Articles: Managing Constituents

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.

What do you need your software to do today to support your organization’s strategies, or for your needs over the next three or four years? What are the common issues other organizations face when selecting such software? Keith Heller takes a look at four things to keep in mind throughout the software selection process.

The right donor management software can make a big difference in your ability to raise funds. We asked six different nonprofit technology experts about donor management software that have worked well for their nonprofit colleagues.

A Constituent Relationship Management can help track of all the ways that you interact with each of your supporters. But what does it take to implement one? Does it have to cost an arm and a leg? What changes will your organization need to make to support it? We look at four different organizations' CRM stories.

Finding Constituent Relationship Management software isn’t easy – there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution. This article, the conclusion of Paul Hagen’s two-part series, helps you understand the CRM marketplace and offers practical advice to help you define a software infrastructure that will work for you.

How are small organizations tracking constituents? What are they struggling with, and what works well? In partnership with the River Network, we spoke to a number of river conservation groups about their constituent databases, and report back with best practices and case studies that apply to any smaller organization.

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.

How do you choose a donor database that will support successful fundraising? The software is only half the story. Fundraising technology strategist Robert Weiner addresses ten common mistakes that can prevent you from selecting the right database and managing it effectively.

It's a challenge to manage information about all your organization’s constituents.  But this challenge is common to both commercial companies and nonprofits. A strategy borrowed from the commercial sector has been gaining popularity in the nonprofit sector over the last couple years: CRM.