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What Nonprofits Need to Know About Building Apps

By: Christopher Bayerle

Today we’re releasing our new guide, “From Blueprint to Launch Pad: What Nonprofits Need to Know About Building Apps”, because nonprofits these days are starting to explore a brave new frontier: custom apps.

Nonprofits leveraging tech to meet their missions isn’t a new phenomenon. You wouldn’t be reading this blog post if nonprofits weren’t already tech savvy.

Idealist Consulting contributed to building the first iterations of the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) more than a decade ago. In fact, most nonprofits are now looking for ways to expand their use of the tech they’ve adopted over the years.

So what is new? It’s the legacy of technology and data accumulated through the years that many of us now want to unite. We want to consolidate the features available across platforms while bringing together siloed data for analysis. And increasingly we want to make the technology we rely on and the information we store to be available to a wider audience of our constituents and partners. 

If embracing technology was the small step we saw almost every organization take over the past twenty years, what is the next great leap we’re facing today? It’s coalescing the systems we already use and refocusing our technological usage to reflect a greater vision for our organizational needs. 

For many organizations, that might mean building custom applications.

But don’t let the specter of custom development intimidate you. Instead, know that what’s going to be important over the next five to ten years isn’t the specific tech. What’s most important is your vision for what you want to accomplish with that tech.

That is exactly the focus on the new guide Idealist Consulting is releasing today, “From Blueprint to Launch Pad: What Nonprofits Need to Know About Building Apps”. This guide defines what it means when we talk about apps and discusses the reasons we see nonprofits building them. Instead of focusing on a single technological solution that can be used to address every organization’s needs, the publication instead will guide you through developing a vision for what you want to accomplish, which in turn will inform the technology you adopt.

So before you talk to software developers, consultants, or your IT crew, if there’s an inkling in your mind that your organization should consider developing an app of your own, you should read this guide first. It was written for you.

 

Download Our Guide to Nonprofit App Building

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