Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Blackbaud CTO Mary Beth Westmoreland (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about a use case and workflow as it pertains to mobile.

Mary Beth Westmoreland: As an arts and cultural organization, I’m like an aquarium. I might want to check people into the aquarium. I may want to have a special event where I’m soliciting major gifts from a subset of the population in my community. I may be out at a community event and I may want to solicit a gift to someone I just met. Mobile can help in all three of those different use cases.

I want to check someone in at an event. When someone comes in, I want to pull their name up. I want analytics and mobile to work together there. I am talking to them but I can check them in for the event via a mobile app. They can purchase a ticket via the mobile app. I can look and see who they are. I might know them already. All of that is rendered via a mobile app.

I may also want to be out in the field soliciting donations. I’m at a community event. I’m the development officer at an aquarium. I meet someone who says, “I love the aquarium. I go there all the time. I was wondering how I could get more involved.” I can pull up my phone and look up that person and enter them into the system.

I can send them information from that system. It gives me the power to know them at a community event and to be able to capture their information and ship it back to the system even though I’m at a community event. There’s many more use cases like that. There’s a lot of different ways to engage from a mobile perspective. The fact is that the cloud gives you that. When I’m at that event, I want someone at the back office to be able to grab that information very quickly and do something with it. I want it to happen in real time.

Sramana Mitra: Given what’s happening in your industry with respect to the cloud, what are some things on your customer’s wish list? You said right at the beginning that you’re not trying to solve all the problems. You’re providing a set of solutions but you’re also bringing together other things through partnerships. As you’re doing that, do you see ways in which there are open problems out there that warrant a separate company to solve some of those problems?

Mary Beth Westmoreland: It’s a really good question. Each of the non-profits we work with is unique. They run programs that are unique. Some of them have missions with respect to clean water or animal welfare. A lot of the institutions that we work with in animal welfare space give classes to their volunteers. They want to be able to track and register those. They have programs around adoption. When I think about what is the gap, a lot of the program pieces that I’ve found in the non-profit space is not as lucrative. There are gaps in programs pieces. When we think of ourselves as Blackbaud, we may not be able to fill every one of those gaps. What I feel really strongly about is the ability for our platform to enable that.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Blackbaud CTO Mary Beth Westmoreland
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