Articles: Back Office & Operations

 Every organization should back up its data.  But for a small organization, it likely doesn't make sense to mess around with complex hardware solutions.  We talked to some nonprofit technology experts to understand what online data backup solutions make sense for nonprofits.

Computers and servers can consume a tremendous amount of natural resources.  David Deal and the Green IT Consortium take a look the software that can help you reduce your environmental footprint.

Through HIPAA, the US government provides a set of instructions and guidelines for working with patient health data. What you should look for to ensure that a software package will comply with the HIPAA standards? We asked a number of experts and rounded up their answers.

Online surveys can be a huge help in understanding what your constituents think and how successful your programs are - without breaking your budget. We spoke to five nonprofit staff members to understand how the existing online survey tools compare.

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your organizational procedures can be a big help, but this information often languishes in obscurity and goes slowly out of date.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:

With Google's recently announced Google Apps donation program - which offers organizational email, calendaring, and document sharing for free - there’s suddenly a viable alternative to Microsoft Outlook for many organizations. How does Google Apps compare to Microsoft Outlook for typical nonprofit needs? We take a close look.

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.