Integrations are a popular way for vendors and nonprofits to extend the functionality of a fundraising system. Many vendors offer a variety of pre-built integrations with third-party tools, such as software for accounting, email marketing, peer-to-peer fundraising, wealth screening, text messaging, and more. In many cases the vendors offer these integrations at no additional cost, but you will often have to pay subscription or package fees to the third-party vendor to use their services. If a vendor offers an integration for a function that is important to your organization, be sure to ask about additional costs, as well as whether it is a one-way (you send your data to the third-party system and use it there) or two-way (you send your data to the third-party system and can update records in your fundraising system with the results). Some systems offer an app store: a searchable set of apps, modules, or extensions built by third-party vendors that work with the database.
If you want to integrate your fundraising system data with another online tool—and manual imports and exports will be too time-consuming and error-prone—it could be worth instead investing in hiring a programmer to build an automated connection so data flows from one system to the next without manual intervention. Most systems will provide an API (or multiple APIs). If your vendor does provide an API, you need to find out what data can be accessed and whether it is read-only or if you can write to the database. One area of caution regarding custom integrations: if an integration is not created by the vendor, you are at risk of having the connection stop working if a vendor makes changes to the API during an upgrade.