Christine

Mission Research Raises Series B Financing

Though I don't normally pass on 'press release' type news, I'm making an exception today. As a common shareholder and advisor to Mission Research, I'm thrilled to disclose that the company has closed on its Series B financing, led by TBL Capital. Mission Research launched as a vendor of customer relationship management software for nonprofits (GiftWorks), and is now entering the small business market with SalesWorks. Congratulations to Charlie Crystle and team!

More from their PR guys:

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Mission Research, Maker of SalesWorks CRM & GiftWorks Fundraising Software Raises $2 Million Series B Venture Investment to Help Home Office, Small Office, Boomer Markets With Customer Management and Marketing Needs

Mission-Aligned Fund TBL Capital Invests Only in Socially Responsible Companies

LANCASTER, PA - March 24, 2008 - TBL Capital has invested $2 million in Mission Research, Inc, of Lancaster, PA, to fund the software company's expansion into the Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) retail software market with SalesWorks, and continue its industry-leading growth in the nonprofit sector with GiftWorks Fundraising Software. GiftWorks is the fastest growing fundraising software for nonprofits, and is known for its affordability and unique, elegant user interface, donor segmenting, easy mail merge, and inherent social networking capability. Mission Research serves most nonprofits with software for $399 while companies like Blackbaud (NASDAQ: BLKB) target large enterprises for an average cost of $40,000.

"We're thrilled TBL has invested in our success," said Charlie Crystle, Co-founder & CEO of Mission Research. "TBL shares our values of social responsibility, and shares our goal of enabling small nonprofits and businesses to do more through feature-relevant, easier to use web-enabled desktop software. While other software companies serving nonprofits are selling off, stagnating, or losing money, we are growing at unprecedented rates. TBL is helping to smooth that path as we continue to democratize fundraising software for nonprofits."

SalesWorks Standard 2.0 launches in late April into the online retail channel, and will be priced at $99. "Business people have suffered with difficult, bloated contact management for too long, and the online apps just don't perform nearly as well as the desktop. So we take a simpler approach to user interface design, presenting only features that are relevant to each customer, rather than showing everything all at the same time, which makes it easy for people to understand and use the software, which is really quite powerful, despite its easy appearance."

SalesWorks also brings together the power of the desktop with the utility of the web in the company's Hybrid Web(TM) platform, which ships as part GiftWorks and SalesWorks. "It just makes sense to keep the data safe and secure in the desktop application, but to enable customers to send mass email, or map a list of customers, or show each contact's Facebook profile if they have one. In fact, our built-in social networking in GiftWorks integrates well with the Facebook platform in prototype tests, making GiftWorks the first fundraising software to integrate seamlessly with online social networking tools."

TBL (Triple Bottom Line) Capital invests in socially responsible companies that have social impact as well as profitability. "We invest in companies that have significant social impact, and Mission Research is having tremendous impact in the nonprofit sector, enabling thousands of small nonprofits to focus more of their resources on their missions and less on technology,” said Joe Marshall, Principal at TBL. "We're particularly inspired by the company's commitment to its local community. The co-founders combined donation of 20% of founding stock to a foundation, combined with their mission to enable nonprofits to build their capacity to do good, is a model we want to see succeed. So far, they're doing a great job, and we expect that to accelerate with this investment." TBL is led by Mark Finser, Board Chair of RSF Social Finance.

The company has grown in revenue and size by almost double in the past year, and is expected to double again through the investment. "We could have moved to the West Coast," said Crystle. "But this is home, and we're happy to be a part of Lancaster's community and have impact here. It's refreshing not to have to move merely to raise money."

