Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

As you know, nonprofit data management has been a really important issue for me for a long time. So I thought it would be a great subject for the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants hosted here today.

There are some great posts for today:

• First, Katya’s Nonprofit Marketing Blog has a great post with an article from Cheryl Gibson about implementing a CRM system in a nonprofit. It’s chock-full of information about what you need to start, different strategies, and potential pitfalls. My favorite quote: “A mutual understanding between the nonprofit organization and the database implementer that converting a database involves organizational change, and this can be stressful and threatening for employees. Both the database implementer and the nonprofit organization will need to establish in the project plan the metrics and deliverables that comprise success.” I wish all nonprofits understood this!
• IDI’s Blogger Relations has some good ideas and resources on data management - they suggest, and I agree that it is critical to managing fundraising strategy.
• Michelle Martin, over at The Bamboo Project Blog, talks about two cool web 2.0 tools, i-Lighter and Google Notebooks for managing online notes and such. I’m a fan of Google Notebook myself, but I’ve never heard of i-Lighter - I’ll have to check it out.
• Kivi at Nonprofit Communications, talks about how to keep track of the kind of data that writers need to keep track of - editorial calendars. I want to do more and more writing, and doing this sort of thing might be pretty helpful for me.
• Beth has some advice for dealing with too much data - write it down (er, on a wiki that is.)
• Finally, if data management stresses you out, here are some tips!

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Technorati Tags: carnival, data management, nptech