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Considering a new CRM? Here is a list of businesses to think about. You may locate the ideal technology for your organization with the aid of this article.
A hard undertaking might be finding a new nonprofit CRM. There are so many things to think about and so many questions to ask. How should a nonprofit respond?
Be at ease! Even if our nonprofit CRM isn’t the right fit for your needs, we are here to support you along the journey.
We have years of expertise integrating NGOs with the appropriate technology, including enterprise clients like the Wounded Warrior Project and Easterseals as well as developing clients like Merlin’s Magic Wand. In this post, we’ll discuss key aspects to look for in a nonprofit CRM before outlining some of the top options available right now.
We provide a ton of free information aimed at educating organizations, whether you want a detailed guide to choose a new nonprofit CRM or even a full guide to contributions. But you’ve come to the correct spot if you’re searching for a shopping list of excellent CRMs.
Depending on your needs, we will indicate which ones would be a suitable fit for you. Keep in mind that your CRM has to be a workhorse if you want to utilize it for regular outreach campaigns, daily donor monitoring, or even all-out year-end efforts.
You’ll be a knowledgeable customer after reading this, prepared to match your CRM needs with the best solution. The next thing you should do is get in touch with any of the businesses that appear appropriate and arrange a demo so you can see their software in action.
What Should I Know Before Looking for a CRM for Fundraising?
Before you go to the store, it’s a good idea to assess your kitchen and prepare a shopping list, just as it’s necessary to assess your organization and establish a list of CRM features that will address your most pressing issues. Before continuing, think about the following queries:
- What are my main objectives? Drill down into particular priorities starting with your mission statement until you have a clear list.
- How does my nonprofit appear? What is my revenue, how many contacts do I have, and how many emails do I send each day?
- What prospective projects are the most crucial for me? Will I require advocacy software, peer-to-peer fundraising tools, or email automation?
- How many data sources are going to be moved? The cost of the move may increase with the more isolated your data is.
The answers to these inquiries will help you organize your list and choose which of the following CRMs checks the appropriate boxes.
CRM for Nonprofits: Key Features
Although the majority of CRMs have fundamental data management and communication functionality, not every solution has the full set of tools you require right out of the box.
An all-in-one solution is a solid place to start for the majority of organizations. Make sure the solution can scale as your business expands and provides fundraising, payment processing, communication, and significant donation management, among other features.
Let’s explore these essential nonprofit CRM features in more detail.
Making payments
Do you truly want to let someone else handle your donations? You can guarantee effective and safe processing as well as prompt information updates when your CRM has an integrated payment processor.
With a strong integrated payment processor, your business can:
- Update credit card data automatically. You may automatically update the credit card information on file for your contributors when it changes or expires if your payment processor has one built in. You should be able to add the new card to your current records if the CRM recognizes the same donor contributing with a new card.
- Process donations safely. Look for PCI-compliant and PCI-certified payment processors while evaluating security. Choose one of the two having a PCI certification. This indicates that the service provider has undergone testing and evaluation by a third party to guarantee the greatest level of security. PCI-compliant testing, in contrast, is more typically carried out internally.
- drastically cut expenditures. By eliminating third-party fees, a built-in processor can drastically lower the cost of processing payments.
Ensure that your payment processor has cutting-edge fraud prevention! You should use the utmost caution to protect the privacy of your donor data, regardless of whether your payment processor is an integrated element of your CRM or a separate system.
Communications Control
Your CRM should make it simple to categorize your contributors and get in touch with them directly via a variety of channels. Look for features in a new charity CRM platform that let your business take advantage of:
- Emailing campaigns. Make sure you have the ability to customize the emails by having the names of your supporters populate the greeting based on their CRM profile. Make sure your CRM allows for email customization to reflect the image of your company.
- marketing through mail. Direct mail is still in use. Combining direct mail and digital marketing creates additional touchpoints with supporters, increases brand recognition, and opens up more opportunities for calls to action.
- automated communications. Send a brief email of confirmation to contributors soon to ensure that you may thank them for their gifts right away.
Nonprofit CRMs with strong communication management features may draw contact information directly from the supporter profiles, eliminating the need to move contacts and donor segments to a different software solution in order to communicate effectively.
Major Gift Administration
You’ve probably observed that the majority of your money comes from a small number of individuals, whether your organization has 100 or 100,000 supporters. In actuality, big donations from 20% of contributors account for about 80% of the revenue for the majority of nonprofit organizations.
Your CRM should assist your efforts with functions that make it simple to monitor significant donations from the start of the donor journey to the finish because so much depends on your nonprofit getting major gifts:
- the start of the relationship. Major donations are rarely presented by an unidentified visitor. Most significant donors begin as regular contributors, giving money to a cause they support.
