Identifying needs and priorities is a big job, but investing in this effort up front will lead to a better decision. This post will give you a few quick tips and resources to help.
- Involve all stakeholders and end users. Getting their input from the start will help ensure broad satisfaction, and enthusiastic adoption of your new software.
- Document outcome of the needs assessment above.
- Start from the end result/goal and work backward. For example, one organization we work with had a goal to convene organizations and individuals doing work on a particular issue. Working upstream from that result, they identified needs to gather and store information on work being done, and find people related to that work. In moving toward software requirements they next had to define who needed access to the info, what format it needed to come out in, what needed to be measured, and so on.
- Don’t trust what people say they need – dig a little deeper. Here are a few good questions to help identify your technology needs.
Previous Posts in this series:
Is Your Nonprofit Ready for a New CRM?
How Can I Identify My Nonprofit’s Software Needs and Priorities?
Up Next:
How To Get the Most out of Software Demonstrations
thedatabank, gbc is technology for change, and we walk the talk. 
