[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.

It's been two years since we released the first Nonprofit Data Ecosystems Survey report, which provided a look at not only what particular technology tools and vendors the NTEN community uses for the different data management functions across their organization (from email to volunteers), but also the grades they assign to those tools and vendors on criteria such as after-sale support and usability. Unique about that report was that we also asked survey participants to grade their data ecosystems, which is what we call that network of tools organizations use to carry out their work.

In 2009, we learned that while respondents tended to rate individual systems as generally successful for managing specific parts of their organizational work (in the B to A range for most criteria), they graded their ecosystems as unsuccessful (generally C's and lower).

We re-visted this topic this summer for the 2011 Nonprofit Data Ecosystems survey, and are happy to release the report today (free for NTEN members).

> Find out more and get the updated report (free for NTEN Members!)

Earlier this fall, Convio released its "Peer-to-Peer Event Fundraising Benchmark Study," based on a look at 48 organizations using Convio's TeamRaiser to manage fundraising events. You can find the complete study online here.

They recently released an infographic to illustrate some of the key benchmarks. Here's what stood out to me:

• On average, a participant must send 5 emails to secure 1 donation – so you'll need to encourage your individual fundraisers to send lots of email!
• Returning participants tend to raise more money than first-time participants, so Convio recommends that you make sure to reach out to former participants, even offering them special incentives. like waiving registration fees.
• Endurance type events generally raise more money overall, but non-competitive event types are great for growing your supporter base

For the infographic, click through to the full post.

[Editor's note: The following is an excerpt of an article in the December 2011 issue of NTEN:Change. Read the complete article, "From Outcomes to Impact," by subscribing to the journal for free!]

By Julie Macalik, with Greenlights for Nonprofit Success

The first step in starting to measure your impact is to identify the major outcomes that you want to examine. In order to be successful in this step you will need full management support and a dedicated key project lead for your team. This person will take the helm on laying out tasks in a sequence, informing other staff of their roles and assignments, and providing assistance to people as they complete their parts of the evaluation.