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Do you really need fundraising CRM software?
To help you answer, consider these facts. A fundraising CRM enables you to:
- Efficiently manage diverse fundraising efforts on one platform.
- Collect donations from different platforms and transfer them to your account by integrating with your payment gateway.
- Automate processes like sending out thank-you emails after receiving a gift and adding details of the gift to the right donor profile.
- Create reports on your efforts to provide valuable insights into what’s working and what’s not.
In short, fundraising CRM software makes fundraising more efficient and effective.
I understand that finding a new fundraising CRM software is not the most exciting task in the world. On the contrary, the research can be pretty tedious.
Not anymore. We’ve researched for you, compiled a list of critical features for searching for a fundraising CRM, and listed a few of our favorites.
What is fundraising CRM software?
Before discussing the key features, it’s essential to understand the solution’s purpose and function.
Fundraising CRM software is a tool that helps facilitate the entire fundraising process. It streamlines fundraising operations by enabling you to control aspects of it from a single platform, which includes:
- Campaign management: Enabling you to create and run different fundraising campaigns like crowdfunding, peer-to-peer fundraisers, etc.
- Payment integrations: It integrates with different payment processors, allowing you to collect payments from various sources, such as cards, wire transfers, etc.
- Reporting and analytics: Offering you reports and analysis on fundraising efforts. For example, what fundraising channel brings in the most donations, which brings in new donors, etc?
While different fundraising software may offer additional features, these are the most basic functionalities every tool offers.
A fundraising CRM is often referred to as a fundraising platform, too. But don’t confuse them with platforms like Fundly or GoFundMe because there are two types of these platforms:
- Hosted: Applications whose backends are controlled by others. You can still use the features in the front end, but you won’t have access to the admin functions. For example, you can create a fundraising campaign on GoFundMe but can’t add a payment option, right?
- Self-hosted: Applications that you control in the backend. So, the fundraising CRM software you select is a self-hosted fundraising platform. You control all the admin functions and can modify them however you need.
How is a fundraising CRM different from a regular CRM and DMS?
When scouting for a fundraising platform, you’ll likely find websites offering comprehensive CRM or donor management systems. Understanding the distinction between them is essential to knowing which best suits your needs.
| What is it? | What is it best suited for? | |
| Constituent Relationship Management System (CRM) | It is a comprehensive tool that tracks every aspect of an individual’s journey with your organization. It also helps you build flows for automated communications, sync different teams within the organization, and automate other processes to build better relationships with supporters. | Medium- and small-sized nonprofits focus on improving donor relations over other tasks (like marketing for awareness). |
| Donor Management System (DMS) | Nonprofits of all sizes need a tool to facilitate different types of fundraising efforts over multiple channels, such as peer-to-peer fundraising on social media or an email fundraising campaign. | A DMS is a subcategory of CRMs designed to collect and manage donor data and support donor relations. They are usually not as feature-rich as CRMs. |
| Fundraising CRM | A fundraising CRM software is specifically designed to facilitate your fundraising operations. It doesn’t track donor interactions or prospect touchpoints outside the fundraising process. | Nonprofits of all sizes need a tool to facilitate different types of fundraising efforts over multiple channels, such as peer-to-peer fundraising on social media or an email fundraising campaign. |
While having all three tools is highly beneficial for any organization, the accompanying costs are a huge burden. Hence, it’s essential to prioritize the one you wish to start with and procure the rest as you grow.
What does a fundraising CRM do for you?
While the specifics may differ, the best fundraising CRM software facilitates the following crucial fundraising operations.
1. Online fundraising
Online fundraising is becoming increasingly important for nonprofits.
- In 2019, online giving was up by 23%.
- On average, 39% of donors who made an online gift to a nonprofit in 2018 made an online gift again to that nonprofit in 2019, indicating that online donor retention is more accessible.
It’s only evident that your fundraising CRM should help you manage your online fundraising efforts easily. Here are some specific tasks that it should enable you to do:
- Create custom landing pages for different campaigns.
- Craft custom online donation forms for different pages.
- Create and automatically send out email appeals and follow-ups for email fundraising.
- Let supporters create landing pages for peer-to-peer fundraisers with ease.
- Provide multiple online payment options for all fundraising campaigns.
Apart from this, a few good-to-have features in a fundraising CRM include:
- The ability to set up crowdfunding campaigns on your website.
- Creating a micro-store to carry out fundraising for merchandise (t-shirts, mugs, etc.).
- Integration with donation matching platforms to support matching gift fundraising campaigns.
2. Offline fundraising
Even though online fundraising is on the rise, offline methods still account for a significant portion of all fundraising revenue. Hence, it’s essential for your fundraising CRM to support these efforts to some extent by allowing you to:
- Create customized templates and auto-populate them with relevant data (like donor name, past donation, address for mailing, etc.) for direct mail fundraising.
