Fundraising Software for Med. Size newbie

Hello everyone! Can anyone recommend a fundraising/tracking software for a nonprofit (private school) with a budget around $250,000?

derhard;

Welcome.

This is essentially a two part process.

1. Determine the resources that you have, particularly the M&Ms, manpower and money. If you have a lot of turnover, you want a common application that new people can easily pick up or already know. If you do not want to invest a lot of money, that is all the more reason to go with a standard application.

2. Determine your wants and needs. Simply tracking fundraising can be done on a piece of graph paper by hand. However, I think you want to do more than that. You know what you want to do. By strategizing about that, you can view some threads here to find out some alternatives. They range from free to several thousands of dollars.

It is hard to say that one size fits all, I guess.

- Gary

Dear derhard,

As Gary said, you need to focus on your needs and resources first. Do you have a budget for this purchase, even a projected range?

As far as needs, schools usually have some special requirements that aren't shared by general nonprofits. You need to track academic information so you can manage an alumni program. But I assume that someone can only get one degree from you, so that requirement isn't that complex. A harder one is that you need to manage complex family relationships. You're going to need to be able track more than one set of parents for a student, plus the grandparents. Any or all of those relatives could be paying the bills, or wanting to receive info from you. You could also have more than one child from the same family attending, so you'll want to track sibling relationships, too. I mention all this because many inexpensive databases were not designed to track complex relationships.

Another complicating factor is your need to turn current students into alumni, and current parents and grandparents into prospects.

Have you looked at integrated systems that were designed to manage independent schools from Admissions to Advancement? While some of those systems only offer rudimentaty support for fundraising, that may be all you need to get started. Systems include Education Edge (Blackbaud), HeadMaster (ACS Technologies), SchoolMinder (Hunter Systems), Chancery Student Information System (Pearson), PowerSchool (formerly Apple, now Pearson, but their web site is powerschool.com), and Schoolmaster (Tyler Technologies).

I would not compromise on required features simply for the sake of integration. But if you can find an integrated system that meets your needs, you can often get more bang for your dollar.

Robert