Thursday, August 9

Blackbaud buys eTapestry

Paul Clolery at The Nonprofit Times reported earlier this week on yet another consolidation in the online fundraising arena:

Nonprofit software provider Blackbaud has made its second major acquisition this year, buying online donor management and advocacy tool eTapestry. During the past two years Blackbaud has spent more than $90 million on acquisitions in the nonprofit software and advocacy marketplace.

The eTapestry deal further consolidates the online advocacy message delivery and fundraising market. Convio in Austin, Texas acquired GetActive Software of Berkeley, Calif., earlier this year.

Blackbaud will pay $24.8 million for eTapestry and up to another $1.5 million under a two-year, stock-based performance incentive arrangement. eTapestry had unaudited revenue of approximately $7 million for 2006, according to a Blackbaud spokesperson. The company did not make any of their executives immediately available for interview but did provide statements.

Blackbaud's stock price surged 10% following Monday's news.

Maybe Blackbaud would be interested in buying this blog? I'd be a lot cheaper than $25 million. If you want to read more about the acquisition, go here.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's like a cold war arms raise all over again.

Anonymous said...

There is an interesting profile of eTapestry in the Indy Star...

Although Blackbaud was No. 1, eTapestry had emerged as a strong competitor because of its focus on smaller charities, as well as its pipeline into college-based fundraising.

Among eTapestry's customers in Central Indiana are Riley Hospital for Children, Marian College and Lawrence Township School Foundation.

http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070808/BUSINESS/708080413/1003/BUSINESS

Peter Gulka said...

It will be interesting to see if any eTapestry clients take the plunge and joing the Blackbaud User Society. We would welcome them if they did :)

www.blackbus.org

Anonymous said...

etap fan....

What Kool aid are you drinking? I'd like some. ;)

You reference Riley Hospital- the one client that actually has something close to 300,000 records that etap keeps touting... yet, they are unhappy. Yes, you know this.

Why? Because etap is fundamentally flawed for any size database over only a few ten thousand records. It's SSSSSLLLLOOOOWWWWW. Worse, some procedures never work at all and give you a non-descript java error.

Don't believe me??? Try creating a custom report that includes most of the fields in etap for any size database over 50,000 records. What do you get? Time outs. It just doesn't work because it just doesn't scale.

It's inevitable that Blackbaud will raise prices to get there money back too.

It's simple economics- and it's not good for the np community.