Topical Review of Donor Management Software

Tue, Jun 15, 2010

Church Software

Many people I spoke with informally, however, were not happy with the current software choices and had decided to do just that: figure it out and build it. The most common set of complaints was that donor software was either loaded with features that didn’t apply to the organization and made it overly complicated to use, or that it failed to easily integrate with other databases that the organization needed to maintain.

Existing Software Solutions Miss Two Critical Segments of the Nonprofit Marketplace:

Many of the existing donor software solutions discussed at the conference missed two critical segments of the nonprofit marketplace:

  • small (1-10 person) organizations, which lack the staff capacity to evaluate and test available solutions, and
  • larger organizations whose donors, clients, and other contacts come out of the same pool.

    • Startup Non-Profit, Inc. is a local non-profit offering after-school programs and other services to at-risk youth. Their annual budget is less than $50,000 per year. They only have one full-time staff person who also works another part-time job to help pay the bills. Startup Non-Profit was in desperate need of a fast, simple solution for handling donations, receipting, doing mailers, and tracking other expenses. dataIDEAL was the perfect solution for them to get their administrative structure up quickly. The data entry and accounting is so simple, junior-high school students and volunteer moms from the neighborhood could do nearly all the administrative tasks, including entering and receipting donations (both print and electronic), entering expenses, processing mailing campaigns and managing contacts.

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