Competing for nonprofit dollars

<rant>

Many of you know that I have a real desire to ease nonprofit pain in two particular areas: vertical apps, and data integration. This simply comes from my years of working with nonprofits who are struggling with their data issues, and need good solutions to them.

I just finished reading Allen’s recent posts about the new wave of widgitized donation functionalities that some big (and not so big) players in the nonprofit technology web services space are pushing out. Yes, it’s a good thing that there are lots of competitors in the field of CRM/fundraising in general, and a lot of them are doing some really interesting on-the-cutting-edge stuff, which is great.

What ticks me off is that by far, the richest (and I mean that in many possible senses) area of software development in the nonprofit sector is … fundraising. I understand how important fundraising is (especially now as the coordinator of an organization that needs money,) but why aren’t there 5 big companies jockeying for space to provide nonprofits with reasonably priced, say, client management packages? Or one of the thirty-five other mission critical tasks that nonprofits need to do to make the world a better place?

I know, I know, fundraising is one of the functions that almost all nonprofits share, and it is where the money is, and software developers have to make a living (er, well, Kintera is making more than a living – they are maximizing shareholder profit,) but if just a fraction of the time, energy and money spent on building CRM and fundraising software/services (how many gazillion of them are there?) went into other software and data needs of organizations, I daresay they might not be in as much of a pickle as they are in terms of making choices about vertical apps.

</rant>

Technorati Tags: fundraising, nptech, web2.0