The Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio podcast recently featured CEO of Software Advice Don Fornes who spoke about his five best tips for identifying the right software, such as to avoid the allure of “bells and whistles” of a system’s technology and focus on what you actually need.

The podcast discusses how nonprofit companies can select the right software to grow their cause. Fornes believes the software selection process starts with asking “What are our biggest challenges?  and Where are we least efficient? Then you go out and start evaluating the technology and you stay in control of that sales process, rather than letting a salesperson from a software company show off the bells and whistles that make them most attractive. You say ‘Oh, that’s great, that’s interesting, and we’ll take that into consideration,’ but you always come back to what are the core problems you’re trying to solve and how does that technology solve those problems.”

Symptoms a current software is not working well for a small or mid-sized nonprofit:

• managing things via excel spreadsheets (version control issues and formula errors that do no scale)
• website coded by a volunteer
• using outlook
• interactions, giving, discovery, report generation, valuable analysis to capture the data
• ability to query data and wide variety of analytics should be readily available

The podcast– which also features Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) CEO Amy Sample Ward — discusses how nonprofit companies can select the right software to grow their cause.

Listen here.