Andrew MartinThe Fundraising Effectiveness Project’s Q1 2023 report suggests a decline of 3.8% in donors year-over-year. Unfortunately, for nonprofits that require donors to thrive, this is far from ideal.
Lower donor participation and retention were key reasons for this decline. To reverse the decline, nonprofits should work to build strong relationships with their donors and offer better experiences to improve donations and volunteer service.
A customer relationship management (CRM) platform can help. A CRM for nonprofits can help you personalize outreach, communicate more effectively, and store donor data for easy access. Collectively, these capabilities can help you build strong relationships with donors and increase participation and retention rates.
Finding the right CRM requires research and evaluation since the market is crowded with CRM solutions. In this guide, we dive into the top 10 CRMs for nonprofits, so you can pick one that fits your unique needs.
Key Takeaways:
- As a nonprofit, you heavily rely on donors and volunteers for success. You must effectively manage donor and volunteer relationships to inspire loyalty to your organization.
- A nonprofit CRM is a software tool used to build and strengthen relationships between you, your donors, and your volunteers.
- Nonprofit CRMs often come with a wide range of helpful features, including robust contact management features, reporting capabilities, and workflow automation.
- When shopping for CRMs, you must consider each platform’s features, ease of use, and customer support options.
- Some of the top nonprofit CRMs include Teamgate, Bloomerang, Neon One, DonorPerfect, Virtuous, Kindful, Blackbaud CRM, Salsa CRM, Donorbox, and Network for Good.
Contents:
- What Is a CRM for Nonprofits?
- Why Do Nonprofits Need a CRM?
- How to Choose a CRM for Nonprofits
- Top CRM Options for Nonprofits in 2024
- Achieving Your Fundraising Goals With CRM
- FAQs: Nonprofit CRM
What Is a CRM for Nonprofits?
A CRM for nonprofits is a software solution that helps build and strengthen relationships with donors and volunteers.
CRMs offer many of the same benefits to nonprofits as they do to for-profit businesses. For example, nonprofits can use the CRM to stay connected with donors and volunteers, market their campaigns, and analyze their strategy’s performance through the CRM’s reporting capabilities.
If you’re still using the old-school approach and maintaining a spreadsheet containing donor information, let a CRM auto-create donor profiles. Use the CRM’s features to augment your outreach efforts and retention strategy.
Why Do Nonprofits Need a CRM?
Nonprofits need a CRM because they heavily rely on donors and volunteers. Outreach and retention are critical to a nonprofit’s long-term success. However, as a nonprofit grows, managing these relationships can be challenging. That’s where a CRM can help.
The best nonprofit CRMs can help retain donors, volunteers, beneficiaries, and board members. They can help automate your workflow so you can focus on tasks that require a human touch, such as building rapport with a major donor or attending events.
How to Choose a CRM for Nonprofits
The top CRMs minimize the stress of missing donor data and manual tasks. But how do you find the right CRM for your nonprofit among the many CRMs on the market today? There are three key factors to consider when evaluating tools, including features, ease of use, and customer support options.
Features for Nonprofits
Nonprofits need many of the same things as for-profit businesses do. Find a CRM that offers an extensive feature set spanning sales, marketing, and administration. CRMs typically have extensive feature sets, so looking for a balance between the features you need and the cost is critical to finding a value-for-money CRM.
Ease of Use
The intention of using a CRM is to make running your nonprofit easier. Complex CRMs can be counterproductive because they require investment in implementation and training. Look for a CRM that’s easy to use and implement.
Customer Support
Check reviews from existing customers to see how they rate the CRM’s support team. A knowledgeable support team that responds quickly is key to minimizing stress when something doesn’t work.
Top CRM Options for Nonprofits in 2024
1. Teamgate
Teamgate CRM Rating: 4.4/5 (G2)
Teamgate CRM Key features:
- Extensive analytics and reporting
- Contact management features
- Native call management feature called SmartDialer
- KPIs and goal progress tracking
- Custom fields and filtering
- Time management
- Integrations with apps like Xero, Mailchimp, and Slack
Teamgate is the perfect CRM for nonprofits. It offers an extensive feature set at an affordable price. The user-friendly interface, advanced filters, and third-party integrations make Teamgate an excellent value-add for nonprofits.
Teamgate is a highly configurable CRM. With the unique needs and requirement of nonprofits, a highly configurable CRM like Teamgate gives your team the flexibility to configure the system to meet your needs.
Outreach campaigns and effective collaboration are vital to a nonprofit’s success. Teamgate seamlessly integrates with your email provider and other marketing tools to ensure all of your outbound efforts are completed timely and efficiently.
Teamgate pricing starts with a FREE subscription offer and scales as your business grows. It’s by far one of the most affordable nonprofit CRMs available.