- Prospective analysis. You should connect your CRM to a database for prospect research. You can find prospective significant donors among your fans with the use of this.
- Cultivation. Start maintaining a connection with potential significant donors as soon as you’ve found them. A fundamental goal of the cultivation phase is to establish and maintain a relationship with a significant prospect. You can keep track of every encounter you have with supporters using your CRM, which will help you establish and maintain the relationship.
- the present. Keep track of mid-tier and significant donations under the donors’ profiles in your CRM. Make sure to express your gratitude and decide the best course of action for strengthening these connections going forward.
The nurturing of major gifts requires a human touch, but your CRM should assist in tracking and managing your efforts. The fact is that an all-in-one solution might ultimately cost more up front even as simple options with fewer features may seem less expensive.
9 Nonprofit CRMs to Consider
Without further ado, here are nine options to take into account as you search for and select the ideal CRM for your organization.
1. Best Nonprofit CRM for Donor Retention: Kindful Explorer and Bloomerang
In 2012, Bloomerang was established, and donor engagement and retention are its top priorities. Customers may quickly run email marketing campaigns to target contributors and incorporate customized online giving forms on their websites. For an extra fee, Bloomerang may interface with DonorSearch to provide an interaction Meter that provides a summary of a donor’s interaction with your organization and a Generosity Score that searches publically accessible data to assist you in identifying top prospects among your constituency.
Donor retention is Bloomerang’s main selling feature. Bloomerang is a wonderful option for small and expanding NGOs because to its ability to provide intelligent reports, scan social networks for insights, and interact with virtually any content management system. According to the corporation, the merged businesses have 200 workers and help tens of thousands of charity professionals worldwide. The company recently purchased Kindful to handle fundraising tools. The user experience could be a little bumpy until things are sorted, as we would note with any purchase or merger.
In conclusion, Bloomerang/Kindful may be a suitable choice if donor retention is an issue for your small NGO.
2. Best Nonprofit CRM For Organizations With A Left-Wing Perspective: Salsa/EveryAction/Bonterra
This might become a bit perplexing. Salsa joined EveryAction, the second-largest provider of software for nonprofits. Salsa and EveryAction systems will not fund groups categorized as conservative or right-leaning due to their business structures.
But it’s crucial to remember that Salsa is coming to an end. It’s also crucial to keep in mind that EveryAction is forming Bonterra with other businesses, such as Network for Good, so don’t be confused by all the numerous names. The organization we’re focusing on in this sentence is EveryAction.
Tools for phone banks, donating days, and outreach to political action campaigns are available from EveryAction. The verticals of social justice and advocacy, community betterment and service, labor unions, PAC compliance, animal rights and welfare, environment and conservation, healthcare, education, the arts and culture, and housing and human services are all areas in which they can assist any size charity. It is a huge corporation with numerous resources and business partners.
Conclusion: EveryAction provides a veritable army of tools, people, and firms to help you thrive if your company politics don’t disqualify you and you anticipate needing more than simply a CRM.
3. Neon One is one of the finest nonprofit CRMs for small to midrange businesses. Learn more about Neon One, one of the best nonprofit CRMs for small to midsize businesses.
Neon One focuses on small to midsize nonprofit organizations. How can you tell where you fit? Review the inquiries you made to yourself. If your organization falls within those parameters—fewer than 100,000 contacts and fewer than 500,000 emails sent each month—you could be a suitable candidate for Neon One.
Through their ecosystem of connected, independent systems, they have a wide range of items that you may choose from. For instance, there is CRM software, fundraising software, “giving days” technology, membership management software for associations and NGOs, and performing arts impact support software. They provide client workflows, so you may adapt them to fit what you’re trying to do, like welcoming a new donor. There are several possibilities, however, they cannot be customized and may only be available for the processes that are part of your membership.
The business has unveiled a redesign to reflect its recent expansion. Neon One, which consists of four separate software firms, seven distinctive products, and more than thirty integration partners, is committed to expanding its ecosystem of resources, consultants, and solutions.
In conclusion, Neon One could be a suitable fit if you want a big company and require a variety of tools (and don’t mind that the tools originate from third parties and aren’t native to the CRM).
4. Discover DonorPerfect, one of the top nonprofit CRMs for creating bespoke reports, for more information.
DonorPerfect provides charitable organizations with donor management and fundraising capabilities so they can manage contributors, collect money both online and off, and automate administrative activities all from one CRM. It has a broad network of partners to offer services including website maintenance, auctions, and prospect research. The organization’s influence spans both the United Kingdom and the whole United States as well as Canada.
