As fundraising software continues to evolve, your nonprofit can fall behind if you don’t take advantage of all of the incredible solutions available to you. A flexible fundraising approach and strong donors are important priorities for most nonprofits. For many small nonprofits with limited resources, fundraising can be stressful and time-consuming. You may still use spreadsheets or a paper filing system to keep track of donors. Or you may be looking to streamline your fundraising to reduce pressure on your staff. This is where a Donor Management Software can exponentially help you with online donations, and other great functions. Let’s dive into why you need a Donation Management Software for your church.
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Estimated reading time: 13 minutes
What is donor management software?
Donor management software is a type of nonprofit software that helps organizations track, assess, and grow their relationships with their donors. As a tool that’s designed to help with donor relationship management, this kind of software helps nonprofits organize donor data, identify donor trends, and increase the likelihood of receiving future donations.
How useful are donor management tools for small nonprofits?
Smaller nonprofits often have smaller budgets, and they usually have smaller teams too. That’s why it’s recommended to invest in a donor management solution even when your nonprofit is a small operation. These tools can do the work of a part-time or full-time staff member for less than $150 per month, depending on which software you use.
Investing in nonprofit management software early is also essential for setting the foundation for organizing your fundraising and donor data. Small nonprofits that use spreadsheets to manage their donors often find that their data becomes disorganized and hard to understand as they grow. This can be a headache for staff members whose time is already limited by development efforts, leading their team, and communicating with their supporters.
Make sure you take the time and choose the right donor software for your sized nonprofit. Complex donor management systems for nonprofits like Salesforce require a lot of customization and maintenance—specialized resources that small nonprofits often don’t have. Others require multi-year contract commitments—locking in small nonprofits for up to three years.
We recommend choosing donor management software that’s simple, scalable, and yet still powerful. The best nonprofit software offers onboarding and training to help you move all your data into your new system. They’ll also be able to integrate with the other tools you’re already using, so you don’t have to learn entirely new systems for everything you do like email marketing and events.
The difference between donor management software and donation software
Donation software is what enables you to fundraise. It’s the method that contributors use to make their contributions. These tools make it simple to collect donations online or through customized campaigns such as peer-to-peer or text fundraising.
Donor Management Software is concerned with donors (current, prospective, or expired) and their records with your agency. In reality, information about potential large gifts or corporate contributors is frequently recorded in a DMS well before they submit their initial contribution.
Benefits of donor management software for nonprofits
Donor management software is designed to help you manage all of your donor data in one place. It’s a great alternative for organizations that have outgrown spreadsheets or are looking to understand and utilize their data to maximize their fundraising efforts.
Here are some additional benefits that this software can bring to your organization:
- Improve efficiency. Automate data entry and reduce manual errors. Manage all donations in one location, even if they are obtained across multiple platforms like social media sites, email campaigns, and events.
- Identify promising fundraising opportunities. Donor management software can also use wealth screening to predict which donors are more likely to give bigger amounts of money, show if and how donors are connected, and highlight giving habits. For instance, Bloomerang’s donor management software integrates with DonorSearch, a prospect research tool. This integration allows nonprofits to find new donors who have supported similar organizations in the past and appropriately upgrade existing donors.
- Personalize donor outreach. Use your nonprofit CRM to track donors’ previous involvement, such as past events they’ve attended, donations, or communications they’ve had with staff members. Then, personalize your outreach to them by referencing their past engagement in your letters, emails, and texts.
- Report on fundraising progress. Gain a bird ’s-eye view of your entire supporter base and run automated reports on essential metrics, such as donor retention or average donation amounts for different donor segments. Monitor the success of your fundraising campaigns and make adjustments as needed for greater future success.
Features to look for in donor management software
There’s no one solution when it comes to finding the best donor management software. There are many options to choose from, each with its own set of features. That’s why we recommend that you consider exactly which features are most important for your nonprofit when evaluating solutions.
Let’s explore a list of features to consider when making your checklist:
Fundraising tools
- Recurring giving. Allows donors to make automatically scheduled donations.
- Donation pages or forms. A landing page where your donors can make online donations.
- Donation buttons. Embeddable buttons on your website that will redirect to your donation page.
- Peer-to-peer fundraising tool. Allows you to launch campaigns where your supporters create teams and fundraise on your behalf.
- Crowdfunding tool. Allows your supporters to launch their own campaigns and fundraise on your behalf.
