GiftWorks Nails It for Small Nonprofits
joel.schuman@gmail.com 
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[02/18/2009]  Mission Research says its GiftWorks product is to the not-for-profit world as QuickBooks is to the SMB world. The analogy is apt. Before GiftWorks I had no satisfactory answer when small not-for-profit clients asked me (I’m an IT consultant) to recommend a software package to help them out of the morass of spreadsheets, emails, and paper where they kept their records of donors, donations, and fundraising activities. I would mention several capable donor management and fundraising apps, but when I presented the TCO estimate for purchase, implementation, configuration and training, and support jaws would drop and brows would crinkle with dismay.

Now when I engage small NFPs it’s a no-brainer. GiftWorks fits the budget of even the smallest groups (and it’s often available for free from Tech Soup). It has everything that small NFPs need in a donor management system, including many features that most small groups probably never knew they needed because they were too busy groveling thru spreadsheets or piles of paper or could not imagine doing things like donor segmentation and mail campaign success tracking with the crude tools they were using.

But although GiftWorks offers much of the functionality of packages that cost ten times as much, it has two enormous advantages over those more expensive apps in addition to low price. First, it is easy to install and configure – you don’t need dedicated IT staff or even a consultant like me. Second, it is simple and intuitive to use. Most of my clients don’t read the manual (does anyone?), yet they find themselves immediately productive. As they begin to explore the new functionality available, GiftWorks’ excellent online help usually gets them over the hump.

Of course, everyone gets stuck sooner or later. That’s when GiftWorks users learn that they’ve not just purchased a software app but begun a relationship with a company that is deeply committed to their customers and that knows how to express that commitment with effective support: an online knowledge base, an active forum of end users and, ultimately, friendly and knowledgeable tech support staff.

I’ve been recommending and installing GiftWorks since the first version, and I’ve seen it mature in capability and sophistication without succumbing to the bloat or irrelevance commonly seen on the software update trail. Each new release adds features that really matter while retaining the ease of use and simple interface of the original. I rarely recommend that my clients upgrade most apps, as there’s little bang for the upgrade buck. Not the case with GiftWorks – you always get more than you pay for.
 
  Ease of Use
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  Quality
  Performance
  Support and Service
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