MPower Announces First Wave of User-Developed Innovations to Its Open Source CRM Solution for Nonprofits

Nonprofit Community Gains Important New Features and Functionality

DALLAS, TEXAS (August 7, 2008) – MPower, which provides the most open, flexible, and powerful software for nonprofit constituent relationship management (CRM) and fundraising, today announced the first wave of product innovations developed by users – innovations that the company will incorporate into its product and support for the benefit of the entire nonprofit community.

The three user innovations announced today were developed by Precept Ministries International, Amazing Facts and Turning Point – among the savviest nonprofits when it comes to direct marketing. These are the first user contributions to the MPower community since the company made its mature, full feature solution available as an open source offering in March.

Now with access to MPower’s source code, charitable organizations have unfettered flexibility and freedom to develop new functionality when they need it – versus having to wait on and even pay high fees for closed, proprietary vendors to include such development on their typically slow-moving product roadmaps. Because nonprofits often have similar needs and can benefit tremendously from each other’s innovations, MPower encourages users to contribute the functionality they develop to the entire user community and the company fully supports additions to its product.

“This is a truly exciting day, not just for MPower, but for the nonprofit community generally – it is the beginning of an era in which nonprofits really have control over the technology they depend on to make their organizations operate effectively,” said Randy McCabe, Founder and CEO, MPower.

“With innovations like those we’re announcing today and the many more that will follow, we are delivering tangibly on the promise of open source CRM for nonprofits,” McCabe said. “Although we at MPower continue to develop our software, our call-to-action to nonprofits everywhere is that we’re all partners in making the world a better place so if you use MPower, dream it, build it and share it – we’ll support it.”

Highlights of Contributions to the MPower Community

MPower users are contributing the following innovations:

• A comprehensive event management solution for turnkey handling of tours, conferences, conventions, classes, workshops, seminars and more including features for registration, payment, transportation, housing and other logistics. Precept Ministries International has worked closely Global Software Solutions to develop the event management product, which fully integrates with MPower.
• An application that provides mobile access to donor profiles in MPower so fundraising professionals can, via their cell phones, have critical constituent data at their fingertips while away from the office, for example, when traveling to call on major donors or working remotely for other reasons. Amazing Facts developed this functionality and is contributing it to the MPower user community.
• Integration with Interprise Suite, a leading shopping cart and eCommerce software solution. Now an organization can synchronize data between Interprise Suite and MPower when a constituent simultaneously buys an item online and also makes a donation. Such synchronization gives the nonprofit a near real time, complete and accurate view of a donor’s complete giving and buying history. Without synchronization, an organization would have to manually combine the two data sets, which could take days and weeks to do and also runs the risk of inaccurate data entry. Turning Point developed and is contributing this integration.

“There’s huge excitement everywhere these days about open source solutions and since MPower has taken the governor off, development around the core product has accelerated at an almost dizzying pace – and this is just the beginning,” said David Michael Jeremiah, COO, Turning Point. “Given the development talent in the charitable sector and what we’re already seeing, I anticipate high quality, high impact enhancements to MPower coming at us almost faster than we have the ability to leverage them – all helping to make our organizations operate with comparable efficiency to the corporate world.”

MPower provides strong product governance for all contributed innovations. The company has established standards for development and puts all contributions through a rigorous quality assurance process to ensure that contributions work and are easy use, build upon and support. MPower also documents new features and functionality from contributions and provides ongoing support.

About MPower

Dallas-based MPower provides the most open, flexible, and powerful suite of software and services for fundraising and constituent relationship management for today's nonprofits. MPower enables organizations to manage important daily operations (including donation processing, fulfillment, event and volunteer management, call center activity tracking and major donors relations) and also capture and leverage key constituent data from all channels for building strong, lifetime relationships. MPower serves hundreds of nonprofits of all sizes with diverse missions and constituencies, including some of the world's largest and most sophisticated direct marketers. For more information, please visit www.mpoweropen.com.