10 of the Best Online Fundraising Software Solutions
Online fundraising software, also known as online donation software, is designed to help nonprofits make the most of their virtual fundraising efforts. These platforms combine multiple donation tools and fundraising activities, including donation pages, recurring gift reminders, donation receipts, and peer-to-peer campaigns, into one system. This makes it easier for donors to give to your cause and for your fundraising team to manage campaigns.
In this resource, we’ll cover the basics of online fundraising software and highlight a few of the most effective tools for nonprofits. Let’s get started.
How can nonprofits use online fundraising software?
It would be inefficient, both in terms of time and energy, for your nonprofit’s team members to launch several different fundraising campaigns, write personalized donor emails, and manually send timely donation receipts. Fundraising software helps manage these tasks behind the scenes and automates much of the fundraising process.
Online fundraising software solutions save you from missing out on fundraising opportunities and help you build a professional reputation. Managing tailored campaigns, communications, and donor follow-through via your nonprofit fundraising software will make the donor experience seamless, potentially leading to more dollars earned in the future.
What features should I look for in online fundraising software?
Every nonprofit will have its own specific needs when it comes to online fundraising features. It’s important to know what your organization’s needs are so you can choose the right solution. Here are some popular features to consider when evaluating solutions:
- Donation pages: An online donation page is a landing page where your donors can submit their donations online. Many online fundraising solutions offer donation-page builders where nonprofits can create customized forms to embed on their websites.
- Donation buttons: A donation button is a call-to-action link on your website that you can use to send donors to your donation page or a specific fundraising campaign page. You can typically create donation buttons with your online fundraising platform and integrate them with your website. Some social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram also include the ability to add donation buttons to your social media pages.
- Donation form: A donation form can either be on your donation page or embedded into your website when users click your donation button. Your donation form will include fields like donation amount, donor information, payment details, the option to make the gift recurring, and the option for donors to cover processing fees.
- Event ticketing and registration: You can create in-person or virtual events and manage supporter registration and ticketing with an event registration tool. This often includes an event landing page, ticket purchasing forms, and event reports.
- Recurring giving: Recurring giving allows your donors to set up regular, planned donations to your organization. Often, you can include this option on your donation form and create a fundraising campaign around monthly giving to promote the option.
- Peer-to-peer fundraising: Peer-to-peer fundraising (also known as P2P fundraising) allows your supporters to take the reins and fundraise on your organization’s behalf.
- Crowdfunding: Crowdfunding also empowers your supporters to initiate their own fundraising campaigns for your organization. Your nonprofit itself can also initiate a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for a certain project or program. Nonprofit crowdfunding often happens on social networking platforms like Facebook, but we recommend checking to see if your online fundraising platform includes a crowdfunding feature.
- Wealth screening: Wealth screening uses public data to give you insights into the giving capacity of your contacts and donors. This can help you identify donors that might be a good fit for a matching gift campaign or a major gift.
- Pledges: Pledges are donor commitments to give in the future. Online pledge software helps record and follow up with these promises.
- Text-to-give: Text-to-give allows you to collect donations or pledges by text, and it’s an important feature for mobile fundraising.
- Payment processing: Payment processing enables you to collect online donations by credit card or ACH payment.
- Donor accounts: Donor accounts or profiles allow donors to view their giving history, recurring donations, tax receipts, event registrations, and more.
- Auctions: Auction tools allow you to organize an online or in-person auction event and manage bidding.
- Integrations: Integrations connect your online fundraising tools to your other nonprofit software to create a seamless online fundraising ecosystem.
- Reporting and analytics: Reports give you the ability to see actionable insights on all your online fundraising data.
Not all online fundraising tools will offer every feature listed above. You may seek out different platforms depending on your nonprofit’s needs. For example, if you’re looking to host more auction events, ensure the fundraising solution you select specializes in auctions and has robust bidding capabilities. Consider investing in multiple platforms to expand your fundraising capacity and ensure that you’re making the most of your fundraising potential.
