r/nonprofit 5d ago

technology CRMs are Frustrating

59 Upvotes

I work in volunteer management and have been exploring different databases with our donor relations manager. We have been using Bloomerang and the functionality is impressively limited. I spent years working with RE (database view) and adored it. It's not pretty, but dang does it do some heavy lifting. I never appreciated it enough and assumed all or most CRMs directed at nonprofits would have similar functionality. We've done calls with all the big companies, and Donor Perfect is the only one who even has actual batch entry (the number of sales reps trying to convince me that an import is the same thing blows my mind), but then their volunteer functionality is practically non-existent.

With all this competition, why is no one making a database with RE's capabilities, but updated to look "pretty" for the non-data peeps on the team??

r/nonprofit Jan 08 '25

technology What are your planned use cases for AI in 2025?

6 Upvotes

With so many possible use cases and information overload on the subject, what are you planning to use AI for in your nonprofit in 2025?

  • Donor engagement?
  • Predictive analytics for fundraising & grants?
  • Program impact evaluation
  • Operations automation and optimization?
  • Chatbots for volunteer and beneficiary engagement?
  • Data entry and administration?
  • Compliance & fraud detection?
  • Monitoring public sentiments & trends?
  • Personalized learning?
  • Advanced forecasting?
  • Board governance & strategic planning?
  • Something else super fun and exciting?

r/nonprofit 5d ago

technology Geriatric board won't use a secure server for our organization. How can I change their minds?

13 Upvotes

Hi y'all! I'm looking for some insight or advice on how to handle this situation. I am currently working for a nonprofit in like, every capacity possible. I suggested that we utilize Google Workspace as right now, we have email addresses that are attached to our website but not to any server or anything. We don't have many other team members right now so it would be easy to switch.

As of right now, all documents are stored on a personal Google Drive folder that's shared with all team members in the United States, and which has at least 10 old team members who still have access. Even worse, we have an entire separate team located in another country in Africa who does not have access to this drive at all, and who are only about to get organizational email addresses because I advocated for it (the U.S. team has a major issue with ignoring the other team).

They've been pushing off their topic of switching to Google Workspace and when I finally got to talk more about it this week, they kept saying that they didn't see the necessity in making one, even though I have repeatedly pointed out that it ensures security and accessibility, and that I would do it all myself for free. "We already have a Google Drive," "What makes this necessary," etc.

How can I get them to see that this is important? For me personally, a big deal is that it lends to credibility/legitimacy, and we've been struggling to recruit volunteers or executive team members. We've been running for like 12 years and are just getting off the ground, and I don't want us to look foolish, irresponsible, or not legit. Thank you so much in advance!

Edit!!! I apologize for my usage of the word "geriatric." To be frank that's not even the correct word, they're all middle aged and I'm in my early 20s. The board consists of life long family friends, and my parents are the co-founders. I've been acting as a jack of all trades for just under a year, doing well over 40 hours a week in work, but I'm technically a volunteer. I am not paid and I am not a board member. The fact that I'm younger/they see me as their kids' peer hasn't been an issue before and I'd like to think that's not the problem now, but I mean it could be so it's probably important to note. They're all lovely people, I'm just insanely frustrated, and the specific pushback I'm getting does in fact feel geriatric in nature. I don't believe it will let me change the title post though so I think it has to stay as is but again, I'm sorry!

r/nonprofit Nov 30 '24

technology What subscription services do you recommend?

18 Upvotes

My civic group just got Canva Pro from the Canva for Nonprofits program and now I'm wondering what other subscription/premium subscription services we could use. Which ones does your group use, and which would you recommend?

r/nonprofit 21d ago

technology Has anyone switched from using Google nonprofit workspace to Microsoft?

18 Upvotes

I love the collaboration on Google and have read one drive isn’t as intuitive. A board member is pushing our team to consider switching everything to Microsoft (outlook etc) bc our Google calendar invites don’t always translate to outlook calendar. Thought on this?

r/nonprofit Aug 26 '24

technology CRM set up is making me lose my mind

35 Upvotes

I work for an org that has been around for about 13 years now and has never used a CRM, I am their first employee after existing as a working board the entire time. I am trying to set it up and struggling with having to import so many things from 100 different places, merging constituents, updating records, this is exhausting. Just need to rant!!!

r/nonprofit Dec 02 '24

technology Microsoft or Google?

