Best Nonprofit CRM: Charity & Donor Management Software Compared

When it comes to the best nonprofit CRM solutions and CRM for charity in general, there’s a lot of good material out there to help you pick the right solution. This article has done the legwork, tried the platforms, read the reviews, and summarized everything you need to know about nonprofit CRM for donor management, fundraising and more. 

We’ll go over pricing and features and what each CRM for nonprofit is best for. Next, we’ll talk about the basic uses of nonprofit CRM and the benefits they bring to your organization. Then we’ll sum it all up and go over some basic FAQs for quick reference. 

Nonprofit CRM comparison chart (top 10 highest rated systems)

This overview of the top ten CRM systems for nonprofits quickly points out the starting price and a snapshot of what each CRM is best for in the nonprofit sector.

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What is the best CRM for nonprofits? Here’s our top 10 list:

The best CRM for nonprofits article you’re about to read contains data from many top reviews of users and online critics. We hope this summary has got the recommendations to help you pick the perfect fundraising management platform. This top ten list is ready for you!

Kindful (Best nonprofit CRM software overall)

Kindful is probably one of the best CRM software for nonprofits. Its offices are in Nashville, Tennessee. Today, Kindful is a product of the larger all-in-one platform called Bloomerang.

Kindful has a suite of fundraising features, including tools to build donation pages and donation forms. It lets you do peer-to-peer fundraising, it’s got event management tools like registration, and donation tracking and donation reporting. Donor management tools get you donor and constituent lifecycle analytics, contact and donor records management, and even provide donor account logins. Donor communications helps with things like email marketing where you get email receipt automations and an email template creator. There are a range of tracking and reporting functionality with Kindful, as well as integrations for things like payment processing, online fundraising, in-person fundraising and more. 

Pros:

The Kindful advantages are mainly that this platform is a great way for nonprofits and charity organizations to run almost all of their operations from a single solution. The tools are quite simple to use and the interface is good looking. Also, the pricing is based on contacts and can be affordable.

Cons:

Very few disadvantages here as Kindful is taking our winning spot as the best nonprofit CRM system overall. 

Pricing:

• $100 per month for 1,000 contacts

• $200 per month for 5,000 contacts

• $300 per month for 12,000 contacts

Kindful

Blackbaud (Top CRM for membership organizations)

Blackbaud is a tech company with a range of solutions for customer relationship management and constituent relationship management, as well as being a solid fundraising software. This is a cloud-based software company for nonprofit organizations aiming to be a driver of social good.

There is a large menu of Blackbaud products and we will talk mostly about Blackbaud CRM. Organize your customers and constituents with its powerful database management. With Blackbaud you can set up and run multiple fundraising efforts. A mobile Blackbaud app lets your representatives build and deepen donor relationships on the road and in person. Multichannel communication tools let fundraising marketers connect with potential donors via direct mail, your website, or even social media. Solid analytics help show you data on your prospects to improve your outreach with new donor sources. There’s also a product called Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge which is an advanced fundraising campaign and donor management software solution.

Pros:

Blackbaud gets generally positive reviews for the sheer robustness of its tools and features, including its membership management functionality. What stands out among their many fundraising tools are their strong features for campaign messaging and multichannel marketing. Raiser’s Edge is also a benefit to the Blackbaud list of CRM features.

Cons:

It’s always a drawback when a CRM or other SaaS vendor does not clearly advertise their pricing, and this is the case with Blackbaud. Also, there is a slight learning curve here.

Pricing:

• Contact Blackbaud for pricing

Blackbaud

Neon CRM (Great charity CRM)

Neon CRM is the customer relationship management system from the larger company called Neon One, which is a general business platform for “social good organizations.” Aside from Neon CRM, there is also Neon Fundraise, Neon Giving Days, Neon Membership and Neon CCM. This is a winner when it comes to CRM solutions for charity.

