I’m just closing in on a deal with a consultant to work on our database integration project. I stumbled on this article from Forbes, published earlier this week:

The nonprofit world gets little attention from the software industry, for understandable reasons: How much money can you make selling to these companies?

A lot, actually.

There are more than 1 million nonprofits in the U.S., and though most are tiny–80% of nonprofits who file with the Internal Revenue Service gross less than $1 million a year, estimates software consultancy Exponent Partners–they spend about $43 billion on information technology.

I love this quote from from the CEO of Blackbaud, makers of the industry leader (and mucho expensive) Raiser’s Edge:

Rather than hearing about return on investment, he says, his clients want to hear about how to get more out of their donors using the right software. “This is different than a purchaser-to-seller relationship,” he says. “It’s not the same set of skills.”

Hey, ROI is important too…the difference is in the currency used to define “return.”