Business Tools — Chapter 8

For an organization looking to build a large donor and subscriber base, it can be helpful to have a tool specifically designed for customer (or “constituent”) relationship management. The products here compile contact information, manage subscriptions and recurring donations, and even designate certain content as subscriber-only.

Donor Management Platforms

Bloomerang

Most of the major nonprofit donor management systems, such as Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge and eTapestry, DonorPerfect, and NeonCRM, do not have a freemium version. Bloomerang, however, offers a limited version of its donation software for free, which allows for up to 250 contacts and up to $100,000 in annual fundraising revenue. If you would like to try out a more sophisticated tool than DonorBox and GoFundMe, more heavily focused on analyzing, growing, and maintaining a donor base, then Bloomerang might prove a good option. The company also offer numerous workshops focused both on the software and on fundraising more generally.

Cost: Free for Lite plan, paid plans begin at $19 per month.

Languages: English only.

Donorbox

Donorbox is a simple way to begin accepting monthly and/or recurring donations through a website. A user can build a customized form, and Donorbox accepts payments in a multitude of formats, processes them through Stripe, Paypal, or ACH, and deposits the money directly in a designated bank account. It also includes a simple donor management system that allows a user to track donors by amount given and frequency of donations. Donorbox integrates with MailChimp and Salesforce.

Cost: Software is free; 1.5% per donation fee in addition to payment processing charges.

Languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, German, Italian, French, Dutch, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Portuguese, and Japanese. Usable in the 44 countries where Stripe is available.

GoFundMe Charity

Although GoFundMe is primarily known for individual fundraising, in 2017 the company purchased CrowdRise, a crowdfunding platform used by small organizations, to enable nonprofits to raise money through its site. GoFundMe Charity incorporates a donation box for monthly and recurring donations that a user can add to a site, branded campaigns, and donor analytics.

Cost: At the time of this writing, GoFundMe Charity is free, with a 2.9% + $0.30 processing fees charged per donation and an additional platform fee charged to larger organizations. This is promotional pricing that may change in the future.

Languages: Supported in 19 countries.

Hype

Hype was designed specifically for online media businesses as a “creator economy monetization software.” It offers a single solution for managing contacts, monetizing site content (including setting up subscription services and implementing paywalls), payment and donation processing, expanding email list and newsletter signups, and integrating with MailChimp and other existing tools an organization might be using to perform portions of this work. Currently, Hype has a waitlist for new customers.

Pricing: Free for up to 500 contacts, paid tiers begin at $5 per month for every 500 contacts above that threshold.

Languages: English only.

Salesforce

Salesforce is the world’s largest provider of CRM databases. For nonprofits, it offers a tailored suite of cloud-based tools, which have a wide range of applications. Small nonprofit news organizations would largely benefit from Salesforce.org’s Nonprofit Success Pack’s ability to manage and communicate with donors, expand email lists, create reports and impact management assessment, and track grant funding. Salesforce software is complex to set up and use, so unless your organization has a robust plan to expand a donor base, it might exceed your needs; also, although the NPSP is billed as free for up to 10 users, it requires an underlying sales or service contract.

Cost: Free for 10 users, but a sales contract beginning at $36 per month is required. For-profit organizations can also use Salesforce (via salesforce.com) to manage subscriptions and marketing, but pricing depends on the exact services you want to use.

Languages: 16 fully supported languages; more languages supported for end-users.

Streak

Streak is a Google Chrome extension that essentially turns a user’s Gmail account into a workflow management tool and CRM. A user can assign certain emails, tasks, and calendar events to a “pipeline” for a single project; this pipeline can be shared with multiple users, who can make notes on it, automatically receive all communication related to the project, and so on. Streak also allows users to save contacts to a Google spreadsheet with notes and information, assign them to specific mailing lists, and then email the lists directly. Streak incorporates a number of views for tracking and displaying emails, projects, and conversations.

Cost: Basic plan incorporating 500 contacts available for free; paid plans start at $15 per user per month.

Languages: English only.