Nonprofit organizations often have unique needs when it comes to implementing a CRM solution. While for-profit businesses are focused on engaging customers and convincing them to buy products or services, nonprofits have the task of trying to sell ideas. Whether it’s humanitarian, political, environmental, or anything in between, selling ideas is always a unique challenge.
Businesses typically use CRM to communicate with prospects who are considering purchasing products and services for their own benefit. Nonprofit organizations use CRM to communicate with supporters and donors to convince them to invest in something that may never benefit them directly. This difficulty is often compounded by the fact that most nonprofits operate on very tight budgets.
The tight budgets, and specific needs, of a nonprofit can make finding the right CRM solution a challenge. To help with the evaluation and selection process, here’s a list of some of the big-name vendors that offer special pricing for non-profits, along with some niche vendors that provide CRM software specifically created for nonprofit organizations.
Enterprise CRM Solutions
Some of the biggest names in the CRM market offer free and discount licenses for nonprofit organizations. This gives nonprofits the opportunity to benefit from enterprise-class CRM software while staying on a nonprofit budget. While there may be other large vendors that offer discounts, these leading vendors proudly advertise lower prices for nonprofits:
Salesforce
One of the biggest CRM vendors, Salesforce offers discounted licenses for nonprofits through the Salesforce Foundation. With their software, nonprofits can manage everything from donor engagement to volunteer recruitment. Their web-based software also saves your organization the expense of purchasing and maintaining servers on site.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Microsoft is another large vendor that provides discounted CRM licensing for nonprofit organizations. Their software is noted for its ability to easily manage the complex relationships and reporting requirements of most nonprofit organizations. Dynamics may offer advantages for nonprofits that are already using other Microsoft products and services.
CRM Specifically For Nonprofit Organizations
While the big-name vendors are very popular, and have many features that would benefit a nonprofit, they weren’t created specifically for the challenges that nonprofits face. Some nonprofits may not have the time, money, or manpower to customize a system for their needs. Fortunately, there are several CRM vendors on the market that cater directly to the nonprofit sector. Their software and services are designed from the ground up to meet the needs of nonprofit organizations.
Blackbaud
Formerly an educational software vendor, Blackbaud now focuses entirely on providing accounting and management software to nonprofit organizations. Their CRM software offers an array of features, including constituent management, analytics, multi-channel marketing, and more.
Salsa CRM
Salsa CRM is used by political campaigns, advocacy groups, nonprofits, and others. Their software allows for easy online fundraising, communication, and organization. They also offer robust support, including assistance with everything from implementation to webpage setup.
Giftworks
Giftworks CRM is designed to help manage donations, donors, and operations within smaller nonprofit organizations. These smaller organizations may find enterprise-level CRM systems too large and bulky for their needs. Giftworks seeks to provide a smaller, more manageable alternative. Their CRM software provides donor management, fundraising, campaign tracking, and more.
Nonprofit Easy
Nonprofit Easy is also focused on small and mid-sized nonprofit organizations. Their solution is module-based, allowing organizations to build a platform that includes only the features they’ll be using. For nonprofits that don’t have a lot of time or money to customize and learn new software, NPE’s module-based platform can be a great benefit. All of the modules are fully customizable and integrate seamlessly with other modules.
Kindful
Kindful is a fundraising nonprofit CRM software that offers powerful online fundraising tools, intuitive donor management and comprehensive reporting analytics all in one, centralized data hub. They’re CRM platform has all the same data and reporting functionality as larger providers, but in a design that highlights beauty and ease-of use. Kindful also provides custom integrations with some of the web’s most popular online fundraising services – like MailChimp for email marketing and Eventbrite for event management. The result is the seamless sync between online fundraising tools and a powerful donor database so that nonprofits can spend less time in their database and more time with donors.
A Worthy Goal
For nonprofit organizations, which are typically dependent on a constant flow of donated money, CRM software can vastly simplify the most common tasks and processes. With the right solution, an organization will be able to spend less time on back-end management and tracking, and more time focusing on core goals. While this list doesn’t cover every possible CRM solution for nonprofit organizations, it will hopefully provide a point in the right direction.
