Best Fundraising Software

Emma Stein
ES
Researched and written by Emma Stein

Fundraising software is used by nonprofit organizations to manage funding processes. Its main goal is to attract and retain donors, and to ensure their loyalty and continuous financing. Fundraising campaigns can be performed online through social media and email campaigns, or during live events. The users of this type of software need to track the efficiency of any fundraising initiative and to develop long-term relationships with donors.

The best fundraising software often integrates with accounting or payment solutions for financial transactions processing. Also, it may require integration with nonprofit CRM or donor management solutions, when these features are not included in the fundraising software.

To qualify for inclusion in the Fundraising category, a product must:

Provide features to create multiple options for donations and gifts
Manage donor information and communications - for both existing or potential donors
Allow users to create, manage, and monitor campaigns to attract new donors
Include online options for one-time or recurring donations and gifts
Deliver reporting and analytics to evaluate fundraising initiatives or donors' contributions
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Featured Fundraising Software At A Glance

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Learn More About Fundraising Software

What is Fundraising Software?

Fundraising software is vital to nonprofit organizations, as it constitutes a significant percentage of nonprofit revenue. Fundraising software gives nonprofits a single source for relevant fundraising data, allowing them to focus and streamline their efforts. Solutions in this category also promote and manage various methods of fundraising, allowing organizations to launch multi-pronged campaigns. Multi-method fundraising is key to ensuring all possible demographics and methods of communication have been leveraged. Fundraising software is the central operational base for any and all fundraising strategies carried out by a specific organization.

Who Uses Fundraising Software?

Nonprofit organizations use fundraising software to raise money for their specific cause. The money is funneled toward whatever the organization needs help with, be it overhead, event costs, or something else. Within the organization, the employees tasked with fundraising utilize the software most often, though higher-level employees will use the data gathered by the software to formulate strategy and maintain an overview of fundraising operations.

What are the Different Kinds of Fundraising Software?

There are a few major types of fundraising. They differ greatly in the audiences they try to capture and the feature sets they contain.

Peer-to-peer fundraising softwarePeer-to-peer solutions are the newest craze within the nonprofit space, and there is ample evidence to support the notion that it provides more opportunity for fundraising greater amounts of money. Peer-to-peer is typically included as a feature within a larger fundraising solution, but there are specific peer-to-peer platforms as well. The basic notion of peer-to-peer fundraising software is that it extends the reach of the organization. Instead of the onus being entirely on your organization to produce fundraising results, it turns your donors into advocates. These advocates will then reach out to their network in order to raise money for your organization. Peer-to-peer fundraising platforms often focus on donation events and team-based donation. This configuration allows your advocates to become team leaders and spearhead the charge to organize and get people involved in a given cause. Team members will get their own donation pages, easily created and distributed by team leaders, to promote their own fundraising efforts. The entire goal of peer-to-peer is to extend the network of actively engaged donors, thereby increasing the amount of donations your organization receives. An example in recent years was the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, which leveraged the power of peer-to-peer fundraising to drive over $100 million in donations in a short period of time.

Text-to-giveThis type of fundraising software has taken off in the past couple of years. The benefit of these solutions lies in their ease of use and the ease with which donors can give to an organization. Text-to-give solutions leverage phone service providers to facilitate an easy transaction. Nonprofits can implement text-to-give software and utilize it at events to make donation gathering easier on both sides.

Auction — Auction fundraising software is a group of fundraising solutions that facilitate the planning and management of fundraising auctions. Auctions are a great channel through which nonprofits generate large amounts of revenue, and auction-specific fundraising software allows nonprofit organizations an easy way to put on auctions more easily.

CrowdfundingCrowdfunding fundraising software refers to applications that allow users to leverage the power of their networks to raise money. These applications provide sharing functions so campaigns can easily be shared among your network and their connections, with the hope that the campaign will pick up enough steam to go viral.

Matching giftMatching gift fundraising software refers to applications that facilitate employer matching of the charitable contributions of employees. These programs are popular ways for companies to engage in philanthropy, support their employees’ out-of-work interests, and check some boxes off on the corporate social responsibility checklist. As a nonprofit, matching gift programs are a fantastic way to leverage corporate desire for philanthropy and to double the donation amount.

Fundraising Software Features

Fundraising software often contains, but is not limited to, the following features:

Email marketing – A key part of nonprofit fundraising over the past decade, fundraising software offers email marketing functionality to help users connect with potential donors.

Direct mail — While response rates for direct mail have slowed, fundraising software still often contains direct mail capabilities so users can track and monitor direct mail campaigns and the data that is created as a result of those campaigns.

Event planning — Event fundraising is a massive industry, and fundraising software typically provides users with features that enable them to plan fundraising events directly within the application. Fundraising events may include auctions or events like bike races, for which the entire goal is to raise money for the organization. Event planning features allow for the seamless transition from event planning to event management and donation collection.

Donor profiles – Fundraising software builds and maintains donor profiles so nonprofit organizations can have a comprehensive overview of everyone contributing to a given cause. These donor profiles include donor history, all interactions that occurred between the organization and the donor, and donor information. Your organization can use these profiles to build out donor personas, which are analogous to the buyer personas often used in marketing strategy. These personas will help your organization shape their fundraising strategy and change it up depending on the specific persona they are going after.

Campaign management – Fundraising software often contains fundraising campaign management features. These features allow users to actively manage and oversee their organization’s fundraising campaigns.

Donation portal – A donation portal gives you the ability to accept donation payments directly in the application you’re using.

Mobile-friendly – Fundraising is taking place more on mobile devices than ever before, so fundraising software vendors are offering more mobile-friendly solutions than ever before.

Interaction tracking — Fundraising software often contains interaction tracking features, which provide your organization with an overview of all interactions between a given donor and your organization. This includes donation history, so you’re able to touch base with the donor at the correct times in order to turn them into a recurring donor.

Reporting – Most fundraising software offers users fairly detailed and customizable reporting features, which employees can use to track the successes and failures of various fundraising strategies.

Recurring donations – This feature gives organizations the ability to set up consistent donations for a given donor, ensuring a constant stream of income. Recurring donations also take the onus off of the organization to reach out again and again to the donor, removing the steps necessary for a donor to consistently contribute to a cause they deem of interest.

Automation — Fundraising automation functionality allows your organization to automatically schedule email blasts and send receipts to donors. The more the system is automated, the more time your employees have to focus on value-adding tasks, like crafting strategy or planning the next viral fundraising campaign.

Other features of fundraising software: Capital Campaign Capabilities, Planning Giving Capabilities.

Many fundraising software tools will also offer the following features: