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“Too many foundations dismiss technology as peripheral to the important work they fund. But even a small investment in your grantees’ technology can have a large impact on their missions.” 

At Idealware, we work hard both to remain impartial in our research--we don't take any money from vendors--and to be fair, but our primary mission is to provide nonprofits like yours with the information you need to make smart decisions about software. The field of technology and the vendors providing tools is constantly changing, and trying to keep up is sometimes like changing a flat tire on a moving car. The information in our articles, including vendors, prices, and features, can go out of date almost as soon as we publish it. 

Typically, our policy is to acknowledge that fact and not revise articles between our scheduled review cycles. But this week, we've made an exception.

Someone recently alerted us to a developing situation with Acteva, an online event management and payment system that's been around since 1998. Some of the vendor's nonprofit clients have reported that they were never paid the revenue owed them, or had to wait months to receive checks. Details are somewhat murky--there's a website that's been established to discredit the company and share horror stories, but we've been unable so far to independently verify them. Other clients have taken to the TechSoup forums to share their experiences. It's hard to know what's going on here, but the Better Business Bureau rating for Acteva is an "F," and the vendor's accreditation was revoked back in October 2012, largely because it failed to respond to any of the complaints levied against it. 

In the past, we've included Acteva in articles about event registration software, as well in our Field Guide to Software for Nonprofits. We've decided to make an exception to our policy and remove mention of the product from our materials while we monitor the situation. We'll continue to look into it, and we encourage you to conduct your own research if you're considering purchasing event software. In fact, this is a great reminder to always do your homework when selecting a vendor-- you never know what you might find out. 

The Idealware “Best of the Web” is a monthly roundup of the top nonprofit resources from the Idealware blog, our Facebook page, and our Twitter feed to help you make the right technology decisions.

How do you track your constituent data? You can use a broad, shallow system that can track all your different types of constituents, from donors and volunteers to clients and members. You'll get a big picture of everyone who supports your organization, and be able to see when individuals support you in different ways, like attending events and donating. But with this high-level approach, you won't have as powerful of features to drill down into the data of any one category.

You could instead use a deep, targeted database, that provides lots of features to get a rigorous view of a single type of constituent, like your donors. But what you gain in power you lose ins cope. In most cases, you'll only be able to effectively track data for a single type of constituent. How do you choose what strategy is best for managing your organization's constituent data?

Want to learn more about constituent data strategies and other parts of your organization's technology plan? Idealware's Tactical Technology Planning covers all the steps, in on-demand recordings so you can learn at your own pace. For more information, visit tacticaltech.idealware.org.