Recent trends, which are rapidly becoming the norm for conventional funding sources, would indicate that the financial sources agencies have typically relied upon in the past are going to become far less reliable both now and in the future. Government at every level is feeling the pressure to increase its efforts to reduce governmental spending and welfare type expenses, and when coupled with the general concern over the inappropriateness of the government being involved at all, the trend towards privatization will continue to grow and accelerate.

Moving on to another issue facing today’s nonprofit sector, it is becoming clear that currently the fastest growing area of both the for profit and nonprofit sectors is in the realm of client services. There is a growing amount of competition for funds in the nonprofit sector, and one of the most important factors looked at by funders is an organizations commitment to community. In the domestic violence nonprofit scenario this truth is become increasingly evident, as grantors and funders demand to see that the agency is fulfilling it’s mission statement. Commitment to the mission statement and providing superior customer service places a tremendous amount of pressure on an organization to participate in the community to a larger extent than ever before, and in order for staff to be able to do so, the amount of paper work they must do needs to be reduced in order to free up more of their time. Computers are one of the most promising methods for streamlining the paperwork process and therefore allowing the staff of the nonprofit to have more time dedicated to serving their clientele and to working with the community.

For the most part, my research has strongly indicated that the days when nonprofit boards were filled by rubber stamp friends of the executive director, or the board chairman, or by those individuals seeking only to achieve social recognition without truly having any commitment to the mission of the organization, are coming swiftly to an end. In addition, there is a growing intolerance for those board members who cannot understand financial statements, business principles, or who for whatever reason are not able to make the tough decisions when staff performance, or financial troubles become an issue. Again, computers and their software can help to ease this situation. There are many common computer programs available on the market today that are capable of reliably analyzing financial statistics and assisting in the creation of sound and viable projections. This type of information is extremely useful in helping both directors and boards in making determinations about what will be necessary for the future survival of the organization.

f which Ms. Connors speaks are “Mission”, “Marketing”, “Money”, and “Management” principles based on the premise that a well-educated nonprofit leader will have had a fusion of both human service and business education in their background. It is a decided advantage for the not-for-profit leaders of today to be thoroughly versed in computer usage as well as having a good exposure to business principles.

The extremely successful business management guru, Peter Drucker, wrote in the Harvard Business Review that in his opinion businesses could learn a great deal from the commitment that nonprofits have to their missions (in McLaughlin, 1995), particularly as this applies to leaning from the use of computers in nonprofit management. In the for profit world, businesses change and modify their mission statements at will to suit the latest trend or whim, but the nonprofit on the other hand has a mission that is not only a social commitment, but a legal one as well. Therefore, the mission of the not-for-profit cannot be changed at the drop of a hat as that of your standard for profit counterpart. Mr. Drucker illustrates his premise using a typical police management example; in thi

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