Nonprofit CRM – A Compact Guide + List of Software Solutions
A CRM, or client/customer relationship manager, is a powerful tool nonprofits use to track donations, create fundraising strategies that work, and build better, lasting relationships with their donors. In short, it's a crucial tool to fundraise better – with less effort. In this article, we'll look at several nonprofit CRM options so you can find one that works for your organization. Plus, we'll look at which qualities you should look for in your next (or first!) CRM.
Regardless of the size of nonprofits, CRM software is essential for all. It can enable your nonprofit to track the success of fundraising appeals and donor trends and help strengthen relationships with supporters.
Technology gives nonprofits their choice of software with different features and at various costs. This guide includes a list of the top seven CRM platforms and why your organization may want to invest in one. We also include a list of features most platforms provide and how you can customize them to fit your nonprofit.
What is a Nonprofit CRM?
A nonprofit CRM is a database where you store all your donor data, donations, donation dates, donors’ personal or professional information, communication details, and more.
CRMs are a vital part of building donor relationships. From the beginning of your organization’s fundraising, you must create an in-depth database of donor gifts and activities.
You can use the database to better understand donor trends and timelines and segment donors by donation amount and program interest. Plus, you can evaluate the success of your fundraising campaigns and reevaluate your strategies. Many nonprofit CRMs also allow you to monitor grants, volunteer hours, and major donor prospects.
Donorbox donor management is a free CRM option for nonprofit organizations, enabling them to securely store and manage donor and donation information. You can segment donors, add offline donors, keep track of any communications, get notifications on important moments, and create reports quickly.
How Can a CRM Solution Help with Donor Relationships and Fundraising?
Nonprofit CRMs let nonprofits track when, why, and what donors have given in the past. This information helps nonprofits segment donors based on their organization’s needs.
Some of the more popular ways of segmenting donors are by gift amounts, donation recurrences, time frame, campaign interest, volunteer participation, and location. Donorbox lets you store all your supporters (event ticket buyers, members, and donors) in one place and segment them through advanced filters, as shown below.
Segmenting donors by their participation and gift amounts lets nonprofits create donor groups and makes it faster and easier to send personalized appeals.
Donors react better to this personalized communication, and your nonprofit will see proof in your campaign and annual revenue.
Top 7 CRM Software Solutions for Nonprofits
In the past, new nonprofits collected donation data on Excel worksheets, but the convenience and popularity of online donations have created an influx of affordable CRM software for nonprofits of all sizes.
The following CRM platforms stand out for their cost, ease of use, and integrations with other fundraising tools.
1. Donorbox
Donorbox lets nonprofits automatically collect donor information to build donor profiles, segment donors, modify details, add offline donors, add communication notes, and automatically send personalized donation receipts.
Securely collect and store donor and donation information.
Make changes to supporter profiles and information at any time.
Add communication notes, including whether the communication was inbound or outbound and which channel was used.
Manage all supporters including event ticket buyers, members, and donors in one place.
Segment supporters with several advanced filters for more targeted outreach.
Receive notifications when donors make changes to their recurring plans and on their first giving anniversary so you know exactly when to reach out!
Create reports with three customizable templates for quick data pulls.
Merge donor profiles to limit duplicate accounts and clean up your lists.
Allow donors to log into their donor portal to change their recurring donation whenever they want – or to give again with one click.
Let donors save their payment information so they can log in to Donorbox and QuickDonate to repeat a donation to your organization.
Integrate with thousands of your favorite apps through native integrations or Zapier.
Pricing
Donorbox is free to get started, with no contracts. Once you start collecting donations, you’ll pay a platform fee of 1.75% plus standard payment processing fees set by Stripe and PayPal. Our Pro plan is $139 a month and includes a reduced platform fee of 1.5% along with access to features like crypto and stock giving. Our Premium plan is fully customizable to meet your needs and help you grow! Learn about our pricing here.
2. Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack
Salesforce NPSP is an all-in-one CRM platform for mid-level to larger organizations. Nonprofits can measure, track, and update data across all nonprofit fundraising, marketing, and program operations.
