Articles: Back Office & Operations

From museum stores to gift shops, organizations with retail storefronts need Point Of Sales solutions that help process transactions, provide reporting, and manage inventory. What are the options in this area?

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? 

Many nonprofits think of innovation as a luxury they can’t afford. Staff time and budgets are limited, and improving the way they use technology seems out of reach. But technology can offer straightforward, inexpensive means of providing higher quality services, and create numerous opportunities to do more with less—even in our current economic climate. Which makes innovation something organizations can no longer afford not to embrace. 

What if a percentage of the $150 billion spent annually in online shopping could be donated to nonprofits working to make the world a better place?That’s exactly the promise a growing number of web-based businesses are making—purchase something from an online retailer you find through their site, and they’ll send a percentage to the organization of your choice. Neither users nor their designated charities pay anything—the donations come from participating merchants, who pay the sites a commission for each online purchase referred through them.

(This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Times.) As user demand increases, vendors are adapting their donor management system offerings to support mobile devices and cloud computing, one of several recent market trends that are adding value and capability to the software. They’re also enhancing functionality that’s critical for nonprofits, like integrated email and ease of use, in many cases adding substantial functionality without raising prices. 

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?

Online surveys can be a huge help in understanding what your constituents think and how successful your programs are, without breaking your budget. Last year we spoke to five nonprofit staff members to understand how existing online survey tools compare—this is an update of that article with current information about the tools’ features and pricing.

Is online office software likely to fit your needs better than more traditional desktop software? Or are installed applications like Microsoft Office ubiquitous for a reason? In this article, updated for 2010, we take a look at the differences between online and installed options in the areas that are often important to nonprofits.

There are many software applications that can help with project management tasks - but also many different opinions about what types of functionality you might want.  In this article, revised in June 2010, we round up the types of software and the vendorswhat nonprofit  project managers to understand what software has been useful to them.

It's easy for your organization to get overwhelmed with data. Executive dashboards can provide an overview of your organizational health at a glance. But how do you actually create one? We provide three examples of nonprofit dashboards.

Data warehouses can allow larger organizations to pull information from multiple places to report on it or analyze it in a central place.  We take a look at the software and processes you'll need to create your own.

Managing all the dates, documents, tasks and people associated with a project can be daunting, but online project management software can help. We present three case studies of nonprofits who have used packages like Basecamp, Central Desktop and Trac to help manage real projects.

Documenting your organizational procedures can be a big help, but this information often languishes in obscurity and goes slowly out of date. Jeremy Wallace talks about how wikis - easily editable websites - can help.

Most organizations have (or at least should have!) internal documentation that outlines procedures, best practices, and tips to help make everyone’s job easier. For instance, an organization might write up:

Secure, staff-only websites, called intranets, are widespread in the business world and increasingly common among nonprofits. What are NPOs doing within these private Web sites? What are the benefits, and the costs? We profile three different administrative intranets.

Integrating all your constituent tracking applications so they can share data is highly desirable, but how should you go about it? We walk through the pros and cons of three basic methods of integrating data: Manual Import/ Export, Integrated Packages, and Automated Connectors.

It can be hard to understand how online payment processing works. Many different steps and a lot of jargon make it seem more complicated than it is. To help you see the big picture, we’ve laid out a typical payment process in diagrams.

Here’s the whole diagram – but don’t worry, we’ll break it down.