Customers appreciate that they may choose reporting parameters and that they can construct campaigns on partner websites like Constant Contact. Although the firm just dubbed its Donor Perfect Processing, it’s crucial to remember that it still uses a third-party payment processor, so this isn’t an all-in-one solution.
Conclusion: DonorPerfect will supply the technology if you are familiar with CRMs and know how to set up and manage information.
5. Best “Smart” Nonprofit CRM: Blackbaud/Raiser’s Edge
Those who work in the nonprofit sector have probably heard of Blackbaud and Raiser’s Edge, their all-inclusive CRM. Raiser’s Edge provides cultivation tools for attracting new donors, analytics for providing donor insights and “smart” recommendations, and data enrichment services for helping you fill up any gaps in your donor data.
Raiser’s Edge is a reliable off-the-shelf CRM; they take advantage of substantial connectors to provide comprehensive functionality, but the system isn’t very configurable without technical knowledge. It is advised for medium-sized NGOs to use Raiser’s Edge NXT.
For NGOs of all sizes, Blackbaud owns and offers several donor management and fundraising solutions. Offerings include Blackbaud Altru®, which provides ticketing, fundraising, and membership management software, as well as Blackbaud eTapestry®, which provides small NGOs with an easy fundraising and supporter management solution.
Blackbaud recently rebranded its payment processing as BBMS (Blackbaud Merchant Services), however, they still employ distinct third-party systems in the background.
Conclusion: Blackbaud should remain on your list if you enjoy the growth strategy of acquiring businesses when there is a gap in a suite of products and you have the capacity to modify and troubleshoot in-house.
6. Salesforce is the best nonprofit CRM for tech-savvy organizations.
Salesforce, widely regarded as the most well-known CRM for sales, interfaces effectively with third-party systems but requires a number of additional subscriptions to function. Salesforce may be tailored for nonprofits by clients using the Nonprofit Success Pack. Salesforce has just recently entered the nonprofit sector (launching this solution in 2018), despite having been a cornerstone of the sector for more than 20 years.
Small and mid-size NGOs may not always have access to Salesforce since it requires skills comparable to that of a software engineer.
In conclusion, if your company is big and you have internal IT and software professionals, you might want to think about using Salesforce’s nonprofit services.
7. Best Nonprofit for Continuous Improvement: Virtuous
Fast data entry, data health tools, and process automation are all provided by Virtuous. Virtuous, an all-in-one CRM, relies on a big network of partners to offer complete functionality. Customers like that Virtuous frequently provides remedies for various issues and idiosyncrasies and that the platform is always evolving. Although the business doesn’t have a native reporting tool, it does provide such a feature for a price.
Conclusion: Virtuous has a strong CRM and is always adapting to meet client demands.
8. Explore Classy, one of the top nonprofit CRMs for website development, and make use of its e-commerce and form generation features.
Forms and payment processing are used by Classy, a platform created for donating that GoFundMe just bought. Raiser’s Edge and Salesforce are just two of the many platforms that Classy interfaces with despite not being a CRM. The business provides a number of solutions for processing payments from third parties so that you may evaluate costs and choose the best one.
In conclusion, Classy can be a suitable fit for you if you want forms and e-commerce on your website but don’t want a complete range of donor management services.
9. Best Nonprofit CRM: CharityEngine
Naturally, we wouldn’t consider a list of the top CRM solutions complete without including CharityEngine. The only fundraising CRM with native features is CharityEngine, which enables you to use data to improve donor connections, raise more money, and have a greater influence on society. Although it could come equipped with all the tools you want right out of the gate, it can also easily interact with any other system to support the development of an enterprise-level tech stack. Oh, and we don’t have any intentions to combine with anyone.
The missions of CharityEngine’s clients range from those that are more local and focused, like Shelby Humane Society, to those that are more national in scope, like Army Emergency Relief. Designed exclusively for fundraisers, CharityEngine provides large-scale email and marketing automation capabilities, resources to increase monthly giving, and competitive, secure payment processing.
In conclusion, CharityEngine is a solid, scalable nonprofit CRM that offers enterprise billing and payment processing, large-volume email automation, reporting, and sophisticated analytics.
That is a lot to think about. Does a nonprofit CRM make sense?
There are several CRM systems available for NGOs, as you have just read. And we can firmly assert that none of the options are unwise. Behind the scenes, our industry is amicable, and we think all of our rivals do a wonderful job. It could take some searching to find the program that best meets your requirements, but we can assure you that the time spent will be well spent on a solid nonprofit CRM.