Nonprofits can use Salesforce to steward major donors and automate their moves management process. Salesforce also makes it easy to segment donors and use source codes to monitor donor response to appeals.
This CRM also helps nonprofits share real-time reports and communication with their team and board members.
Pricing
Nonprofits interested in seeing if Salesforce will work for them can sign up for a 30-day trial. Contact them for prices and a free demo.
Donorbox integrates seamlessly with Salesforce NPSP in four simple steps. You can sync up all your donor and donation data in both tools to utilize them for more significant tasks. This integration will cost you $50/month.
Here’s a guide to help you get started right away. Or watch this video to learn more!
3. Little Green Light
Little Green Light (LGL) offers powerful CRM tools for organizations that are just getting started or are looking to switch. Their software helps you manage your contacts with the following features:
Communication to-do calendar.
Customizable dashboard.
Intuitive list creation and management.
Custom reporting tools with some pre-loaded templates.
Tool to create custom mail-merged materials.
Pricing
Pricing depends on the number of constituents you have and how often you make payments. Receive a 10% discount if you pay for LGL annually, and a 5% discount for semiannually.
Donorbox integrates with Little Green Light to streamline your workflow and provide a robust look at your donor data. This integration is $50/month and is easy to set up! Learn more in this guide.
4. Blackbaud Raisers Edge NXT
Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT is another fundraising and donor relationship management tool for mid-sized to large nonprofits. Raiser’s Edge NXT is cloud-based, allowing nonprofits to access data from anywhere at any time.
Nonprofits can enter donor giving history, email and direct mailing, event attendance, volunteer hours, and members. Blackbaud’s donor-management tool has additional features to help strengthen donor relationships and cultivate major donors, including:
Automatically suggests ask amounts and top prospects.
Data enrichment services to help find missing addresses, emails, and phone numbers.
Integrates with email marketing tools.
Pricing
Prices for this software are not listed on their website, but you can contact them to request more details.
Donorbox integrates with Blackbaud RE NXT to enable you to better leverage your donor and donation data. This integration is priced at just $65/month.
The steps are simple and can be found in this guide.
HubSpot is an excellent CRM for nonprofits looking to grow. With HubSpot CRM, nonprofits can notify team members when prospects open an email or visit your website.
HubSpot CRM includes email tracking, prospect tracking, a meeting scheduler, and live chat features to help nonprofits solicit major donors.
Pricing
HubSpot has a free CRM solution, but their starter package for $45 a month includes 1,000 marketing contacts, form and email automation, and the ability to remove HubSpot branding from forms, email marketing, landing pages, and live chat.
Donorbox customers can use Zapier to integrate and automatically send the campaign, donor, and donation information from Donorbox to HubSpot. Learn the steps in this guide here. You can activate Zapier integration at just $17/month and connect to 5,000+ apps.
6. Bonterra
Bonterra is an all-in-one fundraising and donor management software to help larger nonprofits build quality donor relationships. Nonprofits can create donor groups with built-in filters and use templates and editing tools to send mail, email, text, and video appeals.
After the campaign, organizations can track retention rates, year-to-date giving, and other vital key performance indicators (KPIs). Learn more about Bonterra’s many features here.
Pricing
Prices for Bonterra aren’t listed on their website. Outside sources say that pricing depends on the number of contacts in your donor management database. Contact Bonterra for more information.
7. Neon One
Neon One is an excellent choice for mid-level nonprofits. This software helps nonprofits manage donors, members, fundraising campaigns, email, events, volunteers, and grants. Neon One’s donor management lets organizations track and collect donor details in one place, customize fields, automate donor communication, and create customized reports.
Its Engagement Timeline helps nonprofits learn how supporters interact with their organizations. The dashboard is customizable to ensure you meet donors’ needs.
Pricing
Neon One’s Essentials plan is $99 a month and includes donor management activity, prospecting tools, and reports. It also integrates with third-party software like Quickbooks, Zapier, and 50 other tools. Pricing goes up to $199 a month for the Impact plan and $399 a month for the Empower plan. Learn more about pricing here.
Which Qualities Make a Nonprofit CRM the Best Choice for You?
As you visit the CRM websites on our list and others, below are a few features you should look for.
