The Pendulum Swing: Why Nonprofits Keep Switching Between All-in-One and Best-of-Breed Tech
If you've sat through a software demo this fall, you've probably heard the same promise: everything your organization does, in one place. After a year of reconciling spreadsheets before every board meeting, it sounds like relief.
What gives me pause is how often that pitch lands at an organization that broke apart its last all-in-one platform a few years ago because no department felt it fit their work. They moved to specialized tools, each chosen by the team that needed it, and now they're worn out by the mess that created.
I call this the pendulum swing, and almost every organization I work with is somewhere on it.
What the pendulum swing is
The pendulum swing is the cycle in which an organization consolidates its tools onto one platform when things feel messy, breaks them back apart into specialized tools when that platform feels rigid, and repeats every few years because nothing in the middle is held steady.
Neither end is wrong, and as I wrote in The Iceberg Theory, the tools themselves are rarely the real problem. The trouble is that organizations almost never stop in the middle, and this year the market is pushing hard toward one end. NonProfit PRO's 2026 technology tracker logs a steady run of consolidation, from SofterWare acquiring Givecloud to Bonterra acquiring Deed, and when Momentive Software acquired Personify in January, its stated aim was to let more than 37,000 organizations run everything "in one place."
The Pendulum Swing shows up with donor databases, but just as often with finance and case management systems, and with the everyday suite your staff work in: one vendor’s bundle of email, files and chat, or a handful of separate apps.
Signs you've swung too far toward all-in-one
Teams are bending their workflows to fit the tool.
Everyone uses the same system, but no department feels it was built for them.
Your progress depends on one vendor's roadmap.
The last sign often shows up after an acquisition or when a vendor moves its investment to a newer product. The platform keeps working, but its features stop improving and your plans wait on someone else’s priorities. That isn’t a criticism of any vendor. It’s what living at the all-in-one end looks like: when the vendor changes direction, your options change with it.
Signs you've swung too far toward best-of-breed
No one is sure which system holds the real data.
Staff spend more time maintaining workarounds than using the tools.
The original process is hard to see under everything added since.
This end usually announces itself the week before a board meeting, when development, finance and events each pull a different revenue number from their own system and nobody can say which one belongs in the board package. It's one of the most common conversations I walk into, and it's usually when someone says, "We should just put everything in one system."
Why organizations don't stay in the middle
Each swing starts with pain in one place, and the person feeling that pain picks the fix. Because no one owns the overall shape of the system, its direction changes whenever a different department's frustration gets loudest, while every vendor in the room sells the end it sits on.
NTEN's 2024 Nonprofit Digital Investments Report found that 45% of respondents personally hold responsibility for every technology choice at their organization, and only 62% build technology into annual fiscal planning. That's “held work”: decided by whoever happened to pick it up, with no named owner and no record that survives them.
So the swing isn't a software problem. It's an ownership problem that keeps getting solved with software.
What slows the swing: a stable centre
The organizations I've seen stop swinging didn't find the perfect end of the pendulum. They decided what sits at the centre and let everything else move.
A system of record is the one place a given piece of information is officially kept, so every other tool reads from it rather than competing with it. Most organizations need a few, for constituents, finances and often programs or cases, and the most important is usually the constituent record: who your people are and their history with you.
When that core is solid and someone owns it, adding or consolidating tools becomes an adjustment rather than a migration.
In January, the Ontario Nonprofit Network urged Canadian nonprofits to focus less on tools and more on architecture. I'd add that architecture needs an owner, or within a couple of years you're back to three versions of the truth. If you're weighing a platform decision this budget season, our Assessment maps what's actually at the centre of your operations before the contract is signed.
How to decide what belongs in the core
These are the four questions I'd ask first.
Which information would do the most damage if it lived in two places? If two versions of a donor's giving history or a client's case notes would cause real harm, that information belongs in the core.
What has to survive staff turnover? Anything you can't afford to lose when a long-serving person leaves should live in a system someone owns, not a spreadsheet only one person understands.
What do your board and funders ask for again and again? The numbers you report every quarter should come from one place, every time.
What changes slowest? Supporter relationships evolve over years, while event tools, email platforms and AI features change every year. Put the slow-moving things at the centre and let the fast-moving ones sit at the edges, where they can be swapped without disturbing anything else.
Then name an owner for that core: not necessarily your IT person and never a vendor, but someone with the authority to decide what goes in and what connects to it.
Before the next "everything in one place" pitch
Consolidation might be right for you, and so might keeping your specialized tools. Before you choose, ask the question that decides whether you'll face the same choice again in three years: what sits at the centre of our operations, and who owns it?
If you'd like to talk that through, a Signal Check is 60 minutes with me for $350, credited back if we end up working together.
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