About Mission Research

Mission Research is a socially responsible software company focused on serving the nonprofit and small business sectors with contact, customer, and donor management software that's affordably priced and easy to learn and use. Started in 2002, the company launched GiftWorks fundraising software in 2004 and SalesWorks in 2007. The Pennsylvania company was founded by former US Senate candidate Charlie Crystle, David Weaver, and Chris Walker, the original team behind Chili!Soft, sold to Cobalt Networks in 2000; ChiliSoft is now owned by Sun Microsystems [NASDAQ:JAVA]. Mission Research company is partners with Avery Dennison, Intuit [NASDAQ:INTU], and over 400 independent consultants. Mission Research can be reached at 1-717-431-0200, or info@missionresearch.com. 

About TBL Capital

TBL Capital has developed an intentional, patient capital venture fund platform that focuses on the needs of the entrepreneur with a balanced emphasis on people, planet and profits. With $50 million under management, the firm invests in entrepreneurs who are committed to building companies with strong triple bottom line returns. We provide growth capital to help companies succeed and support entrepreneurs as they manage the many opportunities and demands of a growing business. Launched in the fall of 2007, TBL Capital focuses on a targeted range of socially beneficial sectors: consumer products, service providers, software, clean technology, green building, health and wellness, and retail.

For more information please contact:

Charlie Crystle, CEO
Mission Research
717-368-2445
717-431-0200

Top Ten Mashups for Social Change (Vote Now for Your Favorites!)

Mashups for social change? Apparently, you're not the only one that thinks this is a good idea. Last week, 122 project ideas were submitted to the annual NetSquared Mashup Challenge. This week, you (yes, you) get to choose which of these projects will get support.

Based on the contest's voting guidelines, I voted for projects that would get the most bang for the buck out of combining mashed-up data, exposing it intelligently to the public, and giving communities the opportunity to leverage that information towards change. Many projects provided interesting information, but didn't put a lever into the individual's hand. Alternatively, other projects provided great depth of participation, but not in a way that would scale to multiple communities.

Here are my picks for the top ten mashups for social change:

• OpenCongress.org :: Track Congress with Social Data. New data mashups on “My OpenCongress” will allow users to customize the stream of info they receive about their tracked items. In other words, it can be a lot easier to separate the signal from the noise on Capitol Hill-- to figure out what bills and votes are important or meaningful to you. Users will have access to a wider variety of content, more streams of helpfully-curated data about their interests, and more social wisdom from around the web.

• You Are Here. Punch in your zip code. Immediately, you find out that your water is piped in from a steadily dwindling aquifer in another state, that your garbage is being carted off to an incinerator in the the poorest part of your city. You see pictures of these places, discover their proximity on maps, see related statistics and individual comparisons about resource use and waste production. And something makes you mad--maybe the incinerator is a stonesthrow from your daughter's school. Good news: you don't have to seethe behind your computer, alone with your outrage until you get distracted by the next shiny thing on the net. With a couple of clicks, connect to organizations working on just these issues—suddenly you're linked up with a group working to create a city composting program or a water-conservation organization.

• KnowMore.org Firefox Extension - Get Alerts of Corporate Abuses When You Visit Company/Brand/Product Websites. A Firefox extension that will alert users to corporate crimes whenever they visit company and brand websites. This way, when you visit a company or brand's website that is in the KnowMore directory, the KnowMore extension will automatically display the relevant issues and ratings within your browser. For example, if you were to visit AmericanApparel.net, the statement - "This company has areas of concern around worker's rights and business ethics. Click HERE to Learn More!” would appear over the top of that website.

• MAPLight.org: Mapping Money and Politics. Anyone can create, view, and share maps of contributions from the oil industry, labor unions, or any other interest influencing government. You can compare candidates, to see who has the most local support and whose financial support comes from out-of-state. You can even display income, ethnic, and other demographic information

• City of New Orleans: A Mashup for Citizen Monitoring of the Recovery.       Think New Orleans will provide a citizen driven tool for the notification of demolitions. Not only that, it will provide an interactive map of the recovery: Permit overlay – Citizens will be able to view the pace of construction and the nature of construction with an overlay of city building permits. City demolition overlay – We wrestle with the city to get an accurate list of the houses they intend to demolish. When we do, we will add that information as an overlay to the mashup. Permit and demolition notification – Neighborhood groups are the driving force of New Orleans’ recovery. We want to provide them with a notification tool, that will allow them to get daily updates on who’s rebuilding, who’s coming back. Incentive Eligable Inventory – As further tax incentives for restoration become available, the map will outline the historic districts and map the eligible housing inventory.

