This is the fifth edition of this report, and since the first edition, much has changed—most obvious, of course, is the name. Why did we change the title from A Consumers Guide to Low-Cost Donor Management Systems to A Consumers Guide to Low-Cost Fundraising Software? Because we think the new one better reflects how nonprofits use the systems we review in its pages and better matches how vendors talk about their products. (You can learn more about the terminology in the next section, What Types of Systems are Available?)
We’ve changed, as well. Since the last edition of the this guide, Idealware merged with the nonprofit Tech Impact—a longtime provider of education and services to the sector—to create an organization with more resources, more expertise, and a wider reach.
The marketplace for systems has changed. As the nonprofits who rely on them changed how they do their work to keep pace with the times, the vendors who build the systems worked hard to meet those changing needs. The growth of online fundraising made the ability to accept online donations critically important. A series of high-profile data breaches also underscored the importance of strong security measures to protect systems and data.
The world itself was changing, too. As we conducted our research, nonprofits worldwide were adjusting to the impacts of a global pandemic that upended traditional office-based staffing models, discouraged in-person events, and forced them to rethink the ways they could deliver on their mission, pushing remote work and flexible online tools to the forefront of nonprofit IT priorities.
At the same time, we initiated a series of conversations with nonprofit staff, subject matter experts, and software vendors to find out how the sector uses this guide in the software selection process and identify ways to make it more useful.
There’s no shortage of excellent software on the market. At a high level, every system in this guide—and some that did not meet our eligibility requirements for one reason or another—is capable of meeting the general needs of most nonprofits. It’s in the details, where the specific needs of every nonprofit differ, that selection becomes most important. There is no “best” software—the right software for you is the one that best meets your individual needs.
To that end, we’ve expanded our use case models to make it easier than ever for nonprofits to find one that most resembles their own needs and models for how they might use a donor management system. For each, we’ve listed the systems that we think are best-suited to that particular use case. We’ve also updated our evaluation terminology to better reflect changing knowledge, and added a number of new considerations—such as text messaging capability, payment processing flexibility, login security, automated workflows, and much more—to better differentiate the systems’ features and abilities.
The Systems
For this edition, we surveyed vendors of nearly 40 systems, and participated in vendor demos of the 23 that met our eligibility criteria based on their responses to our survey questions. Of those 23 systems, we chose 12 to represent each of the use cases we identified, and conducted longer demos—and wrote longer reviews—of those dozen systems.
We’ll talk more about that methodology elsewhere in this guide, but there’s one takeaway we cannot state clearly or frequently enough—the 12 systems we chose for longer demos and reviews are not necessarily the best 12 systems, nor are they ranked in any order. We chose them because they best met the needs of the use cases we identified. But in the real world, each nonprofit’s needs are different, even among those with similar use cases, and can vary dependent upon everything from size and budget to the abilities of its most- and least-knowledgeable users and countless other factors. Our overarching goal for this guide is to teach you how to make smart decisions about technology, and to provide you with as much information about the different systems available to you for you to make that decision on your own. Our reviews and choices are simply a starting point for your own due diligence.
This edition of the guide marks the inaugural appearance of a number of new systems:
- CharityEngine
- Eleo
- Keela
- NationBuilder
- Virtuous
In addition, several systems reviewed in the 2017 edition merged with or were acquired by other vendors and no longer qualify for this report:
- DonorCommunity merged with Telosa Software to create Arreva
- Arreva acquired MatchMaker FundRaising Software
- Blackbaud acquired NPOconnect
For this edition, we revised our inclusion criteria to consider only systems that offer a cloud-based access option, facilitate online donations, allow users to create a variety of online forms, and provide either native email marketing tools or a pre-built integration with an email marketing platform. In practice, this means some systems included in the last edition did not meet our new eligibility criteria:
- Abila Fundraising 50
- Akubo CRM
- BasicFunder Premier
- DONATION
- FastFund Raising Online
- ResultsPlus
- Total Community Manager
- Total Info
Each of these systems has its own strengths and weaknesses, and any might be a good fit for your particular needs, regardless of our own eligibility requirements.
Finally, while we made numerous attempts to contact vendors for systems we had previously included, several did not respond:
- Causeview
- Donor Tools
- FundRaiser Select
- Sustain Fundraising Management Software
- Talisma Fundraising Online