Arguably the most common strategic question that our team encounters when meeting new prospective clients is one that’s simple to understand on the surface, but easy to miss the nuances of.

“Should we invest in a bunch of ‘best-in-class’ point solutions, or implement an all-in-one digital tool set?”

Both approaches to building a nonprofit tech stack come with pros and cons. Choosing between nonprofit technology solutions often comes down to how your team balances innovation, integration, and long-term efficiency. While this article won’t make an outright recommendation of one category over the other, my goal is to shed light on the implications of each category that are frequently overlooked.

(Full disclosure: I work for Engaging Networks, which is an all-in-one digital fundraising, marketing and advocacy tool. However, I also have career experience selling within two-point solution technology companies.)

Your Tech as a Team

As a former athletics coach, I think of a tech stack as being like a sports team. 

You can have a roster of highly talented individuals, who may or may not gel well together. These groups require a lot of coaching labour (read: administrative burden) to keep on track, but can certainly be successful when (and if) everyone gets on the same page. 

But then you can also have a roster of solid, hard-working athletes who complement each other well and form a force that’s greater than the sum of its parts. The “talent” isn’t quite the same, but the team’s performance is often better overall.

In keeping with the light sports metaphor, let’s take a closer look at point solutions before jumping into all-in-one platforms:

The First Half: Point Solutions

For those less familiar with the nomenclature, point solutions are narrowly-focused nonprofit technology solutions designed to address a singular functional and/or business problem.

So, for example, a point solution could be a donation form that drives more revenue via your website traffic. Or an email marketing platform that’s super intuitive and helps teams increase campaign output and revenue. Or perhaps it’s an advocacy tool with a slick and unique feature that no one else on the market has.

Whatever the use case may be, these point solutions are tools with teams behind them who are (hopefully) focused on continuously innovating within their one area of focus.

As someone who’s worked in the point solution world before, here’s what I see as the general pros and cons of this type of tool:

Pros of Point Solutions

• They look super impressive: They usually have the most modern UI/UX and have incredible visual appeal when demoed on a Zoom call. When done well, they’re aligned with current consumer expectations of how technology should look, feel and work.
• Individual setup is (often) straightforward: While some point solutions can be very customizable and require a lengthier implementation, simpler ones can be stood up quickly out of the box, sometimes within a few days or weeks. Less time spent on launching and more time spent leveraging the tool is rarely a bad thing!
• Easier to trial: While not true for all products, point solutions are typically the easier category to “try before you buy.” This is because of the point above about easy setup: the provider can quickly activate a prospective client’s account, so the buyer can explore the tool in their specific context.  

Cons of Point Solutions

• Connectability: Many point solutions either don’t integrate well —or don’t integrate easily —with other systems. (And some don’t integrate, period.) Some point solutions have been built to sit on top of larger database products, which is great as long as the connection is technically robust and resilient (i.e., doesn’t break easily). One thing is certain: rarely do these tools connect well to other point solutions. This means that a set of “best-in-class” tools can also come with a world-class — and potentially quite expensive — data management headache.
• Who owns this thing? A narrow product without a dedicated owner, administrator, or champion usually falls off the organizational radar screen and into the oblivion of wasted tech spend. Additionally, a constellation of point solutions with disparate owners often creates wild goose chases for users. Need to get that list pulled or a special marketing message sent? There may be a unique person to engage in each case, creating more-than-ideal hurdles to getting work done.
• Specialized personnel required: If I’m making it sound like point solutions are all simple and easy to use, then let me clarify. Some point solutions (I think of Clay, from personal experience) are extremely complex and require significant levels of expertise to fully leverage. If you don’t have people with said expertise on your team, the tool will die on the vine and never fully deliver on its promise.
• Fastest to evolve, but most likely to confuse: Since point solutions are technically narrow in focus and typically the easiest to develop new features for, they can undergo rapid transformations, which can often be jarring for users. Ever experienced logging into your favourite tool one day and spending 15 minutes finding where the report builder got moved to? Or that edge-case feature you relied on that didn’t make it into the next generation of the tool? These kinds of messy user experiences create a real risk of users ceasing to use the tool altogether.

After Halftime: All-in-One Platforms

A quick explainer: All-in-one platforms are comprehensive technology solutions for nonprofits, combining different products that share a common database infrastructure. 

This commonality allows the products to work together more efficiently and give an organization a clearer 360-degree view of its supporters. It can even lead to marketers and fundraisers — yes, the people themselves! — becoming more integrated in the way they work. As a result, the org becomes more strongly focused on building the one, unified experience that the supporter ultimately interacts with.

All-in-one platforms were the original nonprofit digital tool set. At the dawn of the internet era, one lonely person would need to be able to write website code, set up fundraising appeals, craft cultivation messages, and design registration pages for events. We’ve come a long way since!