2. Bloomerang
Bloomerang Rating: 4.7/5 (G2)
Bloomerang Key features:
- Donor engagement scoring
- Nightly NCOA updates
- Wealth screening to analyze charity histories
- Free email and chat support
Bloomerang is a donor management solution and CRM for nonprofits. It helps nonprofits with six key areas of running a nonprofit: the acquisition, retention, and engagement of donors, as well as the automation of processes and measurement of results.
The constituent timeline feature built into Bloomerang helps visualize the types of interactions at individual and organizational levels, allowing you to understand the way supporters are engaging with you.
Some of your donors might be able to donate more. The wealth scoring tool helps identify these donors based on their charitable giving histories available from publicly available data.
Pricing for Bloomerang is based on how many donor records (or contacts) you have. For example, 5,000 records will cost you $349 per month.
3. Neon One
Neon One Rating: 4.3/5 (G2)
Neon One Key features:
- Constituent login portal
- Workflow automation
- A feature called Radius Search helps find niche donor segments in the community
- Integrations for QuickBooks, Truegivers, Windfall, and more
Neon One CRM is perfect for nonprofits looking for revenue-based pricing instead of record-based pricing. Other than a different pricing model, Neon One offers everything you’d expect in a full-fledged nonprofit CRM solution.
Neon Pay, the built-in payment processing tool, helps save time and allows your team to report income and processing accurately. Another standout feature is Radius Search. Since nonprofits always need more donors, Radius Search can help identify them and offer donor insights within the donor community.
Neon One’s pricing starts at $99 per month. Two other pricing plans are available, including Impact and Empower.
4. DonorPerfect
DonorPerfect Rating: 4.4/5 (G2)
DonorPerfect Key features:
- Integrated payment processing
- Live chat support
- Live and on-demand webinars
- Comprehensive reporting
DonorPerfect is an excellent pick for nonprofits who need a comprehensive fundraising solution. The CRM keeps your nonprofit’s data organized into report-ready profiles.
The database helps inform organizational strategies, saves time by eliminating double data entry, and maintains a single history of contacts and financial transactions.
DonorPerfect offers powerful reporting and analytics tools. The CRM includes over 70 standard nonprofit reports, a report builder, dashboard analytics, and donor targeting and filtering based on your subscription package.
Pricing packages start at $99 per month. However, you must contact DonorPerfect for a custom quote.
5. Virtuous
Virtuous Rating: 4.2/5 (G2)
Virtuous Key features:
- Custom gift ask pipeline
- Omnichannel campaigns
- Personalized multi-channel donor journeys
- Digital engagement tracking
Virtuous can be expensive, but it offers an excellent feature set. If you’re a large nonprofit with complex needs, Virtuous might be worth considering.
The donor management tools offer suggestions on who to contact and what to talk about with donors in a single-donor view. It also offers intelligent suggestions about the next best action based on a donor’s gift history, wealth data, social media behavior, demographics, and more.
Virtuous helps tie your donations back to a project, so you can follow up with donors based on project-level notes. You can then map project gifts to your fund accounting system.
The Starter plan is priced at $400 per month. For additional pricing plan information, you must contact sales.
6. Kindful
Kindful Rating: 4.4/5 (G2)
Kindful Key features:
- Donor lifecycle dashboard
- Wealth insights
- Household and relationship tracking
- Integrations for QuickBooks, Mailchimp, Stripe, and more
Kindful (a Bloomerang product) is a leading nonprofit CRM. It has an excellent support and onboarding team that makes getting started with the nonprofit CRM a breeze.
The feature set is fairly extensive. Standout features include tools like company fee matching. Kindful integrates with Double the Donation, the leading gift-matching software, to increase your revenue with gift-matching opportunities.
The CRM also offers a powerful donation reporting tool. You can apply filters to donor lists or activities you want to report on and select columns you want to include in the report to analyze specific data.
Pricing for Kindful is the same as for Bloomerang and is based on how many donor records (or contacts) you manage.
7. Blackbaud CRM
Blackbaud CRM Rating: 3.5/5 (G2)
Blackbaud CRM Key features:
- Planned giving, matching gift management, and online giving tools
- Robust segmentation that empowers multi-channel campaigns
- Open, industry-standard REST APIs
- End-to-end credit card processing and robust account functionality
Blackbaud is purpose-built for enterprise-scale nonprofits and higher-ed fundraising teams. It’s one of the smartest, most powerful nonprofit CRMs on the market, thanks to its vast feature set and AI capabilities.
One of its key features is direct access to hosted cloud environments. This allows your technical team to fast-track the development cycle while allowing you to retain control of the data. Blackbaud also offers REST APIs, so you can develop apps and extensions to use Blackbaud in a way that meets your nonprofit’s needs.
As for pricing, Blackbaud doesn’t disclose its pricing on its website. You must contact sales for a quote.
