Reports: Managing Constituents

Our thoroughly-researched reports compare products and give recommendations to help you make smart software decisions. Idealware’s reports typically start with a high-level overview of the software landscape for a specific purpose, and then detail the benefits and drawbacks of specific software vendors for your organization’s needs. And don’t worry, our funding model (and integrity) ensures that our reports remain unbiased. 

Reports: Managing Constituents

  • The 2013 Field Guide to Software for Nonprofits
    April 2013
      How do you choose software for your nonprofit? With so many different types of software on the market, it’s difficult to even know what’s available, let alone what’s best for your organization’s particular needs. That’s why we created the Idealware Field Guide to Software for Nonprofits, a handy reference that covers all the different types of software that might be useful to you—and we just updated it for 2013.

  • A Guide to Synagogue Management: Research and Recommendations
    January 2013
    Even as synagogues look to better understand the many ways technology can help them interact with and manage their congregations, the marketplace is changing. New software options are available all the time.

  • The New World of Donor Management Apps for Nonprofits
    October 2012
     

  • Consumers Guide to Integrated Software for Community Foundations
    January 2012
    The Consumers Guide to Integrated Software for Community Foundations looks at the features and processes used by five different integrated software solutions to help community foundations manage funds, track grants throughout their life cycles, solicit donations, provide online support for donor advised funds, and tracking accounting data. 

  • A Consumers Guide to Grants Management Software
    October 2011
    Completely updated in 2011, the free 183-page Consumers Guide to Grants Management  looks at the features and processes used by 22 grants management systems to help private foundations accept and review applications and track grants throughout their life cycles. 

  • A Consumers Guide to Low Cost Donor Management Systems
    June 2011
    Written in partnership with NTEN, this detailed, impartial report walks through the features that might be useful, summarizes and compares 29 different donor management systems that cost $4,000 or less in the first year, and provides detailed reviews of 10

  • Consumers Guide to Volunteer Management Systems
    May 2011
     Volunteer-based organizations have to keep track of a lot of data—for example, contact info, schedules, time sheets and job sites—and the right software can help, freeing time for managing volunteers. There are a number of products out there to help, but it’s surprisingly hard to find information about them.  This report is geared to remedy that!

  • Do You Need a New Donor Management System? A Step-by-Step Decision Making Workbook
    March 2011
      Without an effective system to track donors and other constituents, you can spend too much time just trying to figure out who to contact and miss out on many fundraising opportunities. But switching to a new system can be time consuming and sometimes costly. So how do you know if you should switch, or stick with what you have?

  • Streamlining Online Grant Applications: A Review of Vendors
    April 2010
    Online grant application systems can be a timesaver for all involved—or they can cause grantseekers and grantmakers hours of unnecessary frustration.  Streamlining Online Grant Applications: A Review of Vendors evaluates seven different vendors against a set of essential and gold standard features for online applications and reporting, to help grantmakers identify the best systems to support their grantmaking.  

  • Getting Your Systems Talking: A Framework to Evaluate APIs and Data Exchange Features
    December 2007
    How can you assess the features that a software package offers to provide access to your data? In this report, Paul Hagen and Laura Quinn provide an evaluation framework that will help weigh the advantages and trade-offs of the data integration features across different applications.This Idealware report was written in partnership with NTEN, and with generous sponorship by Beaconfireand Jacobson Consulting Applications.

Reports: Managing Constituents

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