Neon CRM is heavily focused on workflow automations to help people working in fundraising and charity event management save time by cutting out dull administrative work. For events, there is volunteer management, online store functionalities and receipt management through automation. You get instant general reporting, or can set up customizable reporting. With donor management you can track donations easily, set up marketing campaigns with specific targeted audiences, and get advanced relationship building tools. Fundraising offers form templates with custom fields, donation process automation and even follow-up tools to manage recurring donations. 

Pros:

Charities and similar organizations can really leverage Neon CRM and other Neon One products to maximize their advocacy through email campaigns and donation management. One Neon pro is their many tools for event planning.

Cons:

As a CRM platform, there have been some less-than-stellar reviews about the core CRM tools in Neon. While it does fare well when it comes to donor retention rates, as a basic contact and networking tool, it can use some improvement.

Pricing:

• Essentials package is $99 per month

• Impact package is $149 per month

• Empower package is $299 per month

Neon CRM

Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud (Good nonprofit database software)

Most people know Salesforce as a standard CRM solution that does great sales, marketing automation and data management functionality among other things. Salesforce has a nonprofit software product called Nonprofit Cloud for very specific features for charities and nonprofits.

Fundraising tools let you optimize for things like streamlining contact information and donor information, including getting you rich donor profiles from donor data made public online. You can also monitor and track constituent relationships with Salesforce. See payments and pledge donations from everyone from major donors to one-time givers. Plenty of marketing automation functionality is in the system to nurture prospects down the funnel and to take over simple tasks like sending follow-up emails after online donations trigger your workflows.

Pros:

Overall, this is a very good nonprofit database management software. One of the pros of Salesforce for nonprofits is if you need to mix your nonprofit CRM data with other business data and processes since Salesforce is an all-in-one business SaaS set of tools. There is also the NPSP, or nonprofit success pack, which is a great package of features.

Cons:

Unlike other nonprofit CRMs which have simple pricing based on contacts, Salesforce still charges based on users per month, so this can end up being a bit more expensive.

Pricing:

• Sales Cloud EE with nonprofit success pack is $36 per user per month billed annually

• Sales + Service Cloud EE is $48 per user per month billed annually

• Nonprofit Cloud EE is $60 per user per month billed annually

• Contact vendor for Nonprofit Cloud UE pricing

Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud

Bloomerang (Best free CRM for nonprofits)

Bloomerang is a great free donor management and fundraising CRM for nonprofits. The company was launched in 2012. They had over 1,000 customers by 2015. They got a boost of investment in 2020 the same year they launched native integrations with Quickbooks and Mailchimp.

It starts with a donor database that includes workflows for managing your donor community. As for fundraising, the tools are divided into modules called: acquire, retain, engage, automate and measure, with the functions in each being pretty self explanatory. There are peer-to-peer and crowdfunding tools. Email marketing and surveys help keep people engaged and are great for renewing subscriptions too. When it comes to analytics, you can view reporting with standard or custom metrics, which include data on engagement scoring, wealth screening and email marketing performances. 

Pros:

As mentioned above, Bloomerang is among the best free nonprofit CRM software out there. It is very user friendly, and has a really satisfying aesthetic to its interfaces and dashboards. 

Cons:

The cheap Bloomerang Lite plan is hardly the all-in-one CRM for nonprofits it should be, and lacks email marketing. Another drawback here is that it may feel limiting if your organization begins to scale up.

Pricing:

• Bloomerang Lite is free for up to 250 contacts a

• Bloomerang Grow is $19 per month for up to 500 contacts

• Bloomerang Standard is $99 per month for up to 1,000 contacts

Bloomerang

DonorPerfect (Top donor CRM software)

DonorPerfect is a donor management and fundraising platform that partners with charities and nonprofits to help them spread awareness and raise more money for their causes. It started off as SofterWare way back in 1981.

Popular features include a unified database to manage your constituents, which helps streamline donor data management. The CRM of DonorPerfect is highly customizable. There is an advanced batch entry to add and edit multiple contacts at once. You could automate gift and donor entries as well as accept payments that are one-time, recurring and online payments. DonorPerfect also offers templates to make your own forms where you can add personal branding. As for analytics, it gives you access to over 70 nonprofit industry reports which you can measure up against your own KPIs in real time. Their Agile Ticketing system is great for event management too.

