Americans gave nearly $450 billion to charities in 2019, according to data from Giving USA, more than two-thirds of which came from individual donors. Charitable giving is the lifeblood of nonprofits. Which means that tools to manage donations and donor relationships are a critical need.
Small and mid-sized nonprofits constrained by limited budgets and small staff need affordable tools to help them manage and grow their fundraising programs. Fortunately, today’s marketplace offers myriad options for nonprofits seeking low-cost fundraising tools.
At its core, successful fundraising is built on relationships. For major gifts programs, these are one-on-one relationships between development officers and high net worth individuals. But this model is not feasible for direct response fundraising. For this group of donors, nonprofits look to donor engagement strategies that deepen connections between the organization and donors. In recent years, many donor management systems have broadened their offerings to keep pace with the growing desire of nonprofits to deepen engagement with their constituents.
Fundraising software allows nonprofits to provide mass personalization—letting individuals know they are “seen” by a nonprofit and are integral to the organization’s success. To accomplish this, a system must be able to collect and repurpose a lot of data about each constituent. Nonprofits need strong reporting tools to understand who has given, why they have donated, and how to increase the likelihood of getting this donor to give an additional gift. They need to be able to reach their donors where they are—either through postal mail, telephone, email, social media, or mobile devices. They need to have a system that their entire staff can access and use so that fundraising and communication strategies and tactics are data-driven and responsive to changes.
In today’s world, that means nonprofits need to consider systems that facilitate work from any geographic location, that allow them to collect donations online, and that allow them to communicate directly with their donors.
This report looks at 23 systems that do just that. And because the individual needs of nonprofits vary greatly, there is no one-size-fits-all solution out there. The system that checks the most boxes may not necessarily do everything well or be easy to use. A system that does a few things really well is likely a better fit for a nonprofit that focuses primarily on those few things. That’s why we’re not telling you which of these 23 systems is the best—instead we’ve laid out 12 use cases that correspond to ways in which nonprofits leverage their software, and selected one system to represent each use case.
For the first time, we’ve also created a digital version of this guide with additional functionality to help organizations filter systems by the criteria most important to them and compare the available options. By looking at what fundraising systems can do and deciding which features are most critical to your needs, you can narrow your search to the options that best meet your needs and better navigate this competitive marketplace.