• Mapping the Hunger Gap. People will use the Google Mashup to look at the data in communities relative to how much need there is for food, and how many hungry people there are. When they zoom into a city, or a census tract, they will get a picture of how many people in that area are suffering from hunger insecurity. (Sponsored by Second Harvest Food Bank.)
  

• Volunteer Now! - by mobile phone. Tap into the massive untapped capacity to do good by merging human location data with volunteer opportunity data. Spontaneously volunteer your labor or expertise by connecting to volunteer opportunities in your immediate vicinity – or to organizations that can use your expertise over the phone. A scenario: You’ve just missed your airplane and have 6 hours to kill at the Philadelphia airport. You click the “Volunteer Now!” button on your mobile phone and tell it how much time you have. You decide that it’s too much effort to go somewhere to volunteer in person, so you select an organization that needs your expert help reviewing a contract.

• CorpWatch - Government Data on Corporations. By adapting visualization software such as Prefuse into a Drupal module, a large database of unwieldy government information can be made accessible and intuitive for activists and citizens to interact with. The visualization would illustrate the relationships of who-owns-who in the global corporate landscape and shed light on the often dizzying maze of shell companies used to displace liability and avoid corporate accountability.

• Change Broadcasting Channels. CBC (Change Broadcasting Channels) allows users to select channels of social change, and receive instant news about these channels on a mobile phone through SMS or twitter. Every channel has a community of subscribers that use the community tools to promote and share big stories and events. 

• Live Climate. LiveClimate.org is a retail website that links greenhouse gas offset projects in low-income countries, with buyers who value the social and environmental co-benefits of their carbon offsets. The Live Climate retail channel directly connects the offset buyer with the project in a developing country that generated the offset. Vivid descriptions of the community, and people affected by each project and clear descriptions of the social co-benefits inform customers as they select an offset project to buy from. A mashup of maps and project information would allow customers to see where they will make an impact. Customers can get ongoing information about the projects they support through RSS feeds and continuing pictures. 

 

Here's some more info on the event from the Yahoo! Developer Network:

The polls opened this morning, and will remain open until this Friday at 5PM Pacific time. NetSquared has asked that you keep these contest objectives in mind as you're picking favorites:

• Does the Mashup use the power of community and social networks to create change?
• Is there a clear way to measure the success of the application; does this measurement directly relate to creating social impact?
• Does the application give you a sense that the project exhibits passion and commitment to work for social change?

Voters may vote for up to ten projects that they find interesting. Head over to NetSquared and vote! Come on back here to talk about your choices.

Dr. Carlos Brown Provides Raw View Into Iraq War

Former US Navy Commander (and trauma surgeon) Dr. Carlos Brown was deployed to Ramadi, Iraq in 2006, and at the urging of his tech-savvy brother, chronicled his experience on a video blog, Trapper Los MD. It provides a close, raw view behind the scenes of a MASH unit in the war. As a comparison, the typical trauma center input in the US is 15 patients over 24 hours, but in Iraq you may get 50 patients in 15 minutes.

Brown had a hard time deciding what he could put in the blog posts, and then decided that the right filter was that if his kids could see it, then he'd put it into the blog. Even so, some of the photos and video footage presented here at SXSW 2008 are utterly gory - washing out exploded knees after mortar rounds, cutting off feet after stepping onto an IED, etc. He would never have captured this information if his brother hadn't set up the video camera and blog for him before deployment. Visit his site if you're ready for the raw experience, or watch his final video here if you'd like a more sanitized view:

Dr. Brown is still struck by how barbaric the surgery conditions were. Using hammers and chisels to open up a chest cavity; putting in bone screws by hand rather than with a power drill; and so on. No cleanup crew in the surgical area. The surgeons often have to turn the room over themselves. "You do the best you can with what you're given." And tourniquets aren't used much here at home, but they are utterly life-saving in the war zone.