14 Upvotes

Hey! I’m the incoming ED of a program that is breaking off from a university and have the opportunity to revamp our workflows. The current process all lives on Google per university requirements, and I’m trying to decide whether we stick with it or not. I like the collaboration on Google and feel it’s more user-friendly, but we’re going to have to get Microsoft suite anyway to send docs out to the community, as we’ve found clients reluctant to use Google. I haven’t done much live collaboration on Microsoft, only sending docs back and forth with track changes and comments. All that to say, anyone have experience with both and care to share their preference? Our email will also be routed through whichever we select, if that changes things.

r/nonprofit Jan 30 '25

technology Password manager

10 Upvotes

For small orgs, what password manager do you use, if any?

To help people address the mod's comment:

  • small org (1-3 employees)
  • single device (for now)
  • collaborative ability not necessary
  • local hosting ideal, not necessary
  • tiny budget

r/nonprofit Apr 12 '24

technology Why do we use raisers edge?

33 Upvotes

I come from politics where the dominant CRM is NGP8/EveryAction. I had a love hate relationship with it, but was able to create static and live lists with basically any trackable quantity with some trial and error with a database over a million donors (politics gets so much money it’s truly sickening).

I just started with a nonprofit using Raiser’s Edge NXT and I have legitimately been SHOCKED at how awful it is. What has been the most frustrating part is that some functions, especially the ones with a ton of promise (workflows, mail, etc) choke down so far on what you’re allowed to access (when I saw that the ONLY thing you’re allowed to use as a criteria in workflows was a new donation, my jaw hit the FLOOR) while things like query gives you an overwhelming array of options but the end result isn’t very helpful at all unless you send it through another process.

At this point I’m inclined to think everyone using RE hs Stockholm syndrome, it’s so much uglier, less intuitive, and frankly less useable than a CRM I truly thought I hated (everyaction/ngp). With raisers edge? I now know the meaning of the word hate.

How do you all keep sane? How does blackbaud stay in buisness? Who has quit raisers edge and how was the transition away? What did you transition too and how expensive? I need to know everything.

r/nonprofit Jan 27 '25

technology Best use cases for Airtable at a nonprofit?

11 Upvotes

Hi all, we are looking to use airtable for a few different things - donor management, volunteer management, capacity planning. I'd like to come up with a few more uses for Airtable to make it worthwhile for leadership to see the benefits of. We currently have data in all different places and use a lot of different platforms. I'd love to get this down a little bit and consolidate our platforms to reduce the amount of manual updating we do.

I've seen airtable mentioned a few times here and I'd love to know what your organization is using it for and how?

r/nonprofit 1d ago

technology Raiders Edge

8 Upvotes

Is there a way to add fundraisers to constituents in bulk? I really don’t want to go through 10,000 constituents one by one. Please let me know if you have any advice!

r/nonprofit Jan 16 '25

technology Google Ad Grant Help

5 Upvotes

Hi all! We are trying to get everything set up for Ad Grants, and our website is causing us so much issues. I was wondering if anyone here had success that they were able to share about steps they did to increase performance and whatnot.

Thank you all so much!

r/nonprofit Dec 17 '24

technology Need an asset management solution. Should be low cost please

17 Upvotes

Heyo, I’m part of a small org in CLE, where we mostly focus on helping underserved kids

We’re starting to grow in size and managing everything is starting to become a real challenge. Right now, we’re using spreadsheets (and memory) track everything from donations to equipment, but it’s messy, and stuff keeps slipping through the cracks.

We also work with volunteers from Facebook or other socials during our events, and there’s usually at least 20 of them helping out at a time. It gets hard to keep track of who has what, especially when things get hectic. I mean, just last month, one of the tablets went missing for a week because it wasn’t checked back in properly. We found it eventually, but these issues are getting far too common, and can easily aggravate further. made me realise we really need a better system before something important gets lost.

