Philosophy of Donor Tracking
Notebook Philosophy of Donor Tracking
NotebookThe Donor Tracking Notebook was designed to fill a specific need in an economical fashion, and do it well. That need is to:
This program was initially designed for use by crisis pregnancy centers, and is still optimized for this use. It can be used by other nonprofit organzations, as well. I use it for Rainbow Missions, Inc.
In writing this program, I made no attempt to duplicate major functions of other software that already does related functions. For example, Quicken, Quickbooks, and Microsoft Money seem to be inexpensive, readily available, well written, and reliable programs to use for keeping track of money once it is donated. Good word processing programs (like Microsoft Word) have mail merge functions that allow you to take the essential data from the receipts, format it nicely, add appropriate and timely thanks, and print them out on a wide variety of printers. General purpose spreadsheets can be used for supplimentary accounting that may not fit well into the format of Quicken or whatever you use to balance checkbooks with. In general, if one of these other programs does something well, Donor Tracking Notebook probably doesn't do it.
Therefore, to effectively use Donor Tracking Notebook, you must also be good at a word processor (I use Microsoft Word, but several others can probably be used as well) and an accounting package or checkbook program (I use Quicken).
One essential feature of Donor Tracking Notebook is that it must be easy to use. The more features and options you add to a program, the more complicated it tends to become, and the easier it is to really mess things up without realizing what you did. Most crisis pregnancy centers don't seem to hire computer scientists to handle donations, although frequently there is a computer expert available as a volunteer or a friend of a volunteer. Therefore, I have tried to keep the features in Donor Tracking Notebook to a minimum necessary to do the job at hand. There are some things I would like to add to the program, and may possibly do so later, but for now, it is useful as it stands. If I do add features, I intend to make the updates available on the World-Wide Web.
There are other competing programs that can handle your donor tracking for you. I encourage you to look at these as an option. They may have more features. They may have more flexibility. They may still be within your budget. Naturally, you are free to evaluate a full, non-crippled version of this program and compare it. Choose wisely.