Some Observations on Nonprofit Software
Over on the ONE/Northwest site I’ve written up a piece about how nonprofits can best leverage existing software in pursuit of their missions.
Identifying prospects, communicating with them, and moving them along a path to engagement is a set of activities common to just about every organization in the world. Corporations call it sales and marketing, nonprofits call it donor management and outreach, and government calls it campaigning and constituent outreach. Underlying the different terms, the activities are very similar.
This is great news–we don’t have to build it ourselves! We get to use great free and paid software that is targeted at serving other sectors, primarily corporations. We can implement our engagement strategies using tools that are already designed to do that well.
Flexible, enterprise grade commercial applications with open APIs make it possible, and highly desireable, for a nonprofit to support it’s engagement processes with very little software that is written specifically for nonprofits. As the economic engine behind those enterprise applications moves forward, we get to slipstream along, reaping the benefits of their huge investment in the tools. It’s all about leverage, and investing where we can have the most impact, on that small percentage of functionality that the corporate market isn’t ever going to build.
