How Open APIs Can Change How Nonprofits Manage Data

Developed by: NTEN
Type of resource: PDF document
Target audience: General, Trainers
Cost: Free access

Nonprofits manage lots of data: research, files, data on constituents, donors, and clients, etc. Choosing software to manage this organizational data is difficult enough. Getting applications to talk to one another in ways that are efficient and in support of the organization’s mission is even harder. Application Programming Interfaces or APIs provide a way to simplify data management tasks. Software vendors and open source software projects are increasingly using APIs to help their customers/users increase the extensibility and integration possibilities of their software. This paper examines the problem that APIs try to solve, technologies behind APIs, vendor strategies, and examples of things you can do with APIs.

http://www.nten.org/sites/nten/files/NTEN_OpenAPI.
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