Fundraising software allows nonprofit organizations to accept and manage donations with ease. From all-in-one donor management solutions to specialized fundraising event apps, there are plenty of fundraising software solutions available to help your organization thrive.
In this guide, we’ll cover some frequently asked questions about fundraising software for nonprofits and explore the top solutions. We’ve divided our list into the following categories to help you begin your search and choose the best fit for your needs:
- Top fundraising software features to look for
- Best comprehensive nonprofit fundraising software
- Fundraising software for online giving
- Event fundraising software for nonprofits
- Other nonprofit fundraising software
As we explore these options, keep your current and long-term organizational priorities in mind. Ideally, you should invest in unified, scalable software that will streamline both internal processes and the donor journey.
Why do nonprofits use fundraising software?
Fundraising software can help you boost donations, foster a positive donor experience, and build long-term relationships that support your organization for years to come.
Specifically, the right solution can help you:
- Improve donation tracking and reporting: Keep all of your data centralized and easy for relevant team members to access. See individual supporters’ donation histories and overall fundraising progress at a glance.
- Communicate more efficiently: Communication and marketing automation tools allow you to segment donors into groups, send email and social media messages, and communicate via text message.
- Streamline event management: Complete supporter engagement systems include tools to manage advocacy campaigns, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer events, nonprofit auctions, and more.
Fundraising software helps all kinds of nonprofits and their teams. Marketing staff use it to communicate with prospective donors, the executive team pulls analytics and runs reports for the board of directors, and your development team relies on it for running fundraising campaigns.
Top fundraising software features to look for
While the exact list of features you need will be specific to your organization, there are certain features you should prioritize in your search for the best fundraising software. These include:
- Payment processing: Your PCI-compliant tool should allow you to accept and process payments virtually, as well as record additional donations you receive via other channels.
- Donation forms: Choose software with user-friendly form design tools that allow for customization, and ensure that your donation forms are mobile-optimized.
- Campaign tracking: Look at the reports and visual graphs available for specific campaigns and overall fundraising. Make sure the system you choose offers custom dashboards that report on key performance indicators.
- Email automation: Evaluate email design features, the ease of drag-and-drop builders, automated email workflows and triggers, and email performance tracking.
- Peer-to-peer fundraising tools: Your system should allow supporters to create individual campaigns, customize campaign pages, and share them with their networks.
- Text-to-give: Send targeted text messages to supporters and accept donations through apps or mobile-optimized donation pages.
- Event management: Depending on your needs, ensure your fundraising software can help you host auctions, giving days, and other fundraising events.
- Integrations: If you don’t choose an all-in-one fundraising solution (which we recommend), ensure potential systems can integrate with your core constituent relationship management (CRM) software.
Remember that your nonprofit’s needs may be different from those of other organizations. Brainstorm what’s necessary to your operations, and determine which software solutions best suit your needs based on the most essential features from the list above.
Read up on all of these features and how to find them by downloading our free fundraising software buyers’ guide.
Best comprehensive nonprofit fundraising software
Now that you know what to look for, explore our list of the top fundraising software for nonprofits, beginning with our top three picks for all-in-one solutions.
Bonterra Fundraising + Engagement Software
Bonterra’s Fundraising + Engagement solution (previously EveryAction) is a comprehensive, unified solution designed to help you earn and collect more donations, increase donor engagement, and empower your supporters to be life-long advocates for your cause — all in one place. Our fundraising software solution serves over 16,000 nonprofits, helping them secure essential funding from over 37 million donors.
What makes Fundraising + Engagement the best solution?
Fundraising + Engagement isn’t just a donor database or a set of communication tools — it’s a unified platform designed to provide one centralized fundraising and engagement experience for your supporters. Instead of spending valuable time and money connecting multiple disparate fundraising systems, Fundraising + Engagement provides a single, unified platform to meet all of your needs.
By keeping all of your fundraising, volunteering, event, and outreach data in one place, you can easily deliver better experiences for your supporters and steward them to their highest giving potential over time. The result is more fundraising dollars, higher donation values, and more engaged, life-long donors.
Just take a look at the powerful results global nonprofit WhyHunger achieved using Bonterra’s best-in-class fundraising software:
By keeping all of their donor data in one place and using Fundraising + Engagement’s deep segmentation, automation, and analytics features, WhyHunger saw a 218% increase in individual giving and an 80% increase in sustainers.
Essential platform features
Fundraising + Engagement includes all the features you’ll need to boost your fundraising capacity, including:
- Complete donor profiles with giving histories, custom contribution fields, biographies, and engagement points
- Workflow automation to save time on data entry, outreach, contact analysis, and custom donor communication journeys
- Outreach and engagement tools including targeted email, online action forms, SMS, phone calls, and one-to-one messaging
- Fundraising events and gamification including auctions, event live streaming, Giving Days, and fundraising leaderboards
- Peer-to-peer fundraising and advocacy tools that empower supporters to take direct action for your cause with ease
- Volunteer management features like mobile messaging, supporter-created events, social sharing, a volunteer management dashboard, and more
Plus, you can access support packages to get expert help and ensure you can make the most of the fundraising software as quickly as possible.
Fundraising software pricing
Bonterra Fundraising + Engagement is available in three tiers: Essentials, Pro, and Enterprise. Each option comes with key features for nonprofits of different sizes. To find out which option is right for you and receive personalized pricing for your organization, request a demo and speak to our team.
Bloomerang
Bloomerang is another popular fundraising solution that aims to provide a comprehensive set of tools for nonprofits. Bloomerang’s fundraising software includes payment processing, donor management, online giving, and volunteer management features. Some of its standout features include:
- Constituent timelines that display supporters’ history with your organization
- Donor generosity scores and engagement meters
- A mobile donation app with tap-to-pay functionality
This fundraising software is geared toward small to mid-size nonprofits, so if your organization is larger or enterprise-level, you likely won’t find this system robust enough to meet your needs.
Raiser’s Edge NXT
For nonprofits with large databases of donors, Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge NXT offers a cloud-based solution capable of housing all your most important supporter data. This nonprofit-focused fundraising CRM includes features like:
- Suggested ask amounts for individual donors generated by predictive AI
- Automatic data hygiene tools to improve the integrity of your data
- Integrations with other popular solutions like Eventbrite, Outlook, Salesforce, and MailChimp
Since Raiser’s Edge NXT is more complex, be mindful that migrating to this fundraising software and customizing it to meet your unique needs may require expensive outside help from a technology consultant.
Fundraising software for online giving
Looking for a solution specifically to help you fundraise online? Check out these fundraising solutions that help you accept, process, and manage online donations.
Fundraise Up
Fundraise Up helps you design optimized donation and campaign pages for your website. The platform boasts that you can “launch donation pages in minutes,” emphasizing how easy it is to create a custom landing page branded to your organization.
This online giving software comes with features like:
- Conversion-optimized donation page checkout forms
- Support for accepting multiple payment methods, including Apple Pay, PayPal, and Venmo
- Ability to accept donations in over 135 different currencies
If you don’t have a large IT team or any technical experts on staff, Fundraise Up can help you easily develop professional-grade donation pages to generate more online donations.
Fundly
Fundly is an online giving platform designed for both organizations and individuals. They offer basic donation and campaign page creation for anyone interested in fundraising online, from nonprofits to schools to religious organizations.
A few of their top features include:
- Ability to embed a campaign card and “donate now” button to your existing website
- Peer-to-peer fundraising pages for both individual supporters and teams
- Facebook integration that allows you to accept donations directly from Facebook
This fundraising software is a good choice if you’re looking for a very basic solution that lets you create online giving pages without any bells and whistles.
GoFundMe
While GoFundMe may not be one of the first solutions that come to mind when you think of nonprofit fundraising software, it is a well-known crowdfunding platform that your organization can take advantage of.
This solution enables anyone to create an online crowdfunding page, complete with:
- A quick fundraiser setup process that only requires a description, fundraising goal, and other details
- Social sharing buttons to easily spread the word about your campaign online
- Daily transfers of funds raised to your bank account
A smaller organization may choose GoFundMe over a more comprehensive platform because it’s widely known and trusted by the public. It’s also free to create a fundraiser, but there is a transaction fee for the donations you receive.
Donate Stock
This fundraising software meets a highly specific need for nonprofits: the ability to accept stock donations online. By giving your donors the option to give stocks, you can engage more high-income donors who may find stock giving more convenient.
Donate Stock provides the following features:
- An “Easy Button” for stock giving you can add to your website
- A branded homepage for accepting stock donations that you can personalize
- A stock donation dashboard that shows you when you receive stock gifts
You don’t even need a brokerage account to use this fundraising software. Donate Stock uses a charitable organization to convert the stock and send your organization cash proceeds directly.
Donately
Our final fundraising software option with the best online giving tools is Donately, a platform that helps you easily create custom online fundraising pages and donation forms. Donately emphasizes that there’s “no code, no developers, and no training required” to use their form builders.
Their custom donation forms include:
- Suggested donation amounts, including a suggested monthly gift
- A variety of payment options such as ACH, Apple Pay, and PayPal
- Rich media integration capabilities that enable you to embed images, videos, and interactive content
Donately also integrates with a wide range of other nonprofit fundraising software solutions, including Salesforce, HubSpot, and multiple content management systems (CMS).
Event fundraising software for nonprofits
While many comprehensive fundraising solutions come with built-in event management tools, other providers offer standalone solutions. Here are a few of the most popular event fundraising software options available.
Handbid
Handbid is an auction management platform designed to make auctions more fun, accessible, profitable, and easy to manage. With Handbid, you can automate much of the auction process, allowing your team to focus on what matters most.
This software solution offers an easy-to-use mobile app with features including:
- Mobile bidding via a mobile auction management app
- Hybrid auction features like text-to-give and real-time live streaming
- Custom themes, auction catalogs, reporting, and goal tracking
You can tailor the app for your unique event, attend strategic meetings with experienced fundraisers, and encourage giving with Handbid’s software solution. Additionally, Handbid also offers night-of-event support for any software hiccups that may occur during your auction.
OneCause
OneCause is another auction management platform that comes with peer-to-peer fundraising and other event features. This fundraising software allows you to host dynamic online and hybrid auctions, peer-to-peer events, and more.
The best features of this nonprofit fundraising software include:
- Customizable live and silent auctions you can host online, hybrid, or in person
- Event sponsor management tools, including custom online sponsorship packages
- Peer-to-peer fundraising pages for walks, runs, and other -a-thon events
OneCause also allows you to create general online giving forms for your website, and you can branch out by creating integrated text-to-give campaigns.
Eventbrite
Similar to GoFundMe, Eventbrite is more well-known as a platform for individuals. However, it can also be highly impactful as an event fundraising software for small to mid-size nonprofits without the budget for a more robust, specialized platform.
Eventbrite allows nonprofit event organizers to:
- Create, manage, and publicize events online with ads and marketing tools
- Sell tickets from customized event pages for each event
- Use an Organizer App to manage check-in, ticket sales, and attendance data for in-person events
You can host small events for free, but only up to 25 tickets. For larger events, you can either pay a per-event fee or a monthly cost.
Other nonprofit fundraising software
Fundraising software goes beyond platforms that let you accept donations and host events — countless other platforms focus on different aspects of nonprofit operations that can help you boost your fundraising revenue. Explore a few of our favorites below.
Bonterra’s Mobilize solution
Bonterra’s Mobilize solution helps nonprofits recruit, manage, and mobilize volunteers. Nonprofits using Mobilize have saved five to ten hours weekly per staff member, seen a 40% increase in volunteer RSVPs, and earned more donations from engaged supporters.
Mobilize allows you to:
- Conveniently set up in-person and virtual volunteer events to grow your network of supporters
- Automate volunteer event reminders and follow-up messages
- Build a community by empowering volunteers to host their own events and invite friends
If your nonprofit is looking for a way to streamline administrative tasks associated with running a volunteer program, the Mobilize solution offers many great features to help you better manage your supporters.
360MatchPro
Double the Donation is one of the leading matching gifts software providers, with more than 8,500 organizations using its matching gift solution, 360MatchPro. This tool includes a comprehensive, updated database of over 24,000 companies offering corporate giving programs, such as matching gifts and volunteer grants.
Some of the great features 360MatchPro offers include:
- A streamlined matching gift search tool you can embed on your donation page
- Automated email streams to help you earn more matching gifts from eligible donors
- Auto-submission functionally that allows donors to submit matching gift requests just by entering their company email
You can reach out to Double the Donation to learn more about their plans and get a personalized quote for your nonprofit’s needs. You can also request custom features that aren’t listed above to fully customize this software to your operations.
DonorSearch
DonorSearch provides a fundraising software solution that can enhance your nonprofit’s strategy with wealth screening and profiles for donor prospect research. You can use these tools to better understand your donors’ financial and philanthropic backgrounds through key indicators.
DonorSearch’s extensive database can be used to find information about:
- Wealth indicators that provide insight as to how much an individual may be willing and able to give
- Philanthropic indicators showing an individual’s history of giving and previous interactions with various causes
- Affiliations with other nonprofits similar to yours
Aside from its database, DonorSearch also allows you to efficiently build your list of prospects, create marketing plans based on insights the software collects, and make data appends. They integrate with other nonprofit software, too, making it easy to add to your existing operations.
GivingDNA
GivingDNA is another wealth screening tool that helps you gain insights about existing and prospective major donors. This fundraising software focuses on data analytics, providing you with detailed reports about your supporters to help you direct your fundraising efforts.
This platform’s standout features include:
- Auto-generated monthly giving candidates from your database
- Segmentation tools that group donors by net worth, income, and estimated home value
- Alerts about donors who may be about to lapse
Giving DNA can help you prioritize moves management, prospect research, and general data analytics improvements.
Deciding on the right fundraising software for your nonprofit
As you can see, there are plenty of nonprofit fundraising software solutions available at a range of prices. To decide which is the best fit for you, determine what features your nonprofit needs most and match those needs with tools that address them to narrow down your choices. Then, discuss the pros and cons of each option with your leadership to make your final decision.
If you need help evaluating your current system or any of your top fundraising software contenders, use our free tech evaluation worksheet. Keep efficiency and impact at the forefront to invest in a solution that will serve your organization in the long run.