1. Donor profiles that store it all
Nonprofits must collect enough donor information to build solid relationships with donors. CRMs give organizations a single place to store contact information, past donation amounts, recurring donation subscriptions, program interests, fundraising activities, and more.
CRM donor profiles help nonprofits customize donation appeals and create reports to monitor donor practices.
As you research CRM software options, determine what’s vital to your nonprofit and which best helps you and your team meet fundraising goals.
Donorbox’s donor management securely stores all your donor information inside the donor profiles. This includes their contact information, social media accounts, educational and occupational information, and their donations, recurring plans, communication history, and more.
You can add communication notes about your interactions with each donor, add offline donations, or any supporter notes, and can even block a donor if need be.
Many CRM platforms interact with several third-party services that help nonprofits reach more donors, improve communications, and raise funds.
A few of the more popular integrations include:
Mailchimp, an affordable email service.
QuickBooks to help streamline nonprofit accounting needs.
Double the Donation to get you more company-matched donations.
Salesforce, an upgrade for better utilization of data.
Donorbox lets you integrate with all the above platforms and more. As mentioned before, you can connect to Zapier which will further connect you with over 5,000 applications to help automate your tasks. Our Salesforce NPSP, Blackbaud RE NXT, Little Green Light, and HubSpot integrations also help you do more with your donor and campaign data.
3. Online donation pages
Online donations have helped increase nonprofits’ revenues exponentially. Donors can join online campaigns or virtual events and give one-time or recurring donations.
With the right online donation platform, nonprofits can customize donation pages and forms and suggest donation amounts for specific donor groups. This helps elevate the giving experience for all donor levels.
Donorbox is primarily an online fundraising platform with many simple-to-use features including recurring donations, customizable donation pages, peer-to-peer fundraising, crowdfunding, text-to-give, event ticketing, memberships, and more. Our donation pages are quick to set up and customize, and you can create unlimited pages and forms on our platform for free. Learn more about our features here.
As your nonprofit collects donor information, CRMs help create quality reports that you can use to analyze your data throughout the year for better fundraising appeals.
Excellent CRM software lets nonprofits customize these pieces of data to develop solid and useful reports to present to staff and board members.
With Donorbox, you can create three useful reports without any hassle or effort at your end. Simply select from “donor overview,” “new donors,” and “LYBUNT” options and quickly pull the reports that you need for better donor communications.
5. Donor prospecting
Nonprofit CRM software helps nonprofits track donor gift history and past fundraising activities. Some software also shares which supporters have the potential to give more.
This feature enables nonprofits to find prospective major donors from inside and outside their database. For example, on Donorbox, as you segment your donor records by their donation amounts, frequency, campaign preference, number of donations, etc., you’d get an idea about their giving ability and preferences. This helps build a stronger connection with each donor.
6. Supporter timelines
Some nonprofit CRMs also help nonprofits track when supporters give, volunteer, and fundraise for the organization. This information gives nonprofits a better idea about donor trends and which solicitations receive the best response.
You can do this on Donorbox by adding every communication detail to the donor record. This will help you track donors’ feedback, suggestions, or other important opinions about your organization, volunteering preferences, and more.
Final Thoughts
CRM options help nonprofits of all sizes determine which software best fits their organization. Nonprofits can use CRM software to track the success of fundraising appeals and donor trends and manage donors to strengthen relationships.
Some platforms also allow you to store grant funding and prospects for major donors. As you research those on this list and others, list your nonprofit’s needs and match your organization’s must-haves to your budget.
Donorbox gives nonprofits quality donor management free of cost with some great integration options and powerful fundraising tools for raising more money.
With our special success package called Donorbox Premium, you get to choose effective tools ideal for your organization. You’ll receive coaching from our experts and help from the technical team. Pricing is personalized for every nonprofit – book your demo today!
Read helpful blogs on donor management, fundraising, Donorbox products, and more on our Nonprofit Blog. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive the best Donorbox resources in your inbox every month.
Kristine Ensor is a freelance writer with over a decade of experience working with local and international nonprofits. As a nonprofit professional she has specialized in fundraising, marketing, event planning, volunteer management, and board development.
Kristine Ensor
