Community Foundation Software

Over the last 10 years the community foundation field has spent an extensive amount of time discussing the information technology needs of the field along with analyzing the key software providers for community foundations. In 2009 the Council on Foundations (COF) released an update to the 2005 Barrington Partners report titled “Review of Integrated Systems for Community Foundations 2009” and “A Survey of Smaller Community Foundations: How They Meet Their Information Technology Needs”.

After 2 days of successful vendor meetings in Lansing on Febrary 17th and 24th, we have assembled the webinar recordings, vendor provided materials and contact information for Blackbaud, Bromelkamp, MicroEdge and Stellar.  Please use the following information to learn more about these products and evaluate them on how they meet the needs of your Community Foundation.  A set of functional requirements was developed for vendors to respond to and also be a guide for Community Foundations to use as a tool to assist in the evaluation of each vendor's software compared to needs of the Community Foundation. *Note: These files are not formatted for printing due to the detailed screenshots that are included in this guide.

As many of you know community foundations have recently been considering a change in their accounting/donor tracking software systems as result of our previous meetings. Bill Nethercut has written a manual on how to extract data from the FIMS software database for the Stellar iPhi software package. The manual would also useful to Blackbaud and Community Pearl users in that the FIMS extraction methods would be nearly the same regardless of the software package and the MS Access manipulation queries are about 70% the same. The formats of the final extractions that are sent to Blackbaud or Bromelkamp would need to be customized by the user. To access access and download this resource make sure you are logged into the CMF website; then scroll down to the links section at the bottom of the page and you will see this new resource listed.