A Brigada reader is looking for suggestions for a quality or ministry-minded HRIS, accounting software, and/or donor management for a mission agency. Many companies require monthly fees per employee that can be quite burdensome for a non-profit. What suggestions do you have for our friend? Please comment!
5) Software Suggestions for Mission Agencies
This is a good question, but the answers are neither simple nor cheap. There are a lot of variables involved, including what you’re trying to do, how many people you’re trying to account for, and how much growth you anticipate. If you’re a small org, there can be strong lure to trying to over-simplify (including trying to centralize all your data into a single system and avoiding silos). Over-simplification does not scale well, and takes a tremendous amount of customization work.
The implied question is “what is everybody else doing?”, where there is some expectation of a small number of vendors/systems that a majority of orgs are using. Most often, the answer to that question is that “everybody else is asking the same question”. There is no market oligarchy of just a few providers, especially for smaller orgs. There are just too many orgs that are too small, and where the costs of development and support are very high, especially with orgs that have unique workflows that aren’t easy to change. Even among orgs that seem to be similar in size and focus, their office procedures are likely to be radically different, and where it’s not practical to simply copy what somebody else is doing.
I also strongly caution against the idea of trying to consolidate all your data into a single system. Even if there is aspiration of having everybody working from a single list of contacts, uses tend to vary widely across an org, in ways that may be at cross-purposes, and sometimes even conflicting. And while it’s attractive to want all the information in one place, when you have that, a system that is trying to be an all-in-one is generally poorly suited for that, including where it’s really easy to over-share information, because there aren’t sufficient controls to govern who should have access (or not) to what.
Although there may be exceptions, there is not a lot of software out there that’s really designed for ministry use, and the majority of developers that sell to non-profits are secular vendors that tend to be focused on bigger orgs that are also secular. Donor management is particularly difficult if your org has people doing support-raising for their own salaries. Very few developers of donor systems have any knowledge of that kind of fund-raising. To get any support at all (often minimal) it often takes a lot of customization work to rework a system that doesn’t account for those needs in its core design.
Contact Management systems are also likely problematic. Most are built to support sales processes. Those may be easier to adapt to things like mobilization and recruiting, but often, implementation will retain the process of “sales”, including accompanying vocabulary.
HR and Accounting (usually General Ledger and Accounts Payable) are easier to do, because there’s a lot less org-specific needs to account for. However, even those are something that are usually better done by buying purpose-focused systems, and not trying to integrate into One Big Package.
As for cost, I get that ministries are tight on funds, but some of the cost has to be accounted for as simply the “cost of doing business”.
One further underlying aspect to consider is that in non-profit orgs, we want to apply as much of the revenue that we take in to direct ministry uses. But it’s easy to fall into the trap of under-resourcing our ministries, of treating essential infrastructure (including staff and things like IT) as expenses to be reduced rather than as investments in making ministries more effective. That’s a different discussion, but worth mentioning here.