Are you still using spreadsheets to keep track of contact information for your nonprofit? If the answer is yes, we have great news — contact management software for nonprofits is here to save the day.
The reality is that spreadsheets can’t meet the needs of a growing organization. To continue your mission and scale your organization, you need a contact management solution that will grow with your nonprofit. Whether keeping track of donors, partners, or beneficiaries, contact management for nonprofits is crucial and requires the right tools for success.
Implementing a contact relationship management (CRM) tool can streamline your communication efforts, allowing you to save time while keeping your contact records up-to-date. Here’s the best contact management software for nonprofits you should consider.
Table of Contents
- What is contact management for nonprofits?
- What makes great contact management software?
- Best Contact Management Software Solutions for Nonprofits
What is contact management for nonprofits?
Contact management is the process of consolidating and organizing constituent data within a central platform. In a nonprofit context, constituents can be donors, volunteers, members, event attendees, or partners.
Contact management enables organizations to avoid duplicate communications and save staff members time by storing all donor information and communications history in one place. Plus, if you’re not using contact management software, the tedious task of manually tracking contact data could be impacting your fundraising. It’s too difficult to keep track of everything manually — so leave it to your contact management software.
With a CRM tool, contact management can also include automation. Rather than writing individual emails to constituents, for instance, organizations can segment, personalize, and distribute mass communications that are relevant based on the information in the CRM. Overall, using this software is a win-win: It saves you time, and supercharges your efforts. Now, let’s dive into key features the best contact management software offers.
What makes great contact management software?
Looking for the best contact management software for your nonprofit? Finding the right CRM solution is a big decision. Donor management teams use contact management software day in and day out as their home base for connecting with donors and prospects. In other words, picking the right tool is a must.
Here are six criteria you should consider when evaluating a nonprofit CRM software.
1. Customization
Since the primary function of a contact management software is to house data, make sure that the database can hold all the data fields you need. What good is an alumni database, for instance, if you can’t enter a graduation year or major?
Find out if a nonprofit CRM is designed for your audience or if it will let you add a custom field to add all the information you need. Look for features like household and relationship linking, multiple addresses, and more. Other areas where it’s useful to customize your CRM are analytics dashboards and workflows.
2. Donor Communications
Once you’ve input your constituent data, it’s time to start engaging. You can segment your audience, like one-time donors or monthly donors, and create personalized communications.
The best nonprofit CRMs offer multiple ways to communicate within the platform, including: HTML email marketing, direct mail automation, and text-to-donate. By integrating your communications within the platform, you’ll be able to see your communications history with each prospect and use automation to send relevant acknowledgements and messages. This provides invaluable context on each constituent and their behavior.
3. Multi-Channel Fundraising
To boost donations, your fundraising platform should be easy and accessible for everyone in every setting. That means you can create different ways to give with just a few keystrokes — and track all donations in the CRM for reporting. Look for a platform that allows you to:
- Create custom donation pages
- Accept common payment providers like Stripe, PayPal, Google Pay, or Apple Pay
- Pay from mobile such as text-to-donate and scan-to-donate
- Create embeddable “Donate now” buttons
- Peer-to-peer fundraising
4. Event Management
Events are a major touchpoint for engagement with constituents, making it essential to have your ticketed and non-ticketed events connect to your CRM. Here’s what a nonprofit CRM can do for events:
- Operate ticket sales for events, integrating sales with your accounting software
- Manage live in-person and virtual auctions
- Manage volunteer sign-ups for events
- Add event attendance to your contact history
5. Integrations
While CRMs are designed to be an all-in-one software, the truth is that each nonprofit will have a tech stack that’s uniquely its own. You can save staff time by setting up integrations with accounting like QuickBooks or integrations like MailChimp, Constant Contact, SurveyMonkey, or Slack. If your contact management software doesn’t have any integrations, it probably isn’t a well-rounded choice.
6. Reporting, Analytics, and Donor Intelligence
Once your donations are linked back to your contact management activity, you can attribute campaign success back to the communications that prompted them. With a CRM solution, you can see visual dashboards to know if you’re on track and where you need to prioritize.
New functionality is also turning static donor information into a goldmine of data with AI and predictive analytics. Many CRM platforms offer wealth insights and lead scoring to let you know how engaged a donor is with your nonprofit. Some AI-powered insights will even recommend a gift amount based on activity and insights about the donor.
Now that you know what features to look for, let’s dive into our favorite contact management software for nonprofits.
Best Contact Management Software Solutions for Nonprofits
1.HubSpot CRM
HubSpot CRM is an easy-to-use contact management tool for organizations of all sectors and sizes. Your team can store necessary information for all of your organization’s contacts including donors and beneficiaries.
Get Started with HubSpot’s Free CRM for Your Nonprofit
Using HubSpot CRM, you can keep all communications with contacts in one place, allowing you to easily access previous messages without having to dig through your inbox or track down information from former colleagues. HubSpot CRM also has an extensive ecosystem of integrations, allowing you to seamlessly connect your contact management tool to other pieces of software needed to run your organization.
You can also use HubSpot CRM’s email marketing feature to bulk email your contacts to promote fundraising efforts or nurture relationships with donors.
Best for: Overall contact management
What we like: Ease of use, marketing integrations, predictive lead scoring all stand out as major pros. You can also update records on the go with HubSpot’s mobile CRM app. Plus, connecting your marketing tools and website with HubSpot CRM’s integrations is simple.
Price: Free, premium version available
2.Neon CRM
Neon One offers cloud-based software specifically for nonprofit management. Designed for teams of all sizes, Neon CRM provides tools to help organizations maximize their fundraising efforts, manage donor communications, simplify and streamline event planning efforts, and engage with community members. With a majority of their team coming from a nonprofit background, Neon CRM aims to provide time and resource-saving tools to help your organization achieve success.
Notable features include automated communications tools, a mobile-friendly interface perfect for volunteers and event efforts, and flexible integrations. As add-on features, you can add no-code website creation as well as event ticketing, donation pages, and virtual fundraising events.
Best for: Nonprofits looking to scale
What we like: The tool features a dashboard with fundraising KPIs at a glance. Neon CRM also has a pricing plan and version of their CRM specifically for associations.
Price: Pricing based on revenue, starts at $99 per month.
3.Bloomerang
Bloomerang offers donor management software designed to support donor engagement and retention. Key features include a full-stack CRM for maintaining all contact records for your organization, member and volunteer management, an online payment processing tool, Generosity Score tool for prospective donors, and social listening tools.
Bloomerang’s segmenting functionality lets you send targeted communications to a specific segment like at-risk donors or first-time donors for donor retention. You can also keep your tools synced with integrations including SurveyMonkey, Slack, QuickBooks, Square, and SurveyMonkey.
Best for: Donor retention
What we like: The tool has an engagement meter, a score of a constituent’s engagement based on past interactions, including giving, volunteerism, and marketing engagement. Grant tracking features to track grant workflows and deadlines also stand out.
Price:Plans start at $119 per month.
4.Kindful
The CRM from Kindful is an intuitive tool created to help you amplify your fundraising efforts and spread your organization’s mission. Purchased by Bloomerang in 2021, Kindful’s software aims to alleviate the administrative burdens of nonprofits with automation.
Valuable features include customization in donor fields and wealth insights and household and relationship tracking. You can fundraise your way with crowdfunding and peer-to-peer pages, pledges, event ticketing, text-to-give, and embeddable donate buttons. With unlimited admin users, you can empower your board and volunteers to make an impact alongside your team.
Kindful also integrates directly with popular applications such as QuickBooks, Mailchimp, Stripe, PayPal, and CharityAuctionsToday, making it easier for your organization to collect donations.
Best for: Fundraising and donor management
What we like: Donor details visualized at a glance with donor lifecycle dashboards. It also offers custom fields for your unique constituents. Plus, there are a variety of giving options, including text-to-give.
Price:Plans start at $119 per month.
5.DonorPerfect
DonorPerfect keeps all your vital donor data in one place, with a visual dashboard that can quickly align your team on the latest donation information. In addition to seamless data management, DonorPerfect offers fast donation processing, integrated online forms, and event management tools.
DonorPerfect’s SmartAction workflow automation saves teams time by creating assigned tasks, deadlines, and automated communications based on a trigger like a donation.
The full DonorPerfect platform is also available on mobile, making it easy for staff members and volunteers to pull up the information they need when they need it.
Best for: Donor retention and operational efficiency
What we like: The SmartActions workflow automation is a unique asset this software has.
Price: Plans start at $99 per month.
6. Virtuous
Virtuous’s CRM for nonprofit management has won awards for its ease of use and user adoption. With this tool you can personalize your donor communications with thoughtful automation, allowing you to reach more contacts and amplify your fundraising efforts while saving time. Virtuous’s Smart Recommendations include donor intelligence like lead scoring, wealth data, social media tracking, and predictive analytics.
Virtuous also has a built-in online giving platform, making it easy to seamlessly deliver personalized follow-up messages for donors to aid relationship-building.
Best for: Creating a positive donor experience
What we like: Contact management, marketing, fundraising, and event management are all in one place. Plus, you get a dedicated coach to help you onboard.
Price: Plans start at $400 per month.
7.Blackbaud CRM
Blackbaud is one of the largest software players in the nonprofit world, with solutions for large and enterprise organizations. Blackbaud CRM combines CRM capabilities with top fundraising tools to help your team turn supporters into donors. Other offerings include multichannel marketing tools that support dynamic communication efforts, direct mail programs, and an online content management system.
