Question
Good donor relationship manager / CRM for a nonprofit?
I volunteer with a small nonprofit and we're at the point where we could use a CRM. We don't have much budget at all for tech tools right now but could start setting aside some. Since everybody is a volunteer, we also are willing to set aside a tiny bit of money to help with implementation and maintenance if needed. Anybody have experience with a DRM / CRM that they like and find easy to setup and use?
(We know about Salesforce's nonprofit plan but the general bulk and difficulty-of-use of Salesforce scares us a bit)
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Start by checking out TechSoup - once you get registered there, they offer great discounts on a number of CRM products. They have also done a comparison of various CRM packages that you might find useful.
https://blog.techsoup.org/posts/a-guide-to-the-top-crm-and-donor-management-systems
Barebones - you can use Monday.com - I've used Basecamp or even Trello (a kanban board) for our simple pipeline. If your sales process is more mature, however, I would bite the bullet and stick with Salesforce. Finally - do you know about the Google Ad Grant? If no, look it up. If you are a 501c3, you can qualify for $120K a year of inkind advertising from Google. This amount of money for fund raising could definitely make it so you need a robust CRM in the near future. Getting the grant is easy - keeping compliant with grant terms is a bit tougher.
I've built/worked on a few of these for NPOs of varying size in Airtable. It's pretty affordable if you're sharing one seat and there are many pre-configured templates in the Airtable Universe.
There are tons of Airtable experts with affordable packages too!
I'd second the recommendation to start with exploring TechSoup.
That said, I have a small non-profit client who went with DonorSnap.com and are quite happy with it.
You can try Airtable, which is not a CRM, but there are templates in Airtable that can help you build a CRM like structure. It's free for up-to 1000 records per table and the paid plans start around $10 if i'm not wrong. It takes a bit of time to setup, but once you build a structure, it's easy to use.
I'm recommending this cos, it's also easy to do some simple data analysis if you need to in the future.
I'm sorry to say this but I felt like Zoho products are kind of sub-standard compared to commercial tools like Salesforce, Dynamic CRM, or open source solutions like Odoo. Tried Zoho email, books, analytics, and CRM, they all have some sort of issues especially with API access.
Did you consider Odoo? They offer both cloud & hosted community edition. You may need some tech support if you want to host it yourself.
You may consider Redmine CRM plugin (https://www.redmineup.com/pages/plugins/crm) with offers basic contacts & deals management capabilities.
Hey @allenjhyang! I'm one of the cofounders of http://clay.com and we've been building a new user-friendly CRM like tool for finding and managing your customers & related customer ops. We're hoping to provide a great experience that doesn't make your team fearful the way Salesforce does.
Let me know if I can be helpful / give you a tour some time!
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Awesome pointer - thanks!