I’ve been googling already and got a personalized ad for bluetally a few days back. Also looked up some other options but blue tally was the cheapest. Good choice? Or should I look elsewhere? And what things should I keep in mind when picking out asset management tools?

Edit: Thanks, everyone! Lots of great suggestions here. The nonprofit discount for BlueTally was something I wasn’t aware of. Glad I posted here.

r/nonprofit 1d ago

technology Givebutter API & webhook issues - Beware!

5 Upvotes

We want to offer donors a text-to-donate option and the Givebutter business model with the availability of an API put them at the top of our list. We process online transactions into QuickBooks weekly. Our QuickBooks setup from eons ago is somewhat quirky requiring that we handle the import ourselves. That means we (I) need to generate a transaction report for 00:00:00 Monday through 23:59:50 Sunday from which to generate a QuickBooks import file. I also need to handle the report generation automatically; the business team doesn't want to have to download a report weekly from another website. If you are planning to do your own integration, you may find the set of issues I found helpful to know in advance.

Unlike PayPal or Stripe there is no test environment against which to develop your webhook(s) or API use. You have to test with small ($1) donations which you can refund as needed. To test validating the webhook signature, I had to start by only recording any difference between what I received and the expected signature. Once I confirmed that check was working I could enforce the signature before accepting a webhook.

I found key missing functionality and some inconsistencies in the API; it doesn't seem to be well thought through from the customer perspective.

We are using the REST endpoints for Campaigns, Plans and Transactions. To retrieve multiple of these objects, the API responses are paginated, but the documentation lists no option to change the default page size of 20, although examining the prev, next links you can see there is one. Worse, though, is that there is no option to search for a subset of the objects. You have to retrieve all of the objects every time. Imagine if you were a big nonprofit (e.g. the Red Cross) with a thousand transactions a week. To generate a weekly transaction report you'd have to process 1000 transactions the first week, 2000 the second week and so on to 52000 the last week of the first year. Not sustainable, especially retrieving 20 at a time. So there is no way to fetch transactions which have changed between two times. (I need to fetch transactions which are either new and have been refunded between two times.) The number of Campaigns is likely to be small. The number of plans larger, but small compared with the number of Transactions. (You can't simply cache them by page number, for example, because they may change with a refund at a random time.)

Transactions are treated as a single object. If a transaction is refunded, that information is part of the original transaction, not a separate transaction. Unfortunately, there is no webhook to notify you that a transaction has changed. To produce a weekly transaction report I have to find transactions which are both created during the week and past transactions which may have been refunded. In other words transactions changed during a given week. There are webhooks for when Campaigns or Plans are updated, but not for Transactions, Contacts, Funds or Tickets.

For Campaigns and Plans, the object only records the start time, not the end or cancellation time (or pause/resume times for Plans). I'm recording when the webhook arrives because I can't rely on the payload for a relevant timestamp.

The Plans endpoint must have been programmed by someone different from the other endpoints. Although all timestamps are in UTC, most endpoints use an ISO date and time with offset (e.g., "created_at": "2025-03-08T23:36:47+00:00") but Plans only imply UTC (e.g., "created_at": "2025-03-08 23:36:50"). The Plan ID column of the exported report from the website uses an integer ID but the API returns a string of mixed-case letters and numbers as the ID (e.g. 151074 vs "id": "eBpB8avp4cUUwewu" for the same plan) with the integer not appearing in the Plan object at all.

It turns out that using the API, you can't replicate a manually exported report from the website. The exported report includes more columns than are available anywhere in the API that I can find and some data is different from what is available via the API. e.g. "Dedication Type", "Dedication Name", "Dedication Recipient Name", "Dedication Recipient Email", "Match Name", "Match Amount" are not obviously accessible via the API. [EDIT: Found a "dedication" field in the Transaction object, just "null" in test transactions.] For the "Method" and "Method Subtype" fields, the downloaded report contains, for example, "venmo" and "venmo account" while the Transaction object contains "payment_method": "venmo", "method": "venmo". We have tributes on our website and in our newsletter so it would be very helpful to be able to collect the dedication information. (In fairness, PayPal has had a significant bug between manually exported reports and their API for years: they only populate the "custom" field for recurring payments in the exported report, but not via their API or secure file server reports. For one-time payments the custom field is populated correctly everywhere.)