Even simple things like blood and plasma aren't available. Instead, you access the 'walking blood bank' of soldiers on base - announce that you need 40 people to show up with O-negative, and people show up to donate. Interestingly, the soldiers freely donate without knowing if the donation is going to an American soldier or to an Iraqi.

Some other facets of daily MASH life struck me:

• The intensive care unit was a bunch of army cots crammed into what looked like a storage locker.
• Post-operative soldiers are kept in body bags to keep them warm when being transported via air.
• Every evening transport was shot at, so they tried to only transport wounded during the day.

There's also the added pressure of an audience, as surgery tends to happen as the rest of an injured soldier's unit looks on. We're all so fortunate that people are willing to do this in service to our country. Why can't we serve them better?

Side note: Though the chain of command could have shut down Dr. Brown's blog at any time, they never did. Soldiers' access to these types of services has since been shut down for security reasons, so they have no way of freely interacting with their support communities at home. Isn't there an alternative that our government can permit?

Jane McGonigal on Why Gamers Are Happier Than You

There's a backlash against people spending all of their time on the Internet. But are they happier? Jane McGonigal of Institute for the Future spoke on happiness, alternate reality gaming, and gaming as a new langage at SXSW 2008. (And oh yes, she wrapped up by doing the Soldier Boy!)

Midnight Ride in the Great White Snake at SXSW

Our EFF/Plutopia party posse came across a gorgeous piece of Burning Man-type movable art tonight at SXSW 2008: a giant and sinuously elegant snake cycle. The core multi-cycle structure appears to be constructed of welded bike parts, beach tires, and PVC. Strips of white, corrugated plastic; 2-liter bottles spray-painted white; and riveted tin plates make up the snake body around it, with stitched nylon over the head form. Take a closer look, and get the inside view of Brad Templeton and I pedaling furiously away inside:

I googled a bit, but wasn't able to discover the story and makers behind this project. If someone knows the details, please comment!

Quick Picks on How to Market via Social Media

Stopping in to an overcapacity panel on 'Marketing Without Marketing' at SXSW 2008, I picked up a few great sound bites on how to reach out to customers 'without being skeevy':

Andreas Weigend and Ming Yeow Ng Design Interaction, Reputation, and Identity

I'm behind on posting from yesterday's SXSW sessions, so there will be a series of speed posts today. Here's the first: what are the smart ways being used now to design interactions? Andreas Weigend and Ming Yeow Ng explored the science of designing interaction at SXSW 2008:

Mark Zuckerberg Opens Up at SXSW, and Crowd Turns on Sarah Lacy

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a surprisingly interesting keynote interview today at SXSW 2008. (Photo by skidder.) Not only because interviewer Sarah Lacy drew Zuckerberg out from his normally quiet shell, but also because it caused the SXSW crowd to turn on Lacy for too much pedantry.

A quick tangent on the hubbub: The audience grew frustrated with Lacy's decision to storytell rather than to interview. The audience members that I spoke to also wanted her to dig into new, interesting topics that hadn't already been beaten to death in the mainstream and tech press. e.g., tell us more about how Facebook is supporting the guerrilla government revolt in Columbia?  The best snippet may be that Lacy told Zuckerberg that if he wanted to know the real story behind his company, he needed to read her upcoming book of Silicon Valley startup lore. No doubt, the strange interactions will be called out in depth on the gossip sites, and there's a good deal of commentary on twitter.

This being said, let's get back to the details of the Zuckerberg interview. Lacy's drawing-out of Zuckerberg is what made the SXSW crowd warm up to him. Here's the gist of the discussion: