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CRMs and Donor Platforms – What are your experiences?
Hello NFC Community!
During our Individual Giving webinar on Tuesday the chat lit up with your opinions, recommendations, and warnings about the different Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and donor management platforms that you use in your organizations. We’d love to keep that conversation going here in the forum! Specifically, could you share with us observations on your experiences with some of these questions as a guide?
- What CRM platforms have you used for managing donor relationships and fundraising efforts?
- Are there any specific features or functionalities you find crucial in a CRM or donor platform for fundraising purposes?
- Have you encountered any challenges or limitations with certain CRM or donor platforms, and how did you address them?
- Are there any lesser-known or niche CRM platforms tailored specifically for fundraising that you’ve had success with?
- What advice or tips would you offer to someone in the process of selecting a CRM or donor platform for their fundraising initiatives?
We also found really helpful a graph from g2.com that was presented in the webinar which plots different platforms on axes of market presence and satisfaction. You can find that graph towards the bottom of this webpage: https://www.g2.com/categories/<wbr>fundraising.
Thanks everyone. We look forward to hearing from you!
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5 Replies
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My best experience with CRMs is actually to use something that *isn’t* specifically tailored for fundraising. By siloing “fundraising” data in one system, it’s hard to see connections across teams and use the system to track information that is relevant to development, finance, operations, and program. I have had the best success with using Salesforce (which is affordable even for small orgs, which can often obtain some free licenses), and using that for data management not just for donors but also for programmatic data & evaluation, revenue forecasting, and ops uses like contract tracking and inventory management. Especially as your org grows, this leads to less siloed information and the ability to track in one place contacts to have multiple relationships with the org (for example, maybe a donor is also a program partner).
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Thanks so much for your post, Sage. Great feedback about avoiding the siloing effect! Looking forward to hearing others’ perspectives.
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Hi Wade,
I just want to say thanks for putting this in the forum. I’ve been checking back periodically and was hoping you would receive more replies. This is a topic I’m interested in, but unfortunately, I don’t have anything to offer to this forum post. I will be looking to transition from our current CRM and would’ve liked to hear other’s research and comments on their CRMs.
Best of luck
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Chad: Below is some of the reactions in the chat from our January 30 webinar on individual giving. We’d love to get additional reactions on this question, since organizations wrestle with it all the time. We’ll send this out in our periodic email to see if we can generate more traffic on this —
• We use Neon CRM…. I’m curious what others use that they’ve liked
• We use MonkeyPod. It’s been great for us – integrated CRM, nonprofit accounting, e-comms, online giving, events & many other functions. Easy to use & low cost.
• We have a custom-built CRM that folks are invested in, but that I sincerely wish I could trade for an out of the box system that can play well with others…
• We use Give Lively & Salesforce
• We use Neon CRM and I really dislike it, had a much better experience with EveryAction and Salesforce in prior roles
• Katie, I dislike it as well… purely because of the difficulty I’m experiencing with automation and the extra tasks needed to realize gather and analyze donor data
• We also use Neon and I would echo Jena’s comment!
• We also use MonkeyPod and have been happy with it, although we’re still on a learning curve on integrating it with functions beyond the donor database.
• From my experience – be very careful of customizing! The long-term support and challenges for integrating other components can add expense both in time and money. Working with a client now that over-customized their CRM and increased their total cost of ownership of the software.
• I’m curious about experiences with Little Green Light? I have a few smaller nonprofit clients that use it and love it.
• Deborah I’m also curious about Little Green Light!
• We use LGL, and like it a lot.
• New to Little Green Light, but like it so far! It is intuitive and has great training videos/sessions.
• I’ve used LGL, and it’s really easy to use on the back end. I’ve heard from donors that it is hard to use on their end, the checkout process has a lot of steps, and it sometimes deters people from donating. It also makes recurring donations difficult.
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I have used Neon. It sucked.
Donor Perfect is a good system. I would also say that if you can find a system that has an integration with your accounting system it will ensure that your number come closer to matching and make the reconciliation much better.