11 Best Nonprofit CRMs to Manage Donors and Optimize Fundraising

So, you need a CRM for your nonprofit. Whether you are switching from your current or starting from scratch, this is a big decision for your organization. There are so many aspects to look at when deciding on a CRM, some of which are standard and some that are very unique to your organization. We have compiled a list of CRM options that speak to different types of fundraising organizations and sectors (education, healthcare, and nonprofits) or stages in your fundraising journey (small to large organizations). We’ve also explained which factors to consider when choosing the right CRM for you and your team. 

What is a nonprofit CRM?

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is software designed to manage interactions with current and potential donors. Classic features include contact management, lead management, reporting, sales management, and more. It should also include automation features to save time, gift processing to smoothly receive donations, and marketing tools to make it easier to promote the business to new and existing customers.

The key thing to remember as a fundraising professional is how nonprofit CRMs differ from CRMs made for for-profit companies. Nonprofit CRMs include a variety of sector-specific features designed to help you with your donor management, rather than focusing on traditional sales customer management. For example, some key features usually included are volunteer and member management, grant tracking, and event planning.

Benefits of CRM in fundraising

A CRM can have a huge positive impact on education, healthcare, and nonprofit organizations. It allows organizations to consolidate and analyze all donor and prospect information in one place.

It also makes donor engagement much easier, as you can create and send personalized communications based on donor profiles and history, and identify trends to help prioritize your fundraising strategy. Some notable nonprofit-specific benefits include:

• Enhanced donor relations: Tailoring your communication and engagement strategies makes it faster and easier to build and nurture relationships with your donors.
• Better donor retention: By identifying trends and patterns in donor behavior, you’re able to implement targeted retention strategies that will increase loyalty.
• Streamlined donation processes: Using automation, you can speed up donation tracking, processing, and receipting. This reduces administrative time and costs while making the whole process work more efficiently.
• Increased collaboration: Bringing everything into one platform makes it easier for your team to collaborate and share information.
• Greater fundraising insights: Using reporting and analytics, you’re able to evaluate donor data to uncover ways to raise more funds and decide on new fundraising strategies.

Key Features of nonprofit CRM software

Your nonprofit CRM should offer some essential features, from campaign management that fuels your mission to analytics that illuminate your path forward. These tools can enhance your impact, streamline your efforts, and help you organize a community of passionate supporters.

Donor management 

Donor management is an important feature because it combines all donor information, enhances relationship management, and makes it possible to segment your donors. This segmentation can be used to categorize donors based on giving patterns and interests, which means you can target your outreach and send personalized communication.

Fundraising tools and campaign management

The primary goal of a nonprofit is to fulfill its mission, and to do so, it needs to raise funds, which is why the fundraising and campaign management features are so important. These tools allow you to plan, execute, and track your fundraising campaigns. They also allow you to create and manage multiple campaigns at the same time, set fundraising goals and priorities, and monitor your fundraising progress in real time.

Analytics and reporting 

In order to make well-informed decisions, you need to be able to look at the facts and data in a structured and easy-to-digest way. This is where your analytics and reporting are critical. They transform your raw donor data into actionable insights. They also make it possible to measure the effectiveness of your fundraising strategy, track engagement, and identify trends. Robust reporting and analytics allow your organization to become data decision driven rather than making decisions based on feelings and intuition alone.

Integration with other nonprofit software

Even though the CRMs have a lot of features, they can’t do everything for every organization. So your CRM needs to be able to communicate with your other tools seamlessly. This is where integrations become vital to your internal tech stack. They enable you to connect all your operations, removing data silos, and improving your overall efficiency. 

Data Security and Compliance

The biggest risk with collecting and storing donor data is ensuring it’s both secure and stored compliantly. That’s because you’re likely storing PII (Personal Identifiable Information), which could cause genuine harm if it gets into the wrong hands. There can also be financial and legal ramifications if it’s found that you failed to adhere to legal and regulatory requirements.

Customizations

Every nonprofit is different, so it’s important your CRM is able to meet your unique needs. This is why it’s essential that you can tailor your CRM to match your unique needs and workflows. You want your CRM to reflect your fundraising strategies and data requirements. This can include custom fields, modified data structures, and personalized reports.

Top 11 CRM solutions for nonprofits

We compiled the following list of CRMs that serve nonprofit, healthcare, and education organizations. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, and the type of organization they work best with. Kindsight’s ascend CRM is included in this list, as well as CRMs with integrations with Kindsight’s iwave (Salesforce, Raiser’s Edge NXT, DonorPerfect, Neon One). 

1. ascend by Kindsight

Best for: Education and healthcare advancement teams, and large nonprofits

Built on Salesforce (mentioned later on in the list), ascend is designed to be ultra-customizable and scalable. ascend is a flexible system and can be adapted to the user’s unique needs. This is particularly useful for higher education and healthcare, and larger institutions that need a tailored system and robust functionality. ascend allows for donor segmentation, personalized communications, automated email responses, and advanced analytics to enhance fundraising campaigns.

Key features:

• Comprehensive donor database
• Prospect management
• Simplified gift processing
• Mobile and web access
• HIPAA compliant
• Multiple integrations (including proprietary tools to integrate 3rd party data seamlessly)
• Batch Processing
• Grateful Patient
• Mobile and Web Access

2. Bloomerang

Best for: Small to medium size organizations

Known for its user-friendly interface, Bloomerang strongly focuses on donor retention. This combination means that your team can learn it quickly and hit the ground running with fundraising. It also has a tiered pricing structure, which makes it a decent choice for small—to medium-sized organizations. 

