Today, we are very pleased to announce the release of the Data Ecosystem Report.

Life would definitely be easier if there was one piece of software that could do everything we needed it to, from donor management to email blasts. Of course, life is rarely that simple. The reality is that most nonprofits use a variety of software to meet their many needs.

In 2008, NTEN began asking the community to tell us what they thought of the tools they use. We conducted vendor satisfaction surveys for the Constituent Relationship Management, Content Management Systems, and the Donor Management Systems nonprofits use. The results elp organizations understand what software is in use by their peers, and how happy they are with the
service, support, usability and overall value of the software.

Still, these reports were only shedding light on a small slice of the software pie. In summer 2009, we went looking for a better way. Our great friend Paul Hagen suggested that we ought to be looking at the larger picture - at the data ecosystem. The data ecosystem is the collection of tools we use to manage all the ways we interact with donors, volunteers, activists, and supporters. We wanted to
find out how happy organizations are with each of the tools they use, but also what tools make up their ecosystems, and how happy they are with those ecosystems as well.

We hope that, by broadening our view of the software question, we can acheive two things. First, we hope it gives you a resource for helping you make better software selection decisions. Secondly, we hope it helps software vendors better understand the challenges and needs of our sector so that they can address these issues.

So download the report, and share with us what this report means to you and your organization. We love to hear from you.

Oh - and one more big shout out to Robert Weiner, who also helped us do a lot of thinking about how to structure this report and to the folks at Qualtrics, who donated the survey software!