- Event registration tool. Allows you to accept online event registrations and give tickets for your events.
- Wealth screening. Uses public records to estimate the giving potential of your donors.
- Matching gift tool. Finds employee matching gift opportunities for your donors.
- Text-to-give. Allows you to collect donations over text.
- Payment processing. Collects donations via credit card.
Donor communications
- Email receipts. Generate email receipts for donations, usually automatically.
- Automatic tax summary generator. Generates tax summaries for individual donors and usually allows you to send out your end-of-year tax summaries simultaneously to all your donors.
- Email marketing platform. Send mass mailings to your contacts.
- Communication history. Shows every interaction you’ve had with your contacts, including visits, phone calls, emails, and direct mailings.
- Contact and donor segmentation. Filter out your contacts based on a set of criteria, allowing you to target your communication to a relevant group and include personalization.
Donor management
- Pledge tracking. Track and collect donation pledges from your donors.
- Contact profiles. Create pages for each of your contacts with their giving history, communication history, and more.
- Donor accounts. Give your donors the ability to view and manage their giving history, recurring donations, tax receipts, and more.
- Group segmentation. Create lists of your contacts based on certain filters.
- Tasks and reminders. Automatically set tasks and reminders to help maintain donor relationships.
- Household tracking. Track relationships among your donors and streamline communication.
- Donation tracking. Track every transaction you receive through cash, check, credit card, etc.
- Self-import tool. Import data into your database from offline sources.
- Custom fields. Create custom fields for your donation page and registration forms.
- Contact duplicate finder. Identify multiple data sources for a single contact and merge them together.
- In-kind gift tracking. Track, report, and document in-kind gifts from donors.
Tracking and reporting
- Donor analytics. See high-level insights on your donors using a system like donor analytics, donor pyramid, etc.
- Custom reports. Create your own reports based on certain criteria.
- Scheduled reports. Set certain reports, like lapsed donors, that will be emailed to you or another group of people on a recurring basis.
- Donor and contact records. See detailed insights on your contacts with records of all the interactions between your organization and the contact.
- Donor dashboard. Visualize your organization’s health in one simple dashboard.
Apps and integrations
- Email marketing integrations. Integrate data from email marketing tools like Mailchimp and Constant Contact.
- Accounting integrations. Integrate data from accounting software like QuickBooks.
- Fundraising tool integrations. Integrate data from other fundraising tools you’re using like GoFundMe Charity, Qgiv, and iDonate.
- Event registration and auction integrations. Integrate data from other event registration, event ticketing, and auction platforms like Eventbrite, TicketSpice, and Handbid.
- Payment processing integrations. Use outside payment processors to collect donations like Square, PayPal, and Stripe.
Donor Management Software Programs
1. Bloomerang
DONOR MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE OVERVIEW
Bloomerang helps organizations retain more donors with a CRM platform tailored to nonprofit needs. This user-friendly platform makes it easy for your staff to manage supporter relationships and track past interactions to build genuine connections.
Bloomerang is specifically designed to keep the most important mission-related information at the forefront of your system, such as donor retention and new fundraising opportunities!
STAND-OUT FEATURES
This donor management software empowers nonprofits to grow and deepen their donor relationships with great features like:
- An interactive dashboard to monitor important metrics like donor retention and campaign progress
- A constituent timeline to see each supporter’s past interactions in one place, from events they’ve attended to emails they’ve opened and gifts they’ve made.
- Engagement and generosity scores to identify highly engaged donors with a high giving capacity who would be promising major donor prospects.
- Donor segmentation capabilities to group donors based on shared characteristics and send targeted communications that speak to each group’s interests and motivations.
- Robust integrations that allow you to seamlessly connect your current software solutions to your donor management platform.
PRICING
Bloomerang’s pricing starts at $119 per month and scales up based on the number of contacts in your database.
2. DonorPerfect
DONOR MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE OVERVIEW
DonorPerfect is a another great donor management and fundraising platform that helps nonprofits raise more, automate data entry processes, and keep track of essential metrics.
STAND-OUT FEATURE
This donation solution offers flexibility for customizing your database and dashboard and displaying the most important information for your unique strategies. Plus, user-based security features keep donor information safe using varying access levels.
PRICING
Pricing starts at $99 per month. Contact DonorPerfect for a free quote.
3. Little Green Light
DONOR MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE OVERVIEW
Little Green Light’s donor management software offers a very effective option for nonprofits looking to transition from spreadsheets to a more robust platform. Many types of organizations use this solution to keep donor data organized, including K-12 schools, arts and culture organizations, human services, libraries, and more.
STAND-OUT FEATURE
Little Green Light enables multiple valuable integrations with other leading software solutions, such as MailChimp, Double the Donation, and WordPress!
PRICING
Pricing starts at $486 per year.
4. Keela
DONOR MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE OVERVIEW
Keela offers a robust suite of donor management, fundraising, marketing, and reporting tools to help deepen supporter relationships. Maximize your team’s productivity and spend more time building strong donor connections with software built specifically for nonprofit organizations.
STAND-OUT FEATURE
Keela offers a “Smart Ask” feature to improve your donation requests by knowing who to ask, how much to ask for, and each donor’s preferred communication channel.
PRICING
Pricing starts at $134 per month.
5. Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack
DONOR MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE OVERVIEW
The Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack is a nonprofit CRM tool built on Salesforce, a leading CRM software provider. The NPSP is a good option for nonprofits already using Salesforce to manage constituent data.
STAND-OUT FEATURE
Easily manage recurring giving and predict future revenue with recurring donation features.
PRICING
Your first 10 NPSP subscriptions are free. Visit the Salesforce website for more pricing information.
6. Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT
DONOR MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE OVERVIEW
Raiser’s Edge NXT is Blackbaud’s CRM solution for nonprofits. Leverage end-to-end gift management and streamlined workflows to expand your fundraising efforts.
STAND-OUT FEATURE
AI-driven suggested donation amounts and valuable prospect insights that help nonprofits grow donor relationships through smart, data-driven tactics.
PRICING
Contact the Blackbaud team for pricing.
7. Virtuous
DONOR MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE OVERVIEW
Virtuous combines fundraising, marketing, donor management, and volunteer management tools into one robust platform for nonprofits. Virtuous is the responsive fundraising platform proven to help nonprofit organizations increase generosity by serving all donors personally, no matter their gift size.
STAND-OUT FEATURE
Virtuous helps organizations increase their productivity through intelligent forecasting, a custom gift ask pipeline, and simple configurability!
PRICING
Pricing starts at $400 per month.
8. Givebutter
DONOR MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE OVERVIEW
Givebutter is a free fundraising platform and donor CRM that offers customizable, mobile-optimized fundraising tools that you can embed into your website. Givebutter is the only platform that lets you do it all for free. Start fundraising in less than 5 minutes.
STAND-OUT FEATURE
Easily important unlimited contacts from your old system or start from scratch with Givebutter’s automated tracking features!
PRICING
Givebutter is free, with a 2.9% + 30¢ processing fee that is mostly covered by donors.
9. Neon CRM
DONOR MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE OVERVIEW
Neon CRM is tailor-made for small and medium-sized nonprofits looking for a donor management platform to expand their fundraising efforts. Strengthen your connections, harness advanced reporting capabilities, and revolutionize your fundraising with a platform tailored to nonprofits.
STAND-OUT FEATURE
Simplify your reporting process and make data-driven decisions with the help of user-friendly reports, including over 40 pre-built options.
PRICING
Pricing starts at $99 per month.
10. Classy
DONOR MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE OVERVIEW
Classy unifies donation management, fundraising events, and peer-to-peer campaigns under one roof with a variety of revenue-boosting features. Create personalized experiences at scale and build a connected community of supporters with Classy’s intelligent fundraising platform.
STAND-OUT FEATURE
Classy places a strong emphasis on promoting your nonprofit’s story, with customizable donation pages and personalized donor outreach to advance your mission!
PRICING
Contact Classy for custom pricing.
11. DonorDock
DONOR MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE OVERVIEW
DonorDock is a donor management solution that helps reduce data silos to view all fundraising and marketing efforts at a glance. If you are a nonprofit working off spreadsheets or overly complicated software, then you need DonorDock: An all-in-one donor management platform designed with small nonprofits in mind!
STAND-OUT FEATURE
Stay up to date on donor stewardship opportunities with DonorDock’s Action Board! This tool offers daily recommendations, reminders, and alerts to ensure you’re taking advantage of every opportunity to connect with donors more effectively.
PRICING
You can start using DonorDock for free.
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