Pros:

DonorPerfect has many advantages as a donor management CRM. Its multiple pricing tiers make it great for organizations of all sizes and budgets. You get unlimited users even on the most affordable package. DonorPerfect also offers live training webinars.

Cons:

When it comes to DonorPerfect, you will need to open up your wallet for the more expensive versions if you want to take full advantage of workflow automations. 

Pricing:

• Lite plan is $99 per month for 1,000 contacts

• Express plan is $179 per month for 2,500 contacts

• Essentials plan is $299 per month for 7,500 contacts

• Premier plan is $499 per month for 25,000 contacts

• Enterprise plan is $799 per month for 75,000 contacts

DonorPerfect

Network for Good (Good contact management software for nonprofits)

Network for Good was launched back in 2001 by high-level employees from Yahoo, AOL and CISCO. Today, the platform boasts to have helped over 350 thousand nonprofit organizations. They also claim to have helped raise over $3.75 billion.

Communications tools for marketing and outreach include donor engagement journey building, easy-to-record video messaging, custom filters and targeted mailing lists to make sure the best messaging gets to the right party. Fundraising campaigns are also easy to build from scratch to save and reuse. Optimize real-time donor data to keep your audiences in line with your outreach with filters and groups. There is also a Quickbooks integration which works well. As a nonprofit contact management software, Network for Good can be a great choice depending on the price.

Pros:

Network for Good is advantageous because any nonprofit organization can use it no matter how few contacts one has to begin with. The contact management part is very solid. The duplicate contact prevention, grouping and filtering makes this very useful as a nonprofit CRM. The online fundraising tools work well too.

Cons:

Figuring out your exact pricing plan can be a bit annoying, though the sales reps there would probably help you out. What’s more, the look and feel are very basic, however we know some people like that.

Pricing:

• Contact Network for Good for pricing information 

Network for Good

Salsa CRM (Great client management software for nonprofits)

Salsa CRM comes with Salsa Engage as part of Salsa Labs SaaS. It’s some of the best nonprofit client management software to grow your network and engage your followers. 

The level of detail for data of donor profiles is very rich plus you can create custom fields. Automations do things like suggest the next time you should reach out or send a gift to a constituent. You can build fundraising campaigns for email outreach and social media. It then tracks email open rates and analyzes social media engagement levels.

Pros:

Salsa CRM and Salsa Engage really excel at giving you deeper insights into your network of donors and constituents with their rich profiles. It follows from there that Salsa also provides very extensive analytics on all manners of fundraising, whether via social media, direct mail or peer to peer.

Cons:

As usual, you’ll have to do some of your own work to get an idea as to what kind of price tag you’ll be looking at for your business needs. Another tiny drawback of Salsa is that it isn’t the easiest CRM platform to master, however they do offer some good resources to help with that.

Pricing:

• Contact Salsa for pricing

Salsa CRM

Little Green Light (Best CRM for fundraising)

Little Green Light may sound like a cute little company, but this is one great CRM for fundraising that means business. It’s packed with features, and does a fantastic job analyzing your data for insights and suggestions.

With LGL, you get an essential features package, and then you can have access to optional features that are pay-as-you-go. You get great data importing, contact and constituent management, a fundraising gift tracker, and customizable dashboards with advanced search and save functionalities. Some advanced tools include data maintenance and segmentation, membership management, data analysis and scheduled reporting.

Pros:

Switching over and migrating your data into LGL is quite simple the way they’ve set it up. Another benefit to LGL is the event and fundraising management suite of tools. What’s more, they have decent blog resources on fundraising tips.

Cons:

There are a lot of great tools here, but for some, that might mean feature overload to start. What’s more, it’s lucky if you only want tools that already come with the essentials, but perhaps the cost goes up more than you’d think with the pay as you go options.

