View the report at: http://www.idealware.org/IW_software_survey_report.pdf

As Quoted from Laura Quinn of Idealware:

"Thanks very much to everyone who filled out the nonprofit software survey that went out in July - the one intended to assess the feasibility of creating a nonprofit dedicated to providing frank, Consumer Reports style reviews of nonprofit software tools."

"The results - from 261 responses - were very interesting.  There is a huge amount of time and money being spent on software.  The estimates of the survey participants alone total to 7.7 Million dollars worth of time and money spent evaluating and purchasing software (and this is just 261 of more than 550,000 nonprofits who filed 990s last year). The results of this spending are not promising, however:  only 58% surveyed felt their organization had the right software tools to do their job, and only 49% felt their tech team was aware of most of the tools that would be helpful.  There's a lot more information in the survey report, which is available for free online.  "

A user persona is a fictional representation of a real audience group. A
persona description includes a user’s context, goals, pain points, and major
questions that need answers.

User personas:

• Help team members share a specific, consistent
  understanding of various audience groups. Data about the groups can be put in a proper context and can be understood and remembered in coherent stories.

• Team members’ solutions can be guided by how well they
  meet the needs of individual user personas. Features can be prioritized based on how well they address the needs or one or more personas.

CompuMentor's Database Planning Guide for Nonprofits is designed to help small and medium-sized nonprofit organizations to develop a database plan, and as a result, purchase or build a database that effectively serves their needs.

We are preparing to update this guide and would appreciate your suggestions regarding, what's missing and what needs to be updated. We also welcome your ideas about how the overall guide could be improved. Lastly, if you have database planning tools and resources that you think would be useful to the community, please post them!