Whether you have only a handful of donors or a database overflowing with them, each and every one is essential to the success of your nonprofit.
But nurturing new donors to be long-term supporters of your organization is easier said than done.
According to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project’s Q1 2024 report, the donor retention rate fell by type across the board, from those who donate less than $100 to those donating more than $50,000. In other words, any donor you acquire is more likely to float away a year after their first donation than they are to stick around.
That means nonprofits have to burn valuable time and money constantly hunting for new donors, but it also presents an opportunity: How would it affect your nonprofit’s bottom line if you could significantly raise your retention rate through better communication and nurturing?
Managing a nonprofit requires a formalized system of retaining donors, volunteers, beneficiaries, and board members and building relationships with them so your organization can reach its goals. And the best CRM for charities also provides features like donor management and email marketing. Read on to learn more about the best CRM for nonprofits.
Although you may associate CRMs with B2B sales, they can be just as helpful for nonprofits and other organizations that need to manage their contacts and strengthen relationships. Nonprofits use CRM systems to organize and stay connected with their donors and volunteers, engage in marketing and outreach, and analyze their data through reporting.
CRMs allow nonprofits to communicate and build relationships with the advocates they rely on. Rather than relying on unwieldy spreadsheets of donor information, nonprofits can use a CRM to create and execute a donor outreach and retention strategy, resulting in more long-term relationships that fuel their mission.
Benefits of using a CRM for nonprofits
CRMs can help you fulfill the unique goals you have as a nonprofit organization. Here are some benefits of using a CRM for nonprofits:
Improved donor organization: Having a centralized online database of your donors, partners, and involved parties can help you access contact information more easily and help your team spend more time on crucial nonprofit tasks, such as organizing important events and reaching out to potential new donors.
Manage your donations: CRMs can help you keep track of all monetary contributions going into your nonprofit as well as the sources, including once-off and recurring donations.
Accurate reporting: On that same note, with a CRM you have an accurate source for finding out how much income your organization makes. Plus, with features like lead attribution, you can find the sources of your most generous donations, allowing you to make the most of your advertising and other fundraising investments.
Streamline your messaging: Personalize your messages to donors and partners depending on their actions and improve your relationships without spending excessive time writing emails.
Save time with automation: Tasks such as email messaging and pipeline progress can be automated in a CRM. CRM automation can help your staff focus on important tasks that can’t be easily replicated, such as talking to prospective donors and partners on the phone.
Keeps your team in sync: Teamwork plays a big role in the success of nonprofits, and a CRM can help everyone stay on the same page and provide structure in the sometimes chaotic environment that nonprofits face.
Essential features to look for in a nonprofit CRM
So you may already be convinced that a CRM for your nonprofit is a good investment (we agree!). But which one should you choose? With countless CRM options available, it helps to understand what exactly you plan to use your CRM for. Here are some CRM features we think every nonprofit organization can benefit from:
Donor and contact management
A good CRM should be able to help you gather your list of contacts – including donors, partners, and volunteers – and organize your contact database in a way that makes sense for your team.
Contact management features such as tagging and filtered search are essential to the day-to-day tasks your nonprofit team does. Nutshell not only has all these features, but we also offer free data importing assistance to get your team up and running from Day 1 (even when you’re just trying out our free trial).
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Email communication is likely one of the main methods your organization uses to keep in contact with donors, sending reminders or messages of gratitude.
Using a CRM with your email communication spares you the grunt work of sending individual emails with features such as email templates. Additionally, CRM automation should help you send timely messages by triggering automated emails depending on the actions of your donor or prospect.
Integration capabilities
A lot of potential donors come across your organization via events, both online and offline. A good CRM for nonprofits should be able to integrate with your event management software.
Integration with your CRM allows you to streamline new contact data entry or update records to reflect whether a prospect or donor attended an event, letting you send a personalized follow-up email.
Accurate reporting can help your organization understand exactly how much contribution you’re receiving, informing you about what’s working when it comes to your fundraising efforts, and what can be improved. You can even track individual team members’ productivity to better manage your nonprofit team.
These we believe are the bare essentials for the ideal CRM for nonprofits. In addition, some nice-to-have features (that you may deem as essential to your organization) include:
Lead attribution: Track individual donors and find out what led them to your nonprofit – this helps you understand and focus on your most valuable fundraising efforts.
Team collaboration: As your contact records are updated, a good tagging system can help keep all of your staff on the same page with certain donors and prospects.
Prospecting features: Have the ideal donor in mind? A good CRM prospecting tool, such as Nutshell IQ, lets you find and reach out to people and companies from an extensive database of contacts, searching by criteria such as industry, company size, and job title.
Nutshell includes all the above-mentioned features and more at affordable pricing. Try Nutshell and get firsthand insight into how Nutshell can boost your fundraising with an intuitive all-in-one CRM system!
We’ve found seven of the best CRMs for nonprofits on the market. Let’s dive into how they can help organizations like yours reach fundraising goals and achieve your mission.
