by Julie Kennon
Finding the perfect donor management software doesn't have to be a headache. Here are some reasons to start shopping and a list of fantastic options to explore!
Choosing the right donor management software can seem overwhelming. There are so many options, and each promises to transform the way your nonprofit engages supporters and raises money.
But at its core, donor management software is a powerful tool for cultivating relationships, tracking giving history, personalizing outreach, and driving meaningful engagement.
Whether you’re a grassroots fundraiser just beginning to build a database or a large nonprofit with thousands of contacts, the right system can save time and increase fundraising effectiveness.
Let’s begin by looking at what nonprofit donor management software is, how it can benefit your nonprofit, and key features to look for. Then we will dive into a dozen top choices.
What is Donor Management Software?
Also called a nonprofit CRM, donor management software is designed to help nonprofits build and maintain relationships with supporters. It serves as a centralized hub that tracks donor information, manages all interactions, processes donations, facilitates fundraising efforts, and provides a portal for donors to manage accounts.
This software replaces spreadsheets and disconnected tools with a central platform that keeps your donor data clean, organized, and actionable. It provides insights that allow you to hone your outreach to be effective.
How Does Donor Management Software Help Nonprofits?
If you’re a smaller nonprofit getting by with spreadsheets and an email program, spending resources on software might not seem wise. But there is an excellent solution that is sure to fit your budget and meet your needs, delivering some impressive benefits.
While there are many reasons to invest in software, here are six immediate benefits:
- Stronger Donor Relationships: You can use the software to segment your donors into groups and then send personalized communications to strengthen donor relationships.
- Improved Donor Retention: Donor management software allows your team to track donor behavior. This means you can identify faltering donors before they lapse and more effectively re-engage them.
- Increased Fundraising Efficiency: Software helps you be an efficient and effective fundraiser by automating repetitive tasks, streamlining donation processing, and running multichannel campaigns with ease.
- Smarter Decision-Making: Using data to monitor and refine campaigns, reach out to constituents, and allocate resources most efficiently means data support your actions—giving you much better chances of success.
- Better Team Collaboration: Having a central system for all donor data and interactions means your team is always updated with donor activity. If a donor calls, a quick glance at a donor record can give an accurate snapshot to any member of your staff.
- Scalability! As your nonprofit grows (and with the right donor management software, it will), the system can grow with you, supporting more donors and transactions.
It’s hard to be an effective fundraiser without the support of a strong platform. In fact, the right software can help even start-up nonprofits grow quickly. With that in mind, there are core features you will want to consider when you’re shopping for software.
Key Features of Donor Management Software
The exact features your nonprofit needs will be specific to your organization, but some features will benefit all nonprofits. Here are a few to keep in mind as you compare systems:
- Donor Database: Store detailed donor records, including giving history, communication preferences, and all engagement, whether it’s donating, volunteering, or participating in outreach.
- Donation Tracking: Record and, importantly, be able to report on donations, recurring gifts, pledges, and in-kind donations.
- Email and Communication Tools: Send targeted emails or pull a list for a thank-you phone-athon. Send newsletters right from your system or send text reminders about an event or campaign.
- Segmentation and Personalization: Group donors based on behavior, demographics, giving patterns, or any characteristic you choose that will help you tailor outreach.
- Online Giving and Forms: Create customized donation forms, event registrations, and peer-to-peer fundraising pages.
- Reporting and Analytics: Turn your data into dashboards that illuminate trends and help you forecast growth. Run reports that measure everything from campaign performance to donor retention.
- Task and Activity Management: Keep all your tasks and follow-up calls or meetings straight. Set reminders and organize your schedule so nothing falls through the cracks.
- Integrations: While you can choose an all-in-one CRM, you might need to integrate with a system required for a healthcare, advocacy, or educational nonprofit (or others!). If that’s the case, you’ll want to be certain the system has robust APIs for integration.
Beyond these features, consider your most effective fundraising strategies. Email is likely one of them, but are you also focused on SMS? Or are you more concerned with advocacy than raising money? Think about your nonprofit and develop a list of features that will most benefit your team.
Here is a list of top choices when you’re looking for donor management software. Choose a few favorites, then contact the company and ask for a software demo. You’ll know when you’ve found the best donor management software for your nonprofit!
12 Top Choices for Donor Management Software
These are all excellent options with different pros and cons. For each, we’ll tell you what nonprofits might be best suited for the platform to help you narrow your list. Want to jump to one company? Here's a list.
- CharityEngine
- Bloomerang
- DonorPerfect
- Virtuous
- Givebutter
- Blackbaud
- Salesforce NPSP
- Tithe.ly
- Little Green Light
- Keela
- Bonterra
- Classy/GoFundMe Pro
1. Best for Any Nonprofit: CharityEngine
While we are admittedly biased, there’s a reason some of the top nonprofits in the world trust CharityEngine for their donor management and fundraising needs. It’s a complete system, meaning every core fundraising tool is native to the system. No syncs, no uploads...all your data is right at your fingertips, in real time.
If you have monthly donors, look no further down this list. Most nonprofits lose a significant portion of monthly donations to something as common as declined credit cards. Only CharityEngine has built subscription billing technology (like Netflix or Spotify, or even your gym) just for nonprofits. We can retain up to 30% more income for you!
What We Love: The built-in tools, including payment processing, set CharityEngine apart. The reporting and analytics are comprehensive and easy to use, and this is the only system with native advocacy tools. From emails to events, one platform has you covered.
CharityEngine simplifies operations by centralizing all data and functions, making it a perfect choice for any nonprofit ready to grow.
Watch Out For: Because there is so much under the hood, exploring all CharityEngine’s features takes a while. However, as you try new forms of outreach, you’ll see all the tools you need right in the platform.
2. Best for Nonprofits That Want Easy: Bloomerang
Bloomerang is a good choice for nonprofits looking for an easy-to-use platform. It offers most of the tools a small nonprofit needs and has a straightforward interface that makes navigation simple.
What We Love: It’s called delightful for a reason. It's appealing for nonprofits that want a basic user interface and really focus on donor retention, with features like supporter sentiment analysis.
Watch Out For: The functionality is limited because it’s designed for smaller organizations. You won’t find events, auctions, or major gifts here, so you will likely outgrow it quickly as your organization grows. Larger orgs won’t find customization easy, and Bloomerang sometimes gets dinged on customer service.
3. Best for Nonprofits That Want Flexible Pricing: DonorPerfect
DonorPerfect is another great option for smaller nonprofits. Pricing starts lower than most, and contract terms are flexible, making it a solid choice for nonprofits just starting out or working with limited resources.
What We Love: Customizable dashboards are a must-have for insights, and DonorPerfect offers them. They have integrated online forms and reporting tools to analyze campaigns.
Watch Out For: Be careful with the pricing. Make sure you understand the tiers and what’s included, and ask what additional features might cost.
4. Best for Nonprofits Who Love Responsive Fundraising: Virtuous
Have you read the book? Virtuous is known for coining the term “responsive fundraising,” and we have found them to be pretty forward-thinking. They offer a free responsive nonprofit summit and are a good choice for any size nonprofit.
What We Love: This is a good choice for those organizations wanting to focus on automation and personalization, two things we really like.
Watch Out For: Advanced features might be a little too complicated to learn easily, and the “all-in-one" claim doesn’t ring true when they need to connect with a network of partners to provide functionality.
5. Best for Nonprofits Looking for Free: Givebutter
In case you missed it in the screenshot, Givebutter is big on being free donor management software. And free is an appealing hook to smaller nonprofits. It provides donor management and a CRM, fundraising pages, payment processing, and auctions, to name a few features.
What We Love: We, too, love free, because we want all nonprofits to have tools to succeed. The platform also offers a solid array of features.
Watch Out For: Free means that you choose to have your donors cover your fees instead of paying them yourself. Creative? Absolutely. But not everyone wants to pass fees on to donors, and nonprofits can be surprised by how high those fees get.