While these platforms are the tech OGs for many causes, the best ones have kept pace in their overall development and remain relevant decades after their conception. Let’s break this down further:

Pros of All-in-Ones

• Holistic design = powerful supporter experiences: Now there are two broad kinds of all-in-one tools. First, you have the combinations of different companies’ products brought together by corporate mergers and acquisitions. (These may or may not actually work that well, by the way!) Then you have all-in-ones that were built by a singular team over time, and have a consistent data structure and design capability throughout each product. This consistency has tremendous value: It allows a nonprofit to present a cohesive brand and user experience across all digital touchpoints with supporters. This builds more donor trust over time, which yields more long-term net revenue.
• Everybody’s favourite tool: While different members of a digital team will mainly work in the area of the all-in-one platform that’s most relevant to them, the common interface and workflows mean that it’s easier for the team to be “cross-trained” across the various products and collaborate more naturally. Which means that if your “fundraising email” person phones in sick for a week with pneumonia, the “advocacy campaign email” teammate can fill in and put together an urgent appeal in critical moments, like when a disaster strikes.
• It’s not just tech, it’s partnership: since all-in-one tools are often used across a broad set of nonprofit staffers, the staff and the provider can truly get to know each other over time. Great all-in-ones invest heavily in their clients, providing strong, human-led support and events that teach clients the best practices of the tools. When you go the all-in-one route, you’re also going the most people-centred one.

Cons of All-in-Ones

• A feature or two behind: In the same way that everyone only has 24 hours in a day, a tech company can only develop a product so much. While point solutions can stuff all their efforts into building their one set of features, all-in-ones are constantly oscillating their focus between their different products. In a given year, the focus may be on P2P events, reporting tools, and donations. In the following, maybe it’s all about advocacy tools and email. This is normal, and again needs to be considered within the context of how all the products drive impact as an entire platform.
• Cutting-edge interfaces? Not quite: Since most all-in-one platforms were designed over 10+ years ago, it’s rare to find one that has the same kind of ultra-modern UI/UX of a point solution that was built in the last five years. UI/UX is important because it drives the overall accessibility and usability of the underlying software. Robust all-in-one platforms have done their best to keep up with modern standards, but it’s rare that you see one that’s fully up-to-date from a design perspective.

Overtime: A Third Approach

There’s also a third option that can deliver the best of both worlds: combining select nonprofit technology solutions with an all-in-one platform, all connected through a core database like Salesforce, Raiser’s Edge, ROI Solutions, or HubSpot.

An underrated feature of all-in-ones is that they tend to be modular: You can pick and choose what you want to use or not use, while filling gaps with your favourite “best-in-class” tool.

With hybrid tech stacks, it’s important to get a clear picture of where and how data is flowing about the system. Rarely will this approach be more integrated overall than a stack relying on an all-in-one alone, but if data is flowing out of point solutions into the CRM and back over to other tools, then this can be a very efficient ecosystem design that keeps ownership challenges low and overall functionality high.

As always, the devil is in the details. It’s important for organizations to understand granular things like which fields of data are being moved (and which ones aren’t) through the entire system, how often they’re moved, and how automatic versus manual these syncs are.

With some careful considerations, this can be a powerful approach to reaching greater digital maturity and creating supporter experiences that drive list growth, activation and giving.

Final Whistle 

We’ve covered a lot of ground here, and you may be wondering to yourself, “how on earth do I get started in (re-)designing my nonprofits’ tech stack?”

True to my coaching roots, I’ll leave you with four questions for your reflection—may they give you guidance for the journey ahead!

1. How technical of a staff do we have overall? A larger number of highly technical people can usually support an increased number of disparate tools. A less technical team may be more effective if it focuses its energy on mastering one major platform. 
2. How data-centric are we striving to be as an organization? Many teams have become obsessed with amassing large volumes of data that can be turned into insights that inform strategy and enable tactics. Ironically, the more sophisticated you want to be with data, the more a simple and highly integrated tech stack will be a better fit.
3. How much do we see technology providers as partners in our mission and growth, versus merely vendors? The more “all-in” an organization is in its commitments to technology providers, the more of a responsive, supportive and co-creative commitment they will get from providers in return. (And if you’re all-in and they aren’t reciprocating: run, don’t walk!). Like with all human relationships, the more deeply and fully we can share of ourselves, the more trust-driven and less transactional our collective work becomes. 
4. What does the total investment in all this tech truly amount to? It’s easy to overpay for bad software, but difficult to underpay for quality tech. Comprehensive platforms may seem more expensive on the surface, but when you factor in all the soft costs around things like training, implementation(s), change management, data overhead, and lost investment due to poor adoption, the price question for point solutions versus all-in-ones can often be a wash.

However you proceed, remember this: your tech stack isn’t a permanent monolith. It’s not made of stone. You can change it, and it will change on its own as tools evolve organically with time. The decisions you make now will eventually be revisited as needs and capabilities change.

Go forward and use technology to do more good in the world. It’s what the world demands of all of us right now.