Technology Selection: What You Need to Know to Make a Decision
Jeffrey Herron, Beaconfire Consulting, USA

Mini-Workshop: Technology Selection

Once an organization decides to launch an Internet technology project, the next step is selecting the right technology and the right vendor. Although today’s marketplace for nonprofit technologies is flooded with generally mature and capable Web-based tools that provide functionality in the most common nonprofit business areas, the selection process is daunting. Given the availability and viability of so many tools, why does technology selection continue to be a struggle? Shouldn’t technology selection get easier as more viable technologies become available? In part, the problem is that nonprofits are faced with making a decision without understanding that technology is not always the most important element of the decision making process. The key challenge, then, for nonprofits is to determine what factors are central to making the best-fit selection for the organization. This paper will provide some guidelines to help organizations make sense of their options and will outline the pros and cons of the many solution categories so each technology selection can be made from an informed perspective and in the organization’s best interests.