3 Best CRM for Nonprofits

Nonprofit organizations must make every client contact count. If you’re a nonprofit leader, you know you need the best CRM (customer relationship management) for nonprofits in order to maintain a loyal donor base, increase gifts across new populations and keep your message in the minds of potential volunteers, foundations and supporters. CRM for non-profits are more than email campaigns and fundraising letters; it’s the heart of your agency’s efforts to connect people with your mission. Here are three best CRM for nonprofits — systems that rank high for delivering results.

Best CRM for Nonprofits Provides Enterprise Views of Data

Blackbaud offers three choices for nonprofit CRM, but its Blackbaud CRM is an enterprise-level product, offering strong visibility if you’re a larger nonprofit or have multiple branches and sites. A feature that makes the product among the best CRM for nonprofits is that it helps you with cultivating and maintaining lifetime communication and relationships with your supporters. This is accomplished by uniting your multi-dimensional initiatives, such as annual campaigns, capital campaigns, volunteer relationships and events, and then allowing this valuable data to be transferred from chapter to chapter and accessed by numerous users nationwide. One downside to consider of Blackbaud CRM is the need to train multiple staff users on the intricate tools, which could increase your learning curve and implementation time. This solution may also rank among the higher-priced of the best CRM for nonprofits.

Allowing Your Members to Find Each Other: A Trait of Best CRM for Nonprofits

Wild Apricot offers outstanding customer support, alongside a simple user face that makes it easy to perform a key task in nonprofit CRM – adding and maintaining contact with new people. Wild Apricot is especially appealing if you’re a smaller nonprofit organization or if you need to launch or redo a web site, which serves as the company’s featured portal for improving your CRM. It’s Wild Apricot’s low-cost, uncomplicated approach to integrating key nonprofit tasks – such as managing your membership, keeping your supporters in tune with events and offering customer communication outlets like forms and emails – that give it clout among the best CRM for nonprofits. Another unique element: members can log in and search for, and connect with, fellow members, thus strengthening their connection and loyalty to you. Cons of Wild Apricot revolve around its web site functionality, which has been reported to lack the same pace toward innovations as its competitors.

Best CRM for Nonprofits Facilitates Multi-Dimensional Users and Campaigns

Convio stands out among the best CRM for nonprofits because its online software solutions allow you to not only track and manage your precious constituent relationships, but there are built-in tools for relating this information to targeted multi-dimension campaigns for capturing new supporters. Called Convio Common Ground, this CRM product is established on a Software-as-a-Service platform and lets you easily customize your fields on a click-by-click system. All your lists of client or constituent contacts are nicely placed in a centralized location, so that your board members, volunteers and others can access the information. Like others that are among the best CRM for nonprofits, Convio Common Ground is part of the AppExchange and you can keep up with donor and supporter relationships anywhere you go. Cons of this solution include confusion as you choose which category to place a constituent, as in account or contact, and may lack some detailed functionality users want in terms of frequency of credit card gifts. This may require some extra work of setting your own reminders.

No single CRM system is without flaw for your nonprofit, but the best CRM for nonprofits allows you to customize all the unique and rewarding tasks you perform as a leading nonprofit – and then channel this effort into powerful, easily managed and long-term relationships.