygiene
• and -for what good is an elegant system implemented in a robust schema if you can’t make decisions from it — business intelligence/reporting services.

Founder & Chief Succellerant, Darren S. Kowitt is a graduate of Columbia Business School.  A self-taught Microsoft Access junkie since 1998, he is tickled by SharePoint 2013-hosted Access-SQL in the cloud.   He first started specializing in the data management needs of medium-enterprise non-profits when he advised the ACLU Foundation in New York about revamping the workflows of the Planned Giving Department back in 2004.  It stood to reason that when processing direct mail inquiries about planned giving opportunities that you would look up the donor data from the mailing list used — rather than keying it in upon receipt.  Since then, he has been able to combine his passion for relational databases into projects with millions of rows.

One, US Surgery Statistics, transformed very detailed surgery outcomes data from the UK National Health Trust and modeled it into an estimate for US surgical volumes by scaling gender-age-population cohort attributes provided by both countries’ census estimates.  And at AARP for two years he worked on integrating the AARP householding/membership database Konnex (with 100MM plus constituent records) with Convio Online Marketing and Convio’s Luminate CRM offering (in fact: simply a re-branded Salesforce.com instance tracking the multi-channel outreach and egagement activities of AARP grass roots advocates).  The initial load of 11MM records exposed him to something  he had never bumped into before: file size limits in MS Access.  So this lead to some experiments in SQL Server 2012 and Windows Azure.

He is experienced in requirements gathering, enterprise architecture modeling, full software development life cycle, agile development, change management, and loves developing compelling e-learning with Adobe Captivate.  But he loves nothing more than  when he can roll up his sleeves to look under the hood of a database and its integration file specifications, to say nothing of developing test kits and collecting and analyzing data malformation problems so as to develop a fix.

Blackbaud: Raiser’s Edge, Convio, Luminate

Raiser’s Edge is cheekily named — and even more wince-worthy.  But since first exposure to the offering in 2004, it was clear that within the non-profit fundraising space, Raiser’s Edge was the 800 lb gorilla by some quite considerable margin.  In the hands of someone attuned to coding schema, it’s an exquisitely calibrated instrument for always picking a donor’s preferred salutation and summer home seasonal address — and for implementing custom moves management processes, matching gifts, and corporate giving installments and fund restrictions.

But as the early aughts became the late aughts, nimbler web-presence/integrated content management & email startups Kintera & Convio seemed to be the future (all the more so for younger organizations with younger demographics:  these offerings were suitably ‘of the moment’).  Blackbaud’s response offering, NetCommunity, was always something of an also ran, occasioning voluminous complaints in product forums for sub-par functionality and creaky integrations.

Salesforce.com

Succellerator SaaS has its origins in a donated set of licenses to Columbia Business School Alumni Club way back in 2009.

Though iPhone had been launched by then, discovering the Salesforce AppExchange was like being a kid let loose in a candy shop with a huge bag for the loot — and voracious appetite to boot.

Google Apps

Compared to SalesForce AppExchange, on first glance, Google Apps and its AppsMarketplace seems familiar, but somehow underwhelming.

Office 365

There was a period in the aughts where Microsoft had been written off.  With Office 365 and the 18 months of soft release beta, that impression was changed, and dramatically.  (Fittingly, not too long after the launch of Office 365 is when root-problem-in-chief Steve Ballmer finally decided to release his grip.

Adobe Ecosystem