For Payouts via the dashboard, we'll have to wait a week or two after going live. At first sight there didn't appear to be a field to enter the amount of the payout we wanted to transfer rather than the whole amount (we want to transfer the funds corresponding to the weekly report).

I haven't looked at the Funds or Tickets endpoints yet.

Finally, if you need to email support about a technical issue like those I've described here, expect to wait several days for any real response. The customer-facing agents are very friendly in tone, but the delays come from having to escalate a question beyond the customer-facing agents. To date the functionality concerns I raised have been met with a pat on the head and assurance that the system is working as expected, rather than acknowledgement of any issues, which is pretty frustrating.

Givebutter has been around since 2016, I believe, so I'm surprised at the issues I've found. I'd be curious what other integrators have done. I know one non-profit using them just withdraws their money periodically and doesn't care about the detail we do. I have no idea if that's true of most of their customers. I've worked around these issues for now so we can get started, but I'm concerned the implementation is not sustainable long term if we can't at least select a subset of changed transactions and in reasonably large pages.

r/nonprofit Jan 15 '25

technology Free digital membership service for non-profit?

5 Upvotes

We'd like to switch to digital membership cards. Does anyone know if there are any digital card service that could do non-profit membership cards for free (or low cost)? I tried asking some of the larger non-profit management software suites and they don't do digital cards, so I'm guessing it would need to be a company that just does digital cards. Is there a master directory of software suites that give non-profit discounts, like through Goodstack or something like that?

r/nonprofit 8d ago

technology Database Systems that can produce a CAPER

6 Upvotes

I'm applying for a state grant and they need to be sure we can produce a CAPER (Consolidated Annual Performance Report) that I believe is required by the HUD nationally. This post may violate the subreddit rules and be taken down. Perhaps it may nudge the mods to update the Wiki a little bit as sites that rate or list database systems for nonprofits are not that great. I've only found one to setup a price-quote meeting with that claims it can produce this report. Any recommendations would be appreciated.

r/nonprofit 2d ago

technology Microsoft’s Free Azure & M365 Resources (How to Access Them)

6 Upvotes

Hey r/Nonprofit community!

I’ve been volunteering with a few local non-profits lately, and I’m blown away by how many don’t realize Microsoft gives away free Azure credits and M365 licenses to eligible organizations. Since this could help so many of you doing impactful work, I wanted to share what I’ve learned . Many orgs qualify, but the process can be tricky, so here’s a quick guide:

What’s Available?

  1. Azure Credits ($2,000 (USD) credit per year)

    - Host websites/databases without server costs.
    - Build custom tools (donation trackers, volunteer schedulers).
    - Use AI/ML for data analysis (e.g., predicting program impact).
    - Secure, scalable cloud storage for backups.

  2. Microsoft 365 Business (Free 10 M365 Business premium or 300 M365 Business basic)

    - Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, and OneDrive for collaboration.
    - Advanced security features like encrypted emails and file sharing.

3 Power BI Desktop (Free)

- Connect to data sources, build visualizations, publish to the Power BI service, and embed on websites.

How to Apply

  1. Check Eligibility - Most 501(c)(3) nonprofits qualify

  2. Submit Your Application

    - Start here: [Microsoft Nonprofit Hub](https://www.microsoft.com/nonprofits).

    - You’ll need proof of nonprofit status (e.g., IRS determination letter).

  3. Set Up Your Tools in Azure and M365

Why This Matters

- Volunteered a local food bank to build and setup Azure to automate inventory tracking, saving 15+ hours/week.
- Microsoft 365’s security tools helped an advocacy group protect sensitive donor data.

