I rarely make clear endorsements of any particular issue or thing but I can unequivocally say that you should support Idealware’s contest entry on Netsquared. What can I say, I think Laura Quinn is a badass and what she’s doing for the nptech community is nothing short of miraculous. The intellectual promise of Idealware is clear: a clear and unbiased resource of information about nonprofit software that has no pre-existing vendor relationships coloring its reviews. We desperately need this in our sector especially for people coming to us from the private sector. Without an Idealware, we’ll be left trying to decipher vendor strength and weaknesses based on their marketing information and apocrypha from our all-too-busy cohorts in the nptech community. That’s not how it’s done in the private sector and that certainly shouldn’t happen in the nonprofit sector.

As a further proof of how much I think Idealware should be supported, I’m donating $100 of my Google Adsense money (yes, this site makes money the hard way — $1.30 a day) to Idealware as soon as Google cuts the check. Yes, yes, I know that many projects deserved to be funded. However, infrastructure is what is still desperately needed in our sector. As a sector, we spent $60 million in 2006 on Blackbaud data integration — couldn’t we have been wiser about these choices if Idealware had the resources it needs to carry out its mission?

You have to go to the Netsquared voting page, register and vote there. Here’s a hint. Try to rank Idealware.com as your FIRST project just in case there might be a tie between it and another project.

UPDATE: Netsquared is having a bit of a problem with e-mail authentication and viewing a ballot. Please have patience with them. E-mail net2@techsoup.org if you need help. They’re already saying that people who are directing their user base to vote are going ahead of the others. So as they say, let’s vote early and uh, you get the picture.