Email marketing, segmentation tools, social media integration
Nonprofits can design and send customized email campaigns, organize subscribers and donors based on behavior, and find current supporters on social media to encourage interactions.
Bloomerang helps nonprofits decrease donor attrition and increase revenue by connecting with donors, volunteers, and partners.
1. Nutshell
Nutshell is all about building better relationships with people.
Priding itself as the most flexible CRM on the market, Nutshell’s contact management and pipeline automation tools are built for sales organizations but can easily be adapted for the needs of nonprofits.
Using Nutshell, you can log communications from your computer or from your phone if you’re at an event. You can even scan a donor’s business card, and they’ll be added to the CRM as a new contact instantly. That way, you’ll never lose track of a potential donor again.
Like any modern CRM, Nutshell allows you to store all your contact details, call notes, and email conversations in one place—from your first interactions with a potential donor to the confirmation of their first payment—so that everyone in your organization can quickly access them whenever they need to.
What really sets Nutshell apart is its automation, which takes the grunt work out of nurturing donors. Notably, the full-featured Nutshell Pro tier allows your team to build and deploy email sequences that roll out to a potential donor until they respond, and the sales automation suite ensures that your team always gives their leads (potential donors, in this case) the right attention at the right time.
Download now: Use our nonprofit pipeline worksheetto standardize your efforts and build a roadmap for your success.
How nonprofits use Nutshell
Nutshell was designed with flexibility in mind so that users with drastically different use cases (like nonprofits) can still have a processing solution that addresses all of their needs and pain points.
Nonprofits prefer Nutshell because of its ability to easily map people and companies as “donors,” “volunteers,” and whatever other labels are required. There are no limits on this feature. Label away!
Also, Nutshell’s ability to create multiple pipelines and automation specifically addresses nonprofits’ need for multiple workflows.
People and companies can be labeled and then added to whichever pipeline is appropriate for them, so contacts never get mixed up. The audiences are different, the automation is different, and Nutshell controls for this at its most base level.
Furthermore, Nutshell includes features like email automation, email sequencing, and custom email triggers, making it easier to communicate with different audiences and nurture them differently based on their needs to increase donor engagement.
Nutshell pricing options start at $16 per user per month for Nutshell Foundation and $42 per user per month for Nutshell Pro; all Nutshell subscriptions include unlimited contacts and free technical support.
Salesforce has built a Nonprofit Cloud specifically to cater to nonprofits. Using Salesforce as a fundraising as CRM fundraising software provides organizations with a complete, 360-degree view of every part of their work.
Using the Nonprofit Cloud, organizations can create personalized engagement plans to track donor movements and improve their volunteering and fundraising efforts. On top of that, nonprofits can generate new groups of potential donors (for example, a group from a recent fundraiser) and target them with a custom market campaign.
And this gives nonprofits a streamlined, organized way to nurture their new relationships. The results:
The Nonprofit Cloud also has tools dedicated to advancing donors. The platform allows organizations to manage memorial gifts and in-kind gifts to nurture donor relationships in a more meaningful way, without it being robotic.
It’s multilingual, too. Nonprofits can use the CRM to communicate with their constituents in English, Spanish, German, and Japanese.
The team who created Fundly CRM has a background in nonprofits, so every feature has been built with a purpose.
What’s unique about Fundly is the CRM has a real focus on management. To get the most out of a nonprofit’s donor pool, Fundly gives organizations access to donor information, including giving history, campaign participation, event registration, and matching gifts. They can also track event registrations, customize event tickets, and assign sponsors.
Nonprofits can also keep a closer eye on their data using Fundly. Because each donor has their own personal profile, staying up to date with their online (and offline) efforts, membership, and funding takes nothing more than a couple of clicks.
Fundly also has a separate section in its dashboard so nonprofits can monitor all of their grant applications. Each time a grant application is submitted, staff can then track the submission until it’s approved. And once it’s approved, the team can keep an eye on what it’s being used for.
Fundly pricing
Creating and sharing a fundraising campaign is free. However, Fundly deducts a 4.9% fee from every donation as well as a credit card processing fee of 2.9% + $.30 for each donation.
4. Bonterra
Bonterra (formerly Salsa) is a CRM that’s not only geared towards nonprofits but also integrates with some pretty handy marketing gear.
If your nonprofit is looking for a CRM that lends itself to powerful email marketing, Bonterra could be your answer. The CRM allows nonprofits to design and style custom email campaigns with a drag-and-drop editor, and then automate email sequences like triggered welcome series or follow-up campaigns.
The other great feature of Bonterra’s CRM is its powerful segmentation tools. Inside the CRM dashboard, nonprofits can:
Use pre-built segmentation to organize new subscribers, major donors, and petition signees
Create custom segments based on behavior like supporter interaction, gift size, or event attendance
Build donor segments to help create customized email marketing campaigns based on a donor’s frequency and monetary contribution capabilities
Last but not least, Bonterra helps nonprofits stay social. From the dashboard, nonprofit teams are able to link up and share content to channels like Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. Bonterra can also find your current donors and supporters on social media through their email addresses, which can help your nonprofit build up its word-of-mouth marketing by encouraging interactions.
