Articles: How to Choose Software

There’s an app for everything, they say—but what about fundraising? With mobile devices reaching near-ubiquity, donors want to use their smartphones or tablets to give to their favorite charities. Some nonprofits are optimizing their websites to make it easier for mobile users to donate, others are experimenting with text-to-give programs.

Crowdsourcing can help you harness the crowd to increase awareness, cultivate new volunteers, gather information and even get work done—all for a minimal investment. How can you put it to work for you?

Ticketing tools let you sell tickets, assign seating, and in many cases, track attendance at your organization’s events. What should you look for in a good ticketing tool, and how can it help your nonprofit?

Constituent Relationship Management systems allow you to track a 360 degree view of all your interactions with constituents. What’s more, all the available options—including Salesforce.com, CiviCRM, SugarCRM and Microsoft Dynamics CRM—are relatively inexpensive for nonprofits, or even free. Sounds ideal, right? 

The ubiquity of video cameras and the proliferation of video-sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo have made it possible for even the smallest organizations to include short videos as part of their outreach and engagement strategies. In this article, we look at a few good options for editing the footage you shoot and readying it for public consumption. 

Since most organizations don’t track just one type of constituent, the idea of a single database for all of them—donors, volunteers, clients, email subscribers, advocates and everyone else—is something of a holy grail. The ability to easily see how all your constituents interact with your organization, and with each other, makes for an attractive, ideal vision of what a database should be. 

The Google Apps donation program provides organizational email, calendaring and document sharing as a free alternative to Microsoft Outlook. How do the two applications compare in the face of typical nonprofit needs?

If you need an inexpensive software tool that’s not particularly strategic for your organization, traditional software selection techniques can seem awfully complicated. Here’s a simplified six-step process that can help when you just need to make a simple choice quickly.

Should you consider hosted or Software As a Service software applications for your nonprofit? There are a lot of conflicting and often inaccurate messages out there: They're not secure! Use them – they'll replace your IT staff! Perhaps they'll change your life… or perhaps they're evil. What's the truth? We investigate.

Acquiring software for very little money — or even getting it for free! — can feel great. Yet is that bargain really a bargain? Learn how to assess whether that affordable software package is a great deal or a lemon.

When you’re using enterprise software to help run your organization, the software vendor becomes a key ally – and the right relationship may be as important as features or price. Steve Lancman and Steve Heye recommend methods for comparing the intangible aspects of vendor services.