What software solutions do you wish were on TechSoup?

mind mapping software

I wish Canadian not-for-profits had more choices from amongst the existing products. Currently, through TechSoup Canada we're eligible only for Microsoft and Intuit offers. As I understand it, Canadian charities have many more options available to them.

Please open the floodgates!

Carolyn

I Wish TechSoup Carried [insert product name]?

I wish TechSoup carried FileMaker Pro (for both Mac and PC) at a discounted price for nonprofit organizations.

I wish TechSoup had more links to and information about open source and free software solutions. I wish it had an entire section devoted to resources and commentary on these tools.

I wish TechSoup had a comparison of volunteer management software to help nonprofits know which solution is right for them.

I wish TechSoup had a place where nonprofits could share templates in spreadsheet formats, OpenOffice/NeoOffice database formats, MS Access, etc. to manage volunteers, donors, clients and projects.

I wish TechSoup would always make it clear if a software offered was only for Microsoft Windows, or if it was available for all computers, using any operating system.

Extensis Portfolio (Windows/Mac).

Font issues really cost our staff a lot of time figuring out how to handle errors when a vendor gives us native InDesign files. I've read that font managers such as Extensis are widely used and very helpful...not only for time and font management, but to free up computer system resources.

I am a volunteer at the Capital Area Center for Independent Living and we train people with disabilities to use adaptive software.  In particular, we often train people to use JAWS, MAGIC,  and DRAGON.  The prices for this software is ridiculously high and in particular, Freedom Scientific offers NO discounts for non-profits like us who have limited budgets.  If you could convince them to give discounts through your programs, we would be greatly in your debt.

Quickbooks Enterprise Solutions 9.0 - we use Quickbooks enterprise 6.0 now and in the genius of buisness plans, microsoft forces customers to renew every 3 years - this program cost over 5K - ouch - techsoup save me!!

Ditto!

We want to use the latest version of ebase when it's out.

rcross:

mind mapping software

Have you tried Freemind?  It's is a free open-source mind mapping app.

It's pretty good.

Yann

Calyptix Firewall

Palo Alto Firewall

Why don't you see if InfoLogic will participate to make MathLogic available to non-profits at a reduced price?

Hi Megan,

I've read a few comments on the site and I've talked to a nice helpline person and he said I should contact you here initially for your input. I am the executive director of The Freecycle Network and we are looking for donor management software appropriate for our Freecycle.org website. We trust techsoup's advice and are willing to pay for a consultation. We have millions of members and expect a lot of small $3-5 donations and have a fairly smalll budget. What we have is a donate text page and a PayPal donate button. We would like to be a bit more professional, and plan for lots of very small donations. So any program would need to be cheap (no large per donation fee) and not very complicated.  Is there someone we could consult with at Tech Soup? We've also been involved with Tech Soup as a previous winner in Netsquared and like your cause and respect your efforts for nonprofits. We also like open source / shareware-type options but this is not a must.

Thank you,

Deron Beal

Hello TechSoup,

Our small non-profit just bought QuickBooks 2009 Nonprofit version from you and now we are looking to do payroll in-house to save some money and we are therefore needing to buy the  QuickBooks Payroll application.

Is this something you might want to have available in the forseeable future?

Thanks,

Gro A. Lunde

Gallatin Valley Land Trust

gro@gvlt.org

Thanks for the QuickBooks Payroll suggestion, Gro! I'll be sure to pass it along to our program manager who works with Intuit. Can't make any promises since it's really up to our donor partners, but if we tell them there's demand, sometimes that can help!

In response to Deron, who is looking for some donor management software advice, I'm looking into the consulting question you asked and will hopefully be able to let you know something directly in the next couple of days.

In the meantime, you can check a couple of resources that discuss the topic in our Learning Center:

• A Few Good Donor Management Tools (which reviews a handful of tools and also links to some other resources about donor tools)
• Donor-Management Comparison Chart (which has an Excel file where you can see which tools have what specific functions)
• Getting the Best Prices for Processing Credit Cards and A Few Good Methods for Processing Credit Cards both offer some good tools and advice for trying to pick a system that would work well for processing lots of donations with a small dollar amount (rather than processing fewer, large donations).

You can also use our TechFinder to search for consultants in our database who might specialize in what you need. I didn't search specifically for donor-database management, but a number of our forum moderators consult with nonprofits on these topics and could offer some recommendations as well. You could try sending a message to Robert Weiner, Chris Shipley, or Yann Toledano (all forums hosts who consult nonprofits). They can be found by searching the users in our forums.

We'd like to see the QuickBooks Simple Start (100 CDs) offered in the Intuit Client Education and Support section updated to the latest version (2009).

We provide business training and microloans to small entrepreneurs (cleaning ladies, street vendors, etc.) and using QuickBooks increases their productivity exponentially.  We'd love to give them current software!

I would like to see Help Desk software, Asset and Inventory Tracking software.

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