Pricing:

• $45 per month for up to 2,500 constituents    

• $60 per month for up to 5,000 constituents    

• $75 per month for up to 10,000 constituents    

• $90 per month for up to 20,000 constituents    

• $105 per month for up to 30,000 constituents

• $120 per month for up to 40,000 constituents

• $135 per month for up to 50,000 constituents

Little Green Light

Classy (Best CRM for small nonprofit organizations)

Classy is, as the people there style it, a giving platform. It really cares about the causes its customers use, or at least you get that feeling from their website. They’ve helped raise over $3 billion dollars for over six thousand nonprofit partners.

You get all kinds of management tools to help with things like donation management and event management, whether it’s a virtual or hybrid event. Payment processing tools let donors send gifts via credit card powered by Stripe, digital wallets, PayPal and Venmo. There are subscription fundraising tools for recurring gifts and donation website builders. You can use Classy to set up auctions and have the bidding done by mobile app. This is also a decent CRM system for international fundraising. 

Pros:

Classy is up there with some of the other best CRM for small nonprofits. It's a great tool if your organization is compact and everyone has multiple roles. The data and tools are clear and easy to collaborate on as well.

Cons:

Classy is maybe a bit too classy when it comes to pricing in that this nonprofit CRM won’t reveal too much to just any visitor. You’re going to need to request pricing, which is a con when comparison shopping against other nonprofit CRM platforms which are clear about the costs.

Pricing:

• Contact Classy to request pricing information  

Classy

What is a nonprofit CRM & what does it do?

We might get back to fundamentals and ask what is CRM, i.e. customer relationship management. But in the case of a nonprofit you can also think of it as a constituent relationship management solution. 

A CRM is at heart the evolution of an address book, which for businesses and nonprofits, passed through the evolutionary stage of being a series of spreadsheets. Today, CRMs handle advanced customer data, marketing, sales, customer support, HR, IT and more.

For the nonprofit industry, including charities, outreach programs, NGOs, social organizations and political movements, CRM is incredibly useful. First and foremost, you turn your marketing CRM tools toward fundraising. Nonprofit CRM helps create campaigns, spread the word, attract prospective donors, organize donations and gifts, and keep your audience engaged with your organization’s message and branding. Many great nonprofit CRMs also do robust event management, both in real life, online, and hybrid.

Like any great CRM, nonprofit management platforms run on workflows and automations, both built in and with the ability for you to build and share new ones. For the nonprofit industry, this can handle prospect journeys, trigger events like email follow-ups or meeting reminders, track open and click rates in email or social media engagement, and do scheduled reporting on your key fundraising metrics.

What is the best nonprofit management software for me? Our final points

Our key takeaway for the best nonprofit CRM solution is Kindful overall. And perhaps many other critics agree while we’re sure you’ll find some detractors. But once you get down to more specific niche and needs, any of these 10 management tools for nonprofits could be the right choice for your business needs. Neon CRM, for example, is another top choice, as is DonorPerfect. And if you are a really small operation with few users and contacts, Bloomerang is the best free choice to get started with. We even had to leave some good names off, like Virtuous, GiveSmart and EveryAction (Virtuous made it the closest). 

That’s it folks. Good luck with your nonprofit endeavors. We know your causes are noble and your hearts are pure. That’s why we bring you this article to help you in your search for streamlined fundraising and donor management.

FAQs

Does a nonprofit need a CRM?

Nonprofit organizations can all benefit from using a customer relationship management (CRM) system. Just like regular businesses with customers, nonprofits can keep track of all their donors and constituents, do outreach with engaging content, and manage things like fundraising events, auctions, charity drives, and other nonprofit activities.

What does CRM mean in fundraising?

CRM in fundraising can mean constituent relationship management, with constituents replacing the traditional customers for regular for-profit businesses using a CRM. Many of the activities between nonprofits and their constituents are similar to those between businesses and clients or customers. Some CRM brands offer nonprofit solutions, like Salesforce.

How do nonprofits use CRM?

There are many tools and features of a CRM useful for nonprofit organizations. It can organize the donors list, create outreach campaigns with email or social media, plan events, process fundraising payments, and more. CRM automation also takes over repetitive administrative tasks, freeing up time for nonprofit workers.