Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while, but have gotten sidetracked. A while ago, a group of folks got together to create the “Integration Proclamation.” They say:

Technology integration, also called “interoperability,” means getting one program to seamlessly share data with another program — ie, getting programs to “talk” to each other. If you’re a progressive, you should care, because “dis-integration” is killing us.

There are a lot of great tools out there for progressives — email systems, volunteer databases, donation engines, social networking tools, the list goes on and on. But because these tools can’t talk to each other, we can’t use them effectively. Ask organizers about their tech tools, and you’ll hear the same story over and over: too many overlapping databases, systems that don’t work together, hours wasted importing and exporting and de-duplicating lists. In a recent study about progressive technology, lack of data integration was cited as the #1 universal complaint.

I’m encouraging everyone to sign the proclamation, and, if you are a vendor or consultant, tell your clients you’ve signed it, and are working to make integration between applications a reality.

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