The Cost of Non Profit Software

A new non-profit, Idealware, conducted a survey in July to reasearch the time and money that goes into researching non-profit software and to see how strong non-profits' software infrastructure is. This survey also helped Idealware prove that there is a need for an organization like theirs. They were formed to provide non-profits with information on software that can be useful for non-profits in a Consumer Reports way.

The results are very interesting and the report can be viewed in pdf format here: http://www.idealware.org/IW_software_survey_report.pdf.

They were able to get 261 participants. $6.8 million is being spent per year on software by this number of groups alone. This is a huge amount when you take into consideration that there were 550,000 non-profits in the US as of last year's tax filings.

With so much money being spent, only 58% were confident that their organization had the right software tools that will help them do their job well. Money isn't the only factor here, so is time. With so much software out there to research and compare, that's valuable time being eaten up. And in an age where technology is a huge part of our lives, especially when it comes to our jobs, time can become an even bigger factor as new software gets introduced or the current software we have gets updated so frequently. So an organization like Idealware could be very useful to help the non-profit world decrease the time and money spent choosing the software out there that will best fit their needs.