Key features:

• Donor database management
• Customizable dashboard
• Email marketing integration
• Online donation forms

3. Bonterra

Best for: Connecting to corporate partners

Bonterra provides a suite of integrated solutions created to meet the needs of nonprofits. This makes it a versatile choice for organizations looking to manage multiple parts of their operations in one tool. Bonterra offers features that particularly support nonprofits in connecting to corporate partners looking to donate to nonprofits. Pricing depends on the size of your business and the different solutions you want to use. This means the price can vary dramatically depending on your needs.

Key features:

• Grant management
• Volunteer management
• Fundraising tools
• Donor management

4. Blackbaud (Raiser’s Edge NXT) 

Best for: Very large databases

Blackbaud was created for nonprofits and is best for medium to large organizations with a large database. Some drawbacks are that the data can be siloed because each module is built separately, and the platform is proprietary so its often difficult to integrate with.

Key features:

• Cultivation tools
• Built-in analytics
• Data enrichment
• Built-in email campaign capabilities 

5. CharityEngine

Best for: International fundraising

CharityEngine gives you a comprehensive CRM platform that focuses on increasing fundraising effectiveness. It does this by providing a variety of tools to help nonprofits improve their operations and enhance their donor engagement. CharityEngine supports international nonprofit operations, by offering multi-currency support and international security measures. They offer two different pricing levels, depending on the size of your nonprofit, starting at $299 a month.

Key features: 

• Online fundraising tools
• Marketing automation
• Event management
• Donor management

6. DonorPerfect 

Best for: Small organizations

DonorPerfect is a solid CRM for nonprofits because of its donor management and fundraising features. Their lowest pricing tier is also quite affordable, which makes it good for smaller nonprofits. It includes some customization options, making it useful for a range of nonprofit organizations, although its functionality is less extensive than the slightly more expensive options. 

Key features:

• Donor profiling
• Grant management
• Fundraising campaign management
• Reporting and analytics

7. Keela

Best user interface 

Another CRM specifically designed for nonprofit organizations, Keela includes a decent variety of features to help you manage donor relationships and improve fundraising efforts. Its user-friendly interface makes it a good option for small to medium-sized nonprofits that want to minimize training time. Pricing is based on the number of contacts you store, which can vary from $125 a month to $410 a month.

Key features:

• Contact management
• Email marketing
• Reporting and analytics
• Fundraising tools

8. Little Green Light

Best for: Low-budget teams

Designed for smaller nonprofits, Little Green Light is a simple, affordable CRM. Its features help organizations organize their donor relationships without overwhelming users. Because it’s aimed at small nonprofits, the price reflects this: just $39 per month. This makes it a good option for the budget-conscious nonprofit.

Key features:

• Online donation forms
• Email marketing
• Reporting and analytics
• Event management

9. Neon One CRM

Best for: Basic use

Marketed as an ‘all-in-one’ CRM for small to midsize nonprofits, Neon One CRM focuses on the basics of constituent management. This includes automation features designed to save you time in your fundraising. Their pricing is based on your revenue, though, so you need to be mindful of the increased cost as you grow.

Key features:

• Fundraising tools
• Donor management
• Event management
• Website integration

10. Salesforce 

Best for: Tech-savvy teams

Salesforce is a customizable platform that includes robust features to help companies organize and manage their clients. Although not initially built for nonprofits, you can still use its varied features to manage donor relationships and analyze your fundraising performance. Salesforce can be expensive for smaller nonprofits, though, so you might need to look for discounts to get the best value for money. It also tends to require more technical expertise if making adjustments or configurations.

Key features:

• Fundraising tracking
• Program management
• Marketing and communication tools
• Reporting and analytics

11. Virtuous

Best for: Automation

Claiming to be the only ‘Responsive Fundraising Platform’, Virtuous is focused on creating personalized donor experiences and automating fundraising processes. It also includes some useful marketing tools, which are useful as you try to grow a smaller nonprofit. Their pricing goes up based on functionality and the number of supporter records you keep, so it’s worth considering the potential price increase as you need more capabilities or reach more potential donors.

Key features:

• Marketing automation
• Donor management
• Project management
• Gift processing

Choosing the best CRM for nonprofits

Clearly, there are many options when it comes to choosing a nonprofit CRM. Below is a quick list of things to keep in mind when making this important decision. If you want to learn more, check out our blog about creating a CRM RFP that breaks it down into more detail. 

1. Define requirements: The first step is to identify exactly what your nonprofit needs from its CRM. List the functionality you know you need, such as donor management, volunteer tracking, and reporting.
2. Set a budget: Consult with key stakeholders to decide what your budget will be. Consider the different pricing models, additional costs, and long-term financial stability. 
3. Compare options: Using the summaries above, and your own research, compare the different CRMs available to you, comparing them with the list of features you made in step 1. 
4. Request demos: Once you have a shortlist of a few options, the next step is to arrange a demo to help you get a clear idea of how the software actually works and ensure it really does tick all the boxes.
5. Make a decision: At this point, you’re ready to choose the CRM that best suits your needs and budget. Then, you can make a commitment and start planning the implementation and onboarding. 

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You deserve a CRM that is purpose-built for you. There are a variety of options to choose from and many factors to consider when making this decision. Navigating CRM options can be daunting but with a little guidance and research, you can find one that will work for your organization and help you make a greater impact in the end. If you need help with what questions to ask vendors when choosing a CRM, check out our comprehensive cheat sheet.

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Caroline Chang

As the Vice President of Product Evangelism at Kindsight, Caroline Chang is an advancement services expert, with over 30 years of experience in the higher education industry and non-profit fundraising.