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May 2013
New social media startups are appearing all the time, and the lines that distinguish existing tools blur more each day. Facebook is still the dominant channel, but even there, usage is on the decline. Is your organization’s social media presence still cutting it?
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April 2013
How do you choose software for your nonprofit? With so many different types of software on the market, it’s difficult to even know what’s available, let alone what’s best for your organization’s particular needs. That’s why we created the Idealware Field Guide to Software for Nonprofits, a handy reference that covers all the different types of software that might be useful to you—and we just updated it for 2013.
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April 2013
As we strive to measure our work more closely and track a number of metrics about the health of our organizations and programs, we're up to our eyeballs in data. How can we make sense of it all?
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April 2013
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a single project you could fund that would have a positive impact throughout all your grantees’ programs and services?
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March 2013
Idealware is proud to announce the release of our latest report, Data at a Foundation's Fingertips: Creating and Building Dashboards.
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February 2013
NTEN has published a new resource: Getting Started With Data-Driven Decision Making: A Workbook.
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January 2013
Even as synagogues look to better understand the many ways technology can help them interact with and manage their congregations, the marketplace is changing. New software options are available all the time.
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October 2012
Everybody is talking about mobile these days, and increasingly, people are spending much of their online time accessing the internet through mobile devices. What do small nonprofits need to know about mobile to make sure they're not missing out? To find out, we looked at what big global development organizations were doing successfully with mobile and translated that knowledge to a scale that small- to medium-sized organizations could replicate.
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October 2012
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April 2012
Looking for a broadcast email tool? Groundwire has created the report for you. The nonprofit consulting firm, which helps create technology that engages people, organizations and communities in building a sustainable society, has updated its report that takes a close look at email service providers and offers advice on how to evaluate the various price points and feature sets.
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April 2012
From Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn, nonprofits are flocking to social media, but not everyone is prepared for the challenges and ramifications of what you post--or how to manage the process. Who is allowed to tweet? Who can comment on your posts? How do you respond if someone says something mean about your organization? How do you make use of what social media offers while protecting your nonprofit and your constituents?
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March 2012
MAP for Nonprofits and Idealware came together for an exciting research project that paves the way for organizations to use technology in innovative ways to deliver services and advance their missions. To download the report for free, visit http://tinyurl.com/7sqmv4s.
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January 2012
The Consumers Guide to Integrated Software for Community Foundations looks at the features and processes used by five different integrated software solutions to help community foundations manage funds, track grants throughout their life cycles, solicit donations, provide online support for donor advised funds, and tracking accounting data.
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October 2011
UPDATED in October 2011! With more than 750 million people signed up for Facebook alone, there’s little doubt that social media can be a powerful part of most organizations’ communications mix. But what can it be used for—outreach and engagement? Event management? Advocacy? How about fundraising? For many nonprofits, it’s far more obvious that such tools can be useful than how to use them.
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October 2011
Completely updated in 2011, the free 183-page Consumers Guide to Grants Management looks at the features and processes used by 22 grants management systems to help private foundations accept and review applications and track grants throughout their life cycles.
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June 2011
Written in partnership with NTEN, this detailed, impartial report walks through the features that might be useful, summarizes and compares 29 different donor management systems that cost $4,000 or less in the first year, and provides detailed reviews of 10
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June 2011
Should your organization be using Facebook? Nonprofits are increasingly told that they “need to be on Facebook,” and countless gurus and experts offer them advice for maximizing their Facebook presence to get the most return. But are nonprofits actually seeing results, or is Facebook a bandwagon for nonprofits that’s not going anywhere?
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May 2011
Volunteer-based organizations have to keep track of a lot of data—for example, contact info, schedules, time sheets and job sites—and the right software can help, freeing time for managing volunteers. There are a number of products out there to help, but it’s surprisingly hard to find information about them. This report is geared to remedy that!
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March 2011
Without an effective system to track donors and other constituents, you can spend too much time just trying to figure out who to contact and miss out on many fundraising opportunities. But switching to a new system can be time consuming and sometimes costly. So how do you know if you should switch, or stick with what you have?
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December 2010
FULLY REVISED IN DECEMBER 2010! We've taken our popular 2009 report comparing four free and open source systems -- WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Plone -- that can help you to build and manage a website, and completely updated it to the newest versions of the systems. We provide both a feature summary and detailed reviews, as well as a directory of consultants.
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November 2010
Online grant application systems can be a timesaver for all involved—or they can cause grantseekers and grantmakers hours of unnecessary frustration. In an addendum to our April 2010 report, Streamlining Online Grant Applications: A Review of Vendors, we evaluate two additional systems: Npower's Foundation Grants Manager, and FusionLabs' GrantedGE. This addendum was made possible through generous funding from the Technology Affinity Group (TAG).
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April 2010
Online grant application systems can be a timesaver for all involved—or they can cause grantseekers and grantmakers hours of unnecessary frustration. Streamlining Online Grant Applications: A Review of Vendors evaluates seven different vendors against a set of essential and gold standard features for online applications and reporting, to help grantmakers identify the best systems to support their grantmaking.
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March 2010
Are social media channels working to help nonprofits engage their current audience? Recruit new supporters? Raise money? This 20-page Idealware report provides the results of our survey of 459 nonprofit staff member actively using social networking for their organization.
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January 2010
There are a ton of resources on social media for nonprofits, but they are scattered all over the web. With that in mind, and as a first step in our year-long social media research initiative, Idealware has compiled a library of nearly 200 – and growing – resources on social media. And, we’ve incorporated an easy-to-use tagging scheme so that you can find the resources most helpful to you.
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September 2009
You've got data. How do you transform it into charts, graphs, and maps that will help your audience understand the data and move them to take action? This 30-page independent Idealware report provides an overview of the types of graphic formats that might work for you, provides some examples and case studies, and then compares eight low-cost tools that can help you create them.
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December 2007
How can you assess the features that a software package offers to provide access to your data? In this report, Paul Hagen and Laura Quinn provide an evaluation framework that will help weigh the advantages and trade-offs of the data integration features across different applications.This Idealware report was written in partnership with NTEN, and with generous sponorship by Beaconfireand Jacobson Consulting Applications.
