I recently came across a great summary from TechSoup on mistakes organizations make in selecting a donor database.
I can personally attest to making a couple of them myself.
In my experience, most small-to-medium sized nonprofits fail to invest sufficient time and money into utilizing a good donor database, and thinking through the integration of that data with other data the organization uses (email advocacy for example). (Of course, many databases integrate these two functions from the start).
Of the two (time or money), I actually think time is the biggest failure for organizations. They ask the tech people to figure it out, without recognizing the tech people haven’t a clue what your real needs are unless your fundraising and program staff invest real time into thinking through your real needs.
When we finally did the process right in my last job, it was by investing a lot of time into creating a document outlining in excruciating detail our needs and then vigorously checking potential vendors for how they could meet them.
Here are some further thoughts I previously wrote about investing in information management systems.