8. Salsa CRM
Salsa CRM Rating: 3.9/5 (G2)
Salsa CRM Key features:
- Direct mail fundraising features
- Customized dashboards for real-time visualization
- Role-based access and security restrictions
- Track unique data with unlimited custom fields
Salsa CRM is a simple nonprofit CRM. If you’re looking for a no-fuss solution, Salsa CRM is worth considering. The CRM only offers custom pricing, so if you’re interested in the CRM, you’ll need to speak to sales.
The CRM includes all the essentials, such as built-in reports, dashboard analytics, and data entry tools. Plus, the historical constituent profile data paired with relevant and targeted messaging helps build long-term relationships and encourages action across online and offline communication channels.
9. Donorbox
Donorbox Rating: 4.2/5 (G2)
Donorbox Key features:
- UltraSwift checkout that minimizes donor drop-off
- Advanced donor filters
- Connect a PayPal or Stripe account to accept donations directly to your bank account
- Integrations for Salesforce, Mailchimp, Zapier, and more
Donorbox is a great pick for nonprofits who like having access to a bunch of unique features. For example, Donorbox allows you to accept crypto and stock payments.
The built-in checkout feature called UltraSwift reduces donor drop-off by eliminating the need to manually type in personal info. UltraSwift checkout speeds up the checkout process, improves the experience for donors, and increases donations.
Donorbox helps your supporters launch campaign pages and collect donations from their peers on your behalf. All donations collected from these P2P pages go directly to your account.
For pricing, Donorbox’s Standard plan is free to use. There is, however, a fee for donation forms, pages, etc. The Pro plan starts at $139 per month and includes reduced fees.
10. Network for Good
Network for Good Rating: 4.6/5 (G2)
Network for Good Key features:
- Unlimited email blasts
- Pledge and household management
- P2P pages
- Real-time, interactive dashboards
Network for Good is made for small nonprofits that want to make a big impact. It helps you organize and manage contacts, personalize communications, raise funds online, and measure and track progress.
The built-in communication tools include email, text messages, personal videos, and direct mail. You can personalize communications using donor data stored in the CRM’s database by segmenting supporters.
The guided page design tool and expert recommendations help you create branded fundraising pages in minutes. You can also allow your supporters to create P2P fundraising pages so they can reach out to family and friends for donations on your behalf.
Network for Good’s pricing is customized based on your needs. For a custom quote, you must contact sales.
Achieving Your Fundraising Goals With CRM
Teamgate is an easy-to-use CRM that offers everything nonprofits need to build deep connections with their donors. Support by hand-held and dedicated support staff, Teamgate fuels nonprofit organizations of all sizes to manage donor data efficiently, run laser-sharp outreach campaigns, and strengthen relationships with volunteers and donors alike.
Want to see how Teamgate can help your nonprofit? Get started today by scheduling a free demo or starting a 14-day free trial.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs): Nonprofit CRM
Q: What is the significance of a CRM for nonprofits?
A: A CRM for nonprofits is a software solution that aids in building and strengthening relationships with donors and volunteers. It helps nonprofits personalize outreach, communicate more effectively, store donor data for easy access, and ultimately increase participation and retention rates.
Q: Why is there a need for nonprofits to adopt a CRM?
A: With the decline in donors, as indicated by the Fundraising Effectiveness Project’s Q1 2023 report, nonprofits need to build strong relationships with their donors and offer better experiences to improve donations and volunteer service. A CRM helps in managing these relationships efficiently, personalizing outreach, and analyzing the performance of their strategies.
Q: How can a CRM benefit a nonprofit organization?
A: A CRM can help nonprofits stay connected with donors and volunteers, market their campaigns, analyze their strategy’s performance, automate workflows, and improve donor retention and participation rates.
Q: What factors should be considered when choosing a CRM for nonprofits?
A: When selecting a CRM for nonprofits, it’s essential to consider the platform’s features, ease of use, customer support options, and pricing. The CRM should offer features relevant to the nonprofit’s needs, be user-friendly, provide robust customer support, and fit within the organization’s budget.
Q: How does Teamgate stand out as a CRM for nonprofits?
A: Teamgate offers an extensive feature set at an affordable price, making it an excellent value-add for nonprofits. It has a user-friendly interface, advanced filters, third-party integrations, and is highly configurable to fit the unique needs of nonprofits. Teamgate also integrates with various marketing and collaboration tools, enabling nonprofits to operate efficiently.
Q: How can a CRM help in improving donor retention for nonprofits?
A: A CRM can help nonprofits automate their workflow, personalize outreach efforts, segment and target donors effectively, and analyze the performance of their strategies. By offering tools to stay connected, market campaigns, and assess strategy performance, a CRM can significantly improve donor retention and participation rates.
