IT for Charities & NFPs

Choosing a Charity Database September 18, 2007

Most charities and NFPs need to manage “people” records (supporters, donors, beneficiaries for example) on a much wider scale than commercial companies of a similar working size. By the time a commercial company has got to the size where it needs a dedicated database or CRM (customer relations management) system, it will generally have the IT knowledge and support available either in-house or close to hand to enable it to be confident that the system chosen will be the right one.  But this same level of IT knowledge and support won’t always be available to a charity or NFP choosing its first database, and may still not be available in later years when the original database needs to be updated or replaced.

So if you are working for a charity or NFP and have been given the task of finding a database, how do you go about making sure that you choose the right system?

You don’t want to waste your donors money (or your professional reputation) on a system that doesn’t work for your organisation. You can’t afford to waste the time of your employees and volunteers learning to use a system that turns out to be the wrong one. You need to be sure that the final decision is the right one.

There are hundreds of companies and products out there – all claiming to be the perfect answer to your needs. But chances are that you are not a world expert on sourcing charity or membership database software – and you probably won’t have the resources to hire one to make your decision for you. So where on earth do you start?

Over the next few weeks & months here on the Charity Solutions blog, we aim to try and help you through the minefield with a series of “don’t forget to consider” posts – key questions you should probably find the answers to (or at least consider) before you buy. Not all of them will necessarily be relevant to every organisation, but we aim with each one to provide information and suggestions that are useful, factual and unbiased.

Here are some of the areas we aim to cover:

1. What is the Total Cost of Purchase?  The purchase price the salesperson gives you is only one part of your total cost – don’t forget that you also need to consider a whole load of additional (and possibly hidden) costs such as maintenance fees, installation, commissioning and customisation fees, user training. Also, will you need additional hardware and software to run the database?
2. After the system is up and running, what kind of ongoing administration and maintenance overheads are there likely to be?
3. Features – Does it do everything you need it to?
4. Will it be fast enough?
5. Will it be secure enough?
6. Who will be using your system – now and in the future? What kind of training are they going to need to use the system efficiently?
7. What Reporting features does it include? How easy will it be to get the information you need out of the system?
8. Are you going to need to customise it?
9. Will it grow as you grow? Can you add more users or extra modules easily? And if so, what kind of costs will you be looking at?
10. What long term support will be available?

… and so on – more as we think of them or you ask us!

Please check back soon as we take a more detailed look into the first topic.   And in the meantime, please continue sending us your comments and questions and we will try to include them in future posts.