That’s right. CiviCRM is an open-source CRM, so it’s free. It has powerful contact management features so nonprofits can automatically store the data of every donor in one place and customize/update their profile whenever they need to.
What also makes CiviCRM a worthwhile mention is its focus on advocacy campaigns. Nonprofits can build advocacy campaigns in the CRM by tying together and tracking the progress of a campaign’s events, mailings, activities, and contributions.
The software’s reporting features aren’t bad either. Nonprofits can choose between 40 pre-set reports or build custom reports based on whatever facts and figures they need to extract from the database.
CiviCRM pricing
Since CiviCRM is open-source, it’s free to download—although users can donate to support the CRM’s operation.
Following on with the freebie trend, Bitrix24 offers a free CRM for nonprofits with unlimited users.
The software can be used as a Cloud-based system or on-premise. Once installed, nonprofits can use the software to power their:
Contact management
Lead management
Product catalog
Quotes and invoices
Email marketing
Workflow automation
The software has an activity stream to help organize volunteers. It integrates with social networks, along with allowing users to discuss projects in group chats and instant messenger.
When volunteers are trying to organize an event, they can use Bitrix24 to share files and every piece of communication is kept in a communication stream, so everyone can stay in the loop.
Bitrix pricing
Bitrix24 offers a free version with limited online storage for unlimited users. Paid accounts with additional features start at $49 per month.
7. Bloomerang
As a cloud-based recordkeeping software company, Bloomerang helps nonprofits deliver a better giving experience so they can increase donor retention and fundraising revenue to create lasting change. Its donor database solution allows nonprofits to have access to a range of features that can help them reach, engage, and retain advocates they rely on to achieve their organizations’ missions.
Bloomerang is best known for its easy-to-use software and its excellent and responsive customer service with real live people who guide you through each step of the process.
Bloomerang pricing
You can choose a Bloomerang plan based on the amount of records (or contacts) you track in the database. Every plan comes with unlimited users and starts at $49 per month based on annual billing.
How do I choose a CRM for a nonprofit?
Choosing a CRM for your nonprofit is similar to selecting a CRM for any other organization–consider your unique needs and goals and then compare CRMs to determine which one will best help you meet them.
Here are a few specific steps you can take to find the best CRM for your nonprofit:
Compare CRM features with your nonprofit’s needs: Because many CRMs aren’t custom-built for nonprofits, you may find it helpful to consider whether their features will still help you accomplish your goals. Do you need the ability to create email fundraising campaigns, track donor communications, and track and report on donations? Look for a CRM that will help you accomplish your most important tasks.
Look through nonprofit CRM reviews: Look for reviews from other nonprofits that have used the software and see how it worked for them. Searching for the best CRM for nonprofits on a software review site or a site like Reddit could turn up some valuable insight.
Consider the available integrations: Being able to integrate your other software, like online fundraising, payment processing, and accounting tools, lets you get more from your CRM and keep all your data organized.
Balance budget with features: As you create a budget, consider which features you may be willing to pay more for and which ones you can do without. Your nonprofit may not need all the bells and whistles, but certain functions may be nonnegotiable.
Our interactive worksheet compares the benefits offered by Nutshell, your existing contact management solution, and any other CRMs you’re currently evaluating.
What is the average cost of a CRM for a nonprofit?
The average cost of a CRM for nonprofits is between $16 and $120 per month. You can generally expect a higher monthly cost the more users you have on the CRM.
While you can find free CRMs for nonprofits, carefully consider what features you’ll be giving up. A low-cost CRM for nonprofits may or may not be able to provide the functions your organization needs.
What is the best CRM for small nonprofits?
The best CRM for your nonprofit is the one that fits the organization’s needs and goals. A CRM for small nonprofits should offer powerful features in an easy-to-use dashboard, plenty of automation and customization options, and helpful customer support.
When you’re searching for the best CRM for small nonprofit organizations, look no further than Nutshell. Nutshell has the robust CRM features you need to build more and better donor relationships, grow your organization, and make the biggest impact you can. From tracking donors through your pipeline and automating personal email sequences to collaborating with your team and generating reports, Nutshell helps nonprofits accomplish more.
Choose the perfect CRM and supercharge your donor relationships
Nonprofits all have ambitions to reach their goals and complete their mission. To make this a reality, they need donors to help them get there.
That’s why a CRM solution makes a lot of sense for nonprofits: They’re relationship-building machines. Using CRM, nonprofits can make sure a donor never slips through the cracks again, and they’re welcomed into their nonprofit with customized email campaigns and follow-ups.
However, not all CRMs are built the same. Since CRMs are traditionally built for sales teams, it’s crucial for nonprofits to pick a software solution that is geared towards nurturing relationships instead of just closing sales.
Invest in a CRM that’s focused on nurturing your donors, fine-tuning your fundraising efforts, and helping you interact with all your donors on a personal level. After all, the happier your donors are, the easier it will be for your nonprofit to make the biggest impact.
