The app is dead, long live the cloud

Since the release of the I-Phone in 2007 mobile computing has been all about the app. In the 7 years that followed, we have grown used to customising our phones to a staggering effect. According to Staista there are now more than a million individual apps available for the I-phone alone. We spend approximately 2hrs and 19 mins on Apps each and every day(Flurry). Yet we only spend 23 mins a day through our mobile browser. This has led many to label the browser as just another app and certainly right now any org NFP or otherwise is not reaching its market effectively if it doesn't have an app. I can't help thinking that the age of apps is going to be a short lived blip in the history of computing, given that were only 7 years in to this mobile revolution we have a long way to go before we reach a new world order.

Apps are marketed to us as a way of personalising our content getting what we want on our devices, yet what is more personalised than a google search i simply type in what I want and the google fairies supply. No the real reason for the current app revolution is partly to allow companies to stake a permanent presence in your pocket but mainly its to account for the still pitiful download speeds and the lack of network coverage. The app essentially allows us to continue accessing services that we want even when we in a lead lined box at the top of mt Everest.

The computing industry has been through such a period before, and you only have to go back to the 90's to a period before broadband and to a time when we could all hear our data flying across our phone lines in blips and white noise. It was a time of client and servers of fat clients, and of desktop applications. It was a time when we actually installed programs on our PC's and the trick for developers was to pack as much coding into your machine as possible. Nowadays however its all about cloud computing, No longer are we constrained by network access so now companies want to hold all of our information in one place and let us access it anywhere, they want us to trust them and have us as continual presence in their pockets. Its good for us too, it removes a lot of headaches for when things go wrong and lets us get away with much lower specifications.

So now that we've looked back 10 years lets roll forward another 10, in 2024 after a decade of unprecedented investment in our mobile infrastructure we now have web 10.0 and 8G connection speeds, we have city wide Wi-Fi that even seeps into tunnels and can cope with huge concurrence. In these situations the mobile cloud becomes a far better option and the browser bounces back. No longer do we need to both with updating apps each week, no longer do we need to worry f we have space on our phones for all that data, e don't want to wait for an ap to be installed no we just want those services available when we want them. Of course our phones know who we are and can authenticate this to providers so we're guaranteed a secure and personalised service wherever we go. So it leaves nothing left for apps and smartphones themselves become nothing more than just things, and yes there will be a form factor to make some nicer than others but in the same way as we've seen with laptops there are lesss and less to differentiate the brands so we care less and less about the branding.

So may I be the first to give the app with a terminal diagnosis. Yes right now you need an app but if you don't have one already you've missed the boat and your better to let it sink and prepare to surf the next wave. The future is all about making your services accessible and personalised wherever your members or supporters want to access them. Yes if you can knock out an app quickly do it if only to grab a valuable spot on a mobile devices. Do so for the short term, and do so in such a way that it fits with a wider digital strategy
which feeds your supporters with the right information however they access your services. Use industry wide services and protocols to allow users to validate who they are then remember what and more importantly how they want to look for. Make this journey as quick and simple as possible for your users and they will come back Most importantly don't shun mobile internet, there are big clouds looming ready to provide some Epic waves and for your supporters will surf them.

Internet of Members \ Salesforce1 World tour

Earlier today, I went along to the Salesforce 1 World tour, to find out what their latest offerings have to offer for the NFP and charity sector.  Sales force as a company are unashamedly sales orientated their language and style is exuberant to say the least and the event had a personality to match. The keynote speeches include lasers, gymnastics displays and even a Salesforce controlled drone. The day saw them announce proudly that Heron Tower is set to become Salesforce tower, in typically larger than life move. 

Despite its NFP foundation, despite its 1/1/1 commitment and despite some pretty big charity’s on their books, the whole Salesforce Ecosystem just doesn't seem to gel, with the sector, at least not in the UK. You have to work hard to see beyond the showmanship and look to the functionality of the platform then you begin to see a flexible solution that does some really neat tricks. The question is can you get through all that bluster.  The exhibitors at the event where all part of the Salesforce Ecosystem, i.e those working within or on the salesforce platform. They fell largely in to 2 categories Apps or implementation partners. It’s fair to say that none of them had a specific NFP focus. There were some rather cool apps on display Riva CRM integration, Cognizant and Cipher cloud to name 3. But as with any smartphone app store there are lots of apps and finding the right one for your requirement is not a simple task for a charity to understand.

Theoretically, it’s possible to implement Salesforce without an implementation partner, and a big part of Salesforce 1 is to increase what admin users can do, and to speed up user led change. But for a NFP it remains beyond the key skill set of the organisation so better to look for an implementation partner. But here too the Salesforce Ecosystem is huge and as with anything else there are partners and there are partners. Some understand the sector, but from the conversations I had at Salesforce 1 it’s clear that most don’t.  Most focus is on delivering Salesforce and making the platform do whatever it is that you want it to do, irrespective of who you are, talk to them about specific functionally such as an organisational renewal process, or member events, and they approach it as just another sales process, which to an extent is true but rather misses the point. 

It would be very easy to rule out Salesforce, and look to a more sector specific CRM, but the fact remains, it has some good functionality and can deliver just what some charities or associations need. If you've decided you need a CRM, it would be folly not to at least look at Salesforce, just as it would be not to look at dynamics, but you also include more sector friendly solutions.

The big tag line of the moment is “Internet of Customers” which is an evolution of the “Internet of things” concept where an internet world connects everything, from your smartphone to you clothing, from your fridge to the light switch. The concept is a good one that points out that behind every THING is a customer, and I’d like to move on the debate one step further by starting to talk about an “Internet of members”, or even an “internet of supporters”. If you remove the sales speak the principal is the same, and that hasn't changed for years. The people you want to engage are out there and they will do what they do in any number of ways our job is to create interactions that work for them so that we can progress organisational goals, and this is just what CRM’s should enable.  So think about what your members\supporters are doing day to day, then what they want from your NFP. The last question is what you can do to make those interactions as simple as intuitive as possible.