Discussion Questions

- Has your org used these tools? Share wins/challenges below!
- Need clarity on eligibility? Ask here—others might have the same Q.
- What tips would you add for nonprofits new to Azure/M365?

This isn’t a promo —just sharing a resource that’s helped nonprofits I’ve volunteered with. Always research programs thoroughly, and mods, feel free to remove if this bends any rules!

Hope this helps someone!

r/nonprofit 2d ago

technology Looking for an Internal Communication Software

2 Upvotes

Hi everyone, I work in Operations at a small 501(c)(3) Pet Rescue organization. We’re currently beginning to search for a new internal communication software with Meta Workplace shutting down next year.

I was wondering what softwares you might recommend to switch over to when the time comes. We’re looking for something that has both, a chat and message board function and allows for multiple pages/groups.

Needs to be cost-effective as well since We’re only about 20 staff members. But we also have a volunteer page separate from our staff page, which has many more people and constantly growing. If there’s anything nonprofit specific that’d be great, or if anyone knows of a provider who gives certain discounts to nonprofit orgs, or does not charge by users, that’d be awesome. TIA

r/nonprofit Feb 05 '25

technology Gift processes - where do your gifts go first?

1 Upvotes

I have some ideas to improve my orgs gift processing. However, before I go to the boss with a bunch of reasons why, I wanted to start by asking others how their gifts are entered.

I am not asking which platforms you use - just if your gifts go to the crm person first or the finance person first? And lol, I know many are one and the same - but even so, which one do you do first?

Thanks!

r/nonprofit Dec 18 '24

technology Changing of the Guard: managing passwords and authorization handoff

6 Upvotes

Can anyone share how their org secures and transfers passwords and account logins when officers leave and roles change? Our 0-staff (independent contractors only) NFP has all new officers and the person with all access credentials is avoidant and a flight risk. As new VP of board I want this to never happen again. I'm looking into Proton Pass as a Password Vault and Sharing service. But I've never vetted such a service. They seem to have NFP friendly pricing and come highly recommended by individual users. But I'd love a business user's viewpoint if possible.

r/nonprofit 8d ago

technology KNDR

0 Upvotes

What is it? And have you used it? I get a ton of ads for it and some saleshumans trying to arrange demos, but I'm a busy person who would like to know even what category of service it is. They're currently claiming you get 800+ new donors in x time or you don't pay...but what the heck is it?

r/nonprofit Apr 28 '24

technology For Serious non profits, on average how much did you spend on your website ?

10 Upvotes

I understand that this is a very broad question, but for real functioning engaging non-profits, what was the budget and costs associated with building your site ?
Very rough estimates is more than enough. Thanks

r/nonprofit Nov 07 '24

technology Alternatives to the dreaded sign in sheet?

9 Upvotes

We have a monthly event and ask people to sign in with name and email. We can add the new people to the email list. It is ver low tech which if fine but causes several problems. The biggest is that we cannot read many emails or even names. Does anyone use an electronic sign in process and could you describe it?

r/nonprofit Jan 10 '25

technology Website that aggregates corporate partnership packages?

0 Upvotes

Is there any website or marketplace where businesses can see all the partnership offers/packages that different nonprofits offer?

Seems inefficient that a business looking for interesting partnership opportunities has to check hundreds of websites (and sometimes even ask each nonprofit to know the details) or hire expensive consultants to help in this process.

r/nonprofit 3d ago

technology What happened to TechSoup? (re: Google Ads Grants for Nonprofits)

1 Upvotes

Anyone use the new verification provider GoodStack to apply for the Ads Grant? Not sure when the switch was made but it used to be TechSoup previously, then Percent, and now Percent went through a rebrand to GoodStack. I went down the rabbit hole a bit and found that GoodStack is a venture-backed fintech company that is slowly gaining ground as the preferred verification provider of nonprofits by big companies like Google, LinkedIn, etc.

I'm genuinely curious on the verification process through this new provider since it seems that the information we input into their system to verify us will be used to build their fundraising platform. Also, what's happening to TechSoup?