[Editor's note: The following is an excerpt of an article in the December 2011 issue of NTEN:Change. Read the complete issue of NTEN's new quarterly journal for nonprofit leaders by subscribing to the journal for free!]

By Laura Quinn, Idealware

Since most organizations don’t track just one type of constituent, the idea of a single database for all of them—donors, volunteers, clients, email subscribers, advocates and everyone else—is something of a holy grail. The ability to easily see how all your constituents interact with your organization, and with each other, makes for an attractive, ideal vision of what a database should be.

In reality, a single constituent database usually means some sort of compromise.

Earlier this summer, Idealware and NTEN released the updated Consumers Guide to Low Cost Donor Management, which provides reviews and comparisons of 29 donor management systems under $4000.

Included in the report are helpful considerations and guidelines for determining your organization's needs when it comes to donor management.

To start, do you even need a donor management system? 

According to the report, "if you’re receiving more than a handful of individual donations, you’ll quickly run into problems" if you don't have the right system.

Here's more:

Flickr Photo: striaticSurveys are the new black!

Our friends over at NPower have teamed up with Accenture to find out what kinds of software nonprofits are using, and how we're using it. Please take a moment to complete the survey.

I think it'll be very interesting to see how many of us are using software in the cloud right now, how many of us support remote staff software use, and where we might not be using software at all. (How many of us are still updating our web sites one static page at a time?)

Your responses will be key to helping the larger nonprofit technology assistance provider community understand how best to meet the needs the nonprofit sector. All survey responses will be posted on our website in a few weeks. We'll let you know when they're live.

> Complete the Survey

Flickr Photo: Forty PhotographsYou know the drill. You need a new website gizmo or database doodad. You do your best to define the requirements, the stages you will go through during development, how much it will cost, and how long it will take. But somewhere during actual implementation, everything goes sideways, and nothing goes as planned.

We all know this happens, but no one can ever explain why. Well, now we have a nice graph to support gut feeling. The folks at Flightpath bring us this great post about planning for software projects and raising toddlers.

Having done both, let me just say this: True that, Flightpath. True that.

The NTEN Affinity Groups are great sounding boards for folks looking for technology recommendations. Our NTEN Discuss Email Archive members recently investigated the tools and software packages that can aid in online web-conferencing and conversation.

The NTEN Affinity Groups are great sounding boards for folks looking for technology recommendations. Recently, inquiring minds within the 501 Tech Club DC wanted to hear opinions and experiences using AVG antivirus software -- and members responded with know-how.

The NTEN Affinity Groups are great sounding boards for folks who are looking for technology recommendations. Last week, a vibrant discussion occurred among one of our most active Affinity Groups, the 501 Tech Club DC. A group member wanted to better understand how php/mySQL, .NET, and asp/SQL compare. Key issues included similarities, differences, and preferences in choosing amongst the tools. A summary of responses from the 501 Tech Club DC participants is below. Want to be involved? Sign-up today free of charge and view all posts and links in their full glory at http://groups.nten.org.

Every day nonprofits deal with software systems that don't talk to each other or work together. They spend time and money on systems that aren't integrated. They're hampered by the inability to extract needed information from a given tool and resort to entering the information several times in different systems.