Do Nonprofits Need "One Software to Rule Them All"?: The pros and cons of a single source for all organizational data

As nonprofits become more tech-savvy, there is a push among many organizations to find a single all-in-one software or to integrate information across all platforms to create a central hub for all their data. In this article, we explore the pros and cons of this trend and offer our opinion on how nonprofit organizations and nonprofit tech companies should approach data collection, interpretation, and integration.

The case for having all organizational data in a single place:

1. Data-driven decision-making is possible only when you can reference all the information you need. When information is siloed in different platforms or in a combination of digital and physical platforms, it becomes very difficult to reference the information you need when you need it.
2. Nonprofits don’t always have enough people to have teams for each organizational function. It’s quite common for people to wear many hats. If information is segregated departmentally or functionally, then organizations with cross-functional teams or one or two employees need to have an entire tech stack in order to manage everything.
3. Nonprofits exist to build relationships: with people receiving services, donors, Board members, grant funders, etc. It’s not uncommon for an organization’s relationship with an individual to have multiple touch points—one individual could be a donor, a volunteer, and a Board member. All of these relationships need to be tracked in a customer relationship management (CRM) system, but siloed CRMs means that the multi-touch-point relationships aren’t seen.

The dangers of having all organizational data in one place:

1. Most of the “jack of all trades” software platforms are “masters of none,” or they have a handful of features that are great and a handful that aren’t so good. Specialization in software is what creates high-quality platforms. At Atlas, we know grants really well, but we don’t know donor management or volunteer management well, which is why we leave those functions to the experts.
2. Usability can suffer. When everything is mixed together, it can require an expert data analyst to make sense of it all. Most nonprofits (heck, many non-tech for-profits) don’t have a data analyst at their disposal. Furthermore, a software platform that stores everything would have an extremely long onboarding process. Look at Salesforce and Blackbaud products, for example. They are both very robust platforms that can be customized in an infinite number of ways. And most organizations that use them either need a dedicated employee to run them or need to hire outside consultants to maintain them, meaning the “one software to rule them all” would be affordable for only the largest, wealthiest nonprofits.
3. Data gets its meaning from relationships. Picture a wheel and spoke system. You have one key type of data (the hub), and then all the secondary types of data (the spokes) that create the relationships (the wheel). When everything is in one place, any data type could be a hub. Making matters worse is that a lack of data hierarchy makes it difficult to know what data to display and how to sort and filter it, so pulling data out of such a system would be difficult.
4. The way software is built makes this really difficult. The foundation of software is its database—the bits of information you want to store and the way you want to structure those bits of information in order to relate them to each other. At Atlas, our database structure centers around grants, so it isn’t equipped to handle data about volunteers or donors, for example. Integrating Atlas with software for other nonprofit functions would require a massive build-out of the database in order for the information being brought in to be stored. In order to do this, we would have to understand what the relationship between a grant and a volunteer is, for example. In some organizations, that relationship could be obvious; in others, it may not exist at all. And you can’t build software for every conceivable use case.

Our Two Cents

Nonprofit tech is experiencing unprecedented growth. The next few years are going to be really exciting as nonprofits gain the ability to see their data in previously unseen ways. While data needs to be the driving force for decision-making in nonprofits, data points in and of themselves mean nothing. Organizations need to decide what information is important to their unique organization and strategic goals and make sure this data can be integrated, pulled, and interpreted easily.

How Nonprofit Tech Companies Can Help

To facilitate information gathering and sharing, organizations should pick the software in each major organizational function—donor management, grant management, financial management, volunteer management, program management, Board management, and employee management—that best serves their needs. From there, it is our job as nonprofit tech companies to build relationships with other nonprofit tech companies and find ways to integrate data across platforms meaningfully.