- Craft a custom donation form to collect donations during offline interactions. Prospects will be led to this form either through text-to-donate, scanning a QR code, or other methods.
- Sync with your donor management system to add donor data collected in offline fundraising campaigns to the relevant donor profile.
Being cloud-hosted solutions, the ability of a fundraising platform to support your offline campaigns is limited. However, these three features should be taken care of in most offline fundraising operations.
3. Data tracking and reporting
Once your campaign is over, you would want to look over the results to understand what worked and what didn’t. For this, you’ll need data from each campaign.
A fundraising CRM software enables your organization to track the following data:
- Donation amount and the donor who gave it.
- The donation is coming from the campaign. You may be running multiple campaigns at once, and you’ll need this data to see which one is doing better.
- Amount of the donation that is tax-deductible. This will come in handy when sending out tax receipts or donor acknowledgment letters, as you can directly merge this field.
- Method of giving.
Every fundraising software has an analytics dashboard that organizes this data into reports. With these reports, you can get insights into your campaigns, track relevant metrics, and notice trends across campaigns.
For example, with a campaign report, you can track:
- How many donors from your previous campaigns donated again?
- What was the average gift size of these repeat donations?
These metrics help you understand your current donor retention rate and potential retention for the next campaign.
You can customize these reports to add additional fields and track other metrics that are relevant to you.
Fundraising CRM software you can consider
To find a fundraising CRM that best suits you, you can review different options and their feature lists and compare them with the features described above. That’s going to be a tedious but important task.
But if you’re short on time, here’s a list of some of our favorite platforms you can consider instead.
Disclaimer: All the prices mentioned in this article are updated as of November 2024. Please check if the pricing remains the same at the time of your reading this article.
1. CauseVox fundraising CRM software
CauseVox is a comprehensive fundraising platform that focuses on boosting digital fundraising efforts. Its built-in CRM lets you build automated communication flows by integrating it with relevant communication software.
A notable feature of the platform is event ticketing, allowing you to sell tickets for offline and virtual events.
Pricing
CauseVox is available to nonprofits in two different packages. It has a free package and a premier package which starts at $200.
2. CharityEngine fundraising CRM software
CharityEngine is a nonprofit fundraising solution built for multi-channel fundraising. In addition to traditional online fundraising campaigns, this tool helps you create and manage major gifts, direct mail, eCommerce, and event fundraising.
This fundraising software also offers an A/B testing feature, which is handy if you’re experimenting with a new type of campaign.
Pricing
CharityEngine has two pricing packages:
1. For Growing Nonprofits ($1.5M-$10M)
2. For Enterprise Nonprofits ($10M+)
3. Luminate fundraising CRM software
Built for nonprofits by Blackbaud, Luminate is a powerful cloud-hosted fundraising software. This solution has an inbuilt donor management system that allows you to create custom donor profiles to track and manage their interactions and help build better donor relations.
A notable feature of Luminate is its content creation and management tool, which lets you create different types of content for your campaigns within the platform.
Pricing
Luminate also offers custom packages based on a nonprofit’s requirements. To get a quote, you must contact their team here.
4. NeonOne fundraising CRM software
NeonOne is a cloud-based tool that offers fundraising and donor management solutions through a single platform. It supports fundraising operations and helps with communications, event management, and donor tracking.
One feature that stands out is the nonprofit website design tool that allows you to build microsites or even an entire website for your organization.
Pricing
NeonOne offers a demo to help you discover their product and pricing.
5. QGiv fundraising CRM software
QGiv is another comprehensive fundraising CRM that focuses on online fundraising operations. This platform is known for its easy-to-use interface and extensive customization for fundraising.
Apart from everyday fundraising operations, QGiv offers a text-to-give platform to support text fundraising.
Pricing
Qgiv allows you to build your package starting at $25/mo. You can then add on features such as text fundraising ($159/mo), peer-to-peer ($259/mo), and auctions ($259/mo)
6. Panorama fundraising CRM software
Panorama is a fundraising CRM software built by FrontStream. It’s an integrated solution with multiple fundraising apps for different campaigns (like auctions, virtual events, etc.) hosted on one platform.
A feature to look out for in this software is the donor and volunteer management system, which is handy when managing events.
Pricing
To know Panorama’s pricing, you can request a quote from them.
Finding a new fundraising CRM software is like laying the foundation of your house. While it isn’t exciting, it has a long-term impact on your organization, one that can be expensive if done wrong.
Hopefully, the points above will guide you in the right direction and ease the effort you need to put into this process.
Ready to begin your fundraising journey?
Fundraising requires managing data and reaching out to volunteers, supporters, and donors to help make your campaigns successful.
If you are looking for outreach software that helps you call, text, email, and fundraise, look no further than CallHub. It also enables you to integrate other CRM software to transfer and update data seamlessly.
Featured image source: Kuncheek
