I’m in the midst of evaluating the lower-end online donation tools out there, and it’s quite a task – more than I thought when I began. I have 26 tools on my list, and in general the quality is annoyingly high. Okay, okay, it’s good for the space, as there are a number of good tools for organizations to choose from, but it’s annoying for me at the moment, as I can’t easily just cross stuff off the list.
This is actually a difficult methodological issue that doesn’t really come up in straight software selection for a client. You would never seriously review 26 tools – you would instead start by generating high level criteria, and weed out the vast majority before you really even start talking to vendors. And if you look at a vendor website and it seems obvious they don’t have it together, there’s no need to go any further – just cross them off the list.
But with no specific client criteria and a commitment to compare tools rigorously, you need to evaluate differently – and it becomes a challenge to eliminate tools even when it appears pretty obvious that there are better ones out there. It’s hard not to think, “Maybe this expensive one without many features actually has a big strength in an obscure area, and that’s the one area some organization is going to care about…” Or, “Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions because their website is crappy or the salesperson is hostile – I need to be thorough.”
This is clearly a place where the best is the enemy of the good. No one benefits if it takes hundreds of hours to do each review – there’s just not that much incremental benefit to being exhaustive compared to merely thorough. I’ve been planning to create a set of organizational profiles, so that I can recommend a couple of tools for each - I think I need to do that soon, so I can use them as a guide. That will allow me to say, “Is this tool a good candidate for any of these organizations?” and if other tools are better in every circumstance, then I can weed it out.
And in the long run, hopefully Idealware can help stop this proliferation of tools. Maybe it could encourage people to build things that we really need, rather than just another one of what we’ve already got.
