The Problem
Most nonprofits today must rely heavily on data collection, management and reporting to ensure timely and effective administration, communications with supporters and program performance tracking and evaluation.
If your nonprofit is like most, you and your staff are trying to do much more with much less. You need more data than ever but have fewer staff and dollars to manage and make sense of it all. From program recipients or clients to donors, members, volunteers, community partners, sponsors and board members—nonprofits today must keep track of many different constituencies and stakeholder groups. Collecting, updating, communicating and reporting on these different groups can take up a huge amount of staff and volunteer time.
To complicate things, the "technology" that you use to store and manage all of this data is probably all over the map: some lists are kept in your accounting system, some in your e-mail program, others in your donor management system (if you have one), perhaps another list in a web-based database system.