Some of its enterprise features include the ability to define solicitation and stewardship responsibilities and unite relationships across chapters, programs, and field offices. Blackbaud’s ResearchPoint tool offers powerful modeling, benchmarking, and a Nonprofit Cooperative Database to help you source new donors. Companion software like Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge integrates seamlessly with the CRM.
Best for: Large and enterprise-level nonprofit organizations, education
What we like: ResearchPoint analytics tools for data intelligence, workflows for multiple fundraising teams.
Price:Contact Blackbaud for pricing.
8.Givebutter
Givebutter’s anywhere, anytime motto means that you can add new donors and manage your constituent data from any device, whether you’re at an event or sitting at your desk. With a mobile-first approach to fundraising, Givebutter’s platform makes giving easy with text-to-give, scan-to-give, and event and auction features. Other standout features include live streaming and an in-app Canva integration for beautiful designs.
Givebutter’s unique tips-model makes it free for nonprofit organizations to use. Stripe, PayPal, and Venmo integrations give donors a variety of giving options.
Best for: Grassroots fundraising, mobile engagement
What we like: The Campaign Library, giving endless inspiration from real-world fundraising campaigns. Auction management makes in-person and virtual auctions a breeze with live displays to build momentum.
Price: Free
9.Salsa CRM
The Salsa CRM platform has a robust set of features designed for nonprofit organizations. Notable benefits of Salsa CRM include in-depth donor profiles, donation tracking, and reporting capabilities. All packages include Salsa Engage, which empowers organizations to fundraise and communicate with constituents. In a crowded digital space, Salsa CRM also eases offline communications with direct mail fundraising services.
Salsa CRM allows you to deepen your relationships with donors through the creation of workflows designed to track gift prospecting. Your team can also create custom workflows to support grant and member management.
Best for: Nurturing contact relationships
What we like: Relationships and household features to give you the big picture of your donor prospects.
Price:Contact Salsa to request pricing.
10.Keela
Keela’s nonprofit software solution is designed to help organizations improve donor relationships, streamline communication, and analyze relevant data. The CRM platform prioritizes relationship-building and placing donors through journeys.
Keela also offers nonprofit intelligence tools, putting robust data front and center to drive organizational decisions. You can assign a donor score, which ranks contacts based on engagement and activities tracked in the system.
Best for: Full-stack nonprofit management
What we like: Keela’s unlimited form-builder lets you feed your database with custom forms like event registrations, volunteer signups, and donations.
Price:Plans start at $99 per month.
11.EveryAction by Bonterra
EveryAction serves nonprofit organizations serving every type of cause. Its nonprofit CRM software is designed to centralize online, offline, and automated outreach in one place.
EveryAction’s donor management tools enable teams to send direct mail, email, digital ads, telemarketing, and SMS without switching data from one system to another. Users can also identify likely predictive analytics based on behavioral data.
Best for: Fundraising, volunteer mobilization, political advocacy
What we like: Diverse donor management with fields like preferred pronouns, preferred names, and more. Fully integrated mobile tools reach a new generation of donors where they spend the most time.
Price:Contact EveryAction for pricing.
12.DonorSnap
Don’t you wish you could complete donor records and donor acknowledgements in a snap? DonorSnap’s platform is designed to do just that, with a contact management system available on desktop and mobile.
DonorSnap’s contact management system accounts for complexities such as multiple addresses, households and relationships, plus any other customization you wish to add. Keep notes, track volunteer engagement, and manage memberships within DonorSnap’s nonprofit CRM software. You can also send email communications, manage events, and create donation pages.
Users rate DonorSnap highly for ease of setup and support. Its live support offered across pricing tiers has an average response time of under two hours.
Best for: Donor engagement, smaller nonprofits
What we like: You can automate donor acknowledgement letters and emails and carry on 1:1 text communications with constituents. Stay in the loop with custom reports sent to your inbox at the interval you choose.
Price: Starts at $39 per month or $450 per year.
13.iMIS
iMIS nonprofit software is designed for trade associations, unions, clubs, member associations, and faith communities to enable growth. Core features include contact and activity management, member and chapter management, email marketing, event registrations, and accounting and payments. Powered by Microsoft Azure, iMIS’s portals are secure and GDPR-compliant.
By combining contact management and web publishing, iMIS allows organizations to have greater visibility of cross-functional data. Using this tool your team can manage contact data, track donor engagement, improve productivity, and manage your organization’s web presence.
Implementing the right tools can make all the difference in how you run your organization. To learn more about the importance of using the right CRM, check out this post.
Best for: Associations
What we like: Specific features for membership and alumni associations like chapter management, learning management with certifications, and accounting.
Price:iMIS pricing starts at $8,500 per year with three user seats.
Find the best contact management software for your team.
Ultimately the best contact management software is one that works for you and makes your job easier. If you give these contact management software solutions a try, you’re guaranteed to find one that will suit your nonprofit’s needs.
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