6. Best for Nonprofits That Appreciate Longevity: Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT/Total Web Solution
Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT is undergoing a bit of a metamorphosis. It’s moving Raiser’s Edge and Financial Edge to a Total Web Solution, which means the database view is moving to a web view. The company says this is a phased modernization of the platform. If you’re on RE7, though, that is being sunset.
What We Love: We often call Blackbaud the grandpa of nonprofit CRMs, and it’s true. It’s been around for decades. It’s a good database solution if you have a ton of contacts and you want to house a lot of data.
Watch Out For: Siloed data always complicates things, but with Blackbaud, every module is a separate system. The contact record is the hub and connects to every module, but the modules don’t connect. Nonprofits have found Blackbaud outdated, so we will watch for the new UI to see if it’s improved.
7. Best for Really Techy Nonprofits: Salesforce NPSP
Salesforce is another big name in the industry because it’s been around forever. It launched a Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) that leverages the robust sales platform. It is best for large nonprofits with IT help at the ready.
What We Love: NPSP offers comprehensive donor management and can integrate with anything. The system also offers advanced tools for reporting and analytics.
Watch Out For: We hear that it’s hard to do much with Salesforce unless you have an IT background, and that the org is so large things move at the speed of molasses.
8. Best for Nonprofits that are Churches: Tithe.ly
When it comes to church donor management software, Tithe.ly is an all-in-one tech stack for churches. It offers giving tools, an app, a website, and software to manage donors. If you’re a small to mid-size church looking for software to help with mobile and digital giving, you might have met your match.
What We Love: This software offers mobile giving in app and also text-to-give. They send automated receipts and feature donor messaging.
Watch Out For: It’s hard to pick and choose what you want. You’ll likely have to get the whole system for full functionality.
9. Best for Nonprofits Graduating from Spreadsheets: Little Green Light
If you’re looking for a straight-shooter, Little Green Light is it. It’s user-friendly, cloud-based, and offers transparent pricing with no hidden fees.
What We Love: It’s great for new nonprofits. Pricing is really low, and this is donor management software that works with QuickBooks, making it easy to use. It even offers a free 30-day trial.
Watch Out For: It’s a good starting point, but it doesn’t offer much. You can’t customize very much, and it won’t scale with your nonprofit’s growth.
10. Best for Nonprofits Excited About AI: Keela
We like that Keela is women-led and has teams in different countries. It combines donor management with fundraising and marketing tools, featuring AI-driven insights. It’s good for nonprofits that are interested in adding marketing automation to their donor management.
What We Love: The Donor Pipeline tools help with moves management and the Smart Ask feature suggests optimal donation asks.
Watch Out For: The fact that it’s based in Canada, so compliance rules are different and can get complicated. There’s also a learning curve for the AI tools.
11. Best for Nonprofits with a Lot of Patience: Bonterra
Hear us out: Bonterra has put customers through a lot of changes, and it really does require patience. That said, it’s a good option for nonprofits looking for an integrated platform.
What We Love: Because Bonterra is the product of many different systems that were bought and combined, there is a lot of functionality.
Watch Out For: It’s the product of many systems that were bought and combined! This is an industry behemoth owned by private equity, meaning the goal is to make money. You might really like your platform, but it might be shut down and replaced with something more expensive.
12. Best for Nonprofits Needing Forms: Classy/GoFundMe Pro
Here is another metamorphosis for you: Classy was purchased by GoFundMe, and now it’s GoFundMe Pro. The forms are still terrific, but the new platform offers a whole host of features that make it look more like a Bonterra than the beloved Classy.
What We Love: We always liked Classy’s straightforward forms and payment processing. It wasn’t a CRM, but it integrated cleanly with almost all of them.
Watch Out For: Be wary of big corporate takeovers of good platforms. They lose a little heart when they get absorbed.
Finding the Donor Management Software That Fits Your Mission
We began by saying it can be overwhelming, and hopefully, this list helped you narrow down your choices. It’s not about the most features or the highest or lowest price tag—it's about finding the right platform for your nonprofit now, as well as when you grow.
CharityEngine offers some free tools to help you narrow down features and different platforms. Start by scheduling a few demos of software and see if you find a match. If not, keep going! Your ideal partner is out there, just waiting to help you grow.
