The following requirements are paraphrased/modified from a feature comparison of eBase, a free non-profit management database application that is written using FileMaker Pro . These strike me as a good start for determining what information needs to be managed when dealing with donors and volunteers. A couple of additional thoughts:

• The requirements are very broad, and to handle everything in one system is probably unusual. For example, a good event-management system is itself an ambitious stand-alone program.
• This set of requirements has nothing to do with service delivery. Depending on clients, activities, and reporting requirements to regulators and funders, you may have a separate system that handles that aspect of your business.

Contact Mangement

• Multiple locations with address, eMail and URL
• Links between contacts
• Action scheduling and assignment to staff
• Demographics
• Special roll, as board member, volunteer, donor, etc.

Donation management

• Date, amount, deductible
• Gift acknowledgement, batches and individual
• Association of gifts to campaigns, solicitations, or events
• Income summary by campaign, solicitation or event
• Online donation processing

Pledge management

• Current outstanding pledge balance
• Automatic and customized pledge payment scheduling
• Transactions related to a particular pledge

Membership management

• Find lapsed members
• Calculate member status: expired, grace, current

Volunteer and Activist management

• Volunteer interests, action and availability
• Association of actions to solications and events

Event management

• Create events or conferences
• Allow registration to events
• Manage seating and room assignments
• On-line registrations
• Printing of name tags
• Create event packages: single-day, multi-day, with or without meals/receptions
• Interface to hotel system
• Manage speakers, staff, VIPs
• Managing pricing, “early-bird” registrations

Data entry and import

• Keyboard shortcuts for common tasks
• Import basic gift and donor data from other systems

Mail and Email

• Personalize bulk eMail
• Automatically mange eMail and subscription lists
• Track eMail correspondance with database contacts
• Target mailings to subset of database
• Mail-merge letters and labels
• Analyze effectiveness of mailings

Reporting and search features

• A variety of standard reports
• Ability to create custom reports
• Export ability to Excel or data formats
• Store custom search criteria (queries)
• Store custom search results