10 of the best online fundraising software solutions for nonprofits
Let’s dive into an overview of a few of the most effective fundraising solutions available today and how they can help improve your nonprofit’s fundraising campaigns:
- Kindful
- Bloomerang
- Qgiv
- Double the Donation (360MatchPro)
- Fundraise Up
- Handbid
- GoFundMe
- Donorbox
- DonorSearch
- Bonfire
1. Kindful
Overview of this online fundraising software:
When it comes to online fundraising, your nonprofit needs to make the online donation process as convenient as possible. This requires multiple components working together, such as your website donation buttons, online donation page, and payment processor.
Kindful is an online fundraising platform that facilitates all of that and more in a streamlined, all-in-one software solution. Nonprofits can use Kindful to easily customize engaging donation pages, enable their supporters to create and promote peer-to-peer and crowdfunding pages, sell fundraising event tickets, and more.
Standout features:
With Kindful’s donation page builder, you can create donation pages that make it easier than ever for your donors to support your mission. Adjust everything from your donation page’s header image and colors to the suggested donation amounts to match your brand and fundraising campaigns.
Another standout feature of the Kindful platform is its ability to integrate with multiple tools and seamlessly transfer data between platforms you already use and love. This helps you track all of your online fundraising campaigns in one place and saves your nonprofit time and money that you can then use to do more good.
Pricing:
Kindful’s pricing starts at $100 per month.
2. Bloomerang
Overview of this online fundraising software:
Is increasing your donor retention rate at the top of your list of priorities? We can understand why it would be. When you encourage existing donors to continue supporting your cause, you tap into reliable, long-term support for your mission.
Bloomerang can help your organization improve its donor retention rate and build deeper relationships with your supporters. This powerful nonprofit donor management and online fundraising platform optimizes every stage of the donor cycle to help you maximize your fundraising efforts. Bloomerang gives you access to simple online giving tools that make fundraising a breeze, email marketing tools to help you connect with new donors, and a comprehensive donor database to store donor information.
Standout features:
Bloomerang offers automatic updates for multiple CRM elements, such as your supporters’ ages and mailing addresses. Plus, Bloomerang automatically checks your database for duplicate entries, giving you the ability to merge and eliminate unneeded records.
Pricing:
Bloomerang’s pricing starts at $99 per month.
3. Qgiv
Overview of this online fundraising software:
Investing in an all-in-one giving platform makes the donation process more manageable for both your staff and donors. Qgiv is another comprehensive online fundraising platform that provides the tools you need to launch effective fundraising campaigns. These tools include donation forms, text-to-give campaigns, auctions, peer-to-peer fundraising, and more.
Standout features:
According to the M+R Benchmarks report, the majority of nonprofit website traffic in 2021 (54%) came from users on mobile devices (compared to 46% of traffic from users on desktop devices). This makes Qgiv’s text fundraising capabilities an especially powerful feature since more and more donors connect with nonprofits using their mobile phones. This feature allows you to send updates on your activities and events and reminders for donors to complete pledged gifts.
Pricing:
Qgiv’s pricing starts at $0 per month for organizations looking to get started with online fundraising for the first time.
4. Double the Donation (360MatchPro)
Overview of this online fundraising software:
About $4-7 billion goes unclaimed in matching gifts each year. The team at Double the Donation seeks to help nonprofits make the most of this untapped funding source by streamlining the matching gift process.
They offer online fundraising software that helps nonprofits raise more funding through corporate-sponsored matching gifts. Their flagship product is 360MatchPro, a matching gift automation tool that allows nonprofits to identify match-eligible donors during the donation process and follow up with them to encourage them to apply for a match.
Standout features:
Donors can research their eligibility during the online donation process using 360MatchPro’scomprehensive matching gift database. If donors are eligible, the database connects them with the paperwork and instructions required to request a match from their employers. This makes the process easier for donors, helping your organization bring in more matching gift funds.
Pricing:
360MatchPro’s pricing starts at $799 per year.
5. Fundraise Up
Overview of this online fundraising software:
It’s becoming increasingly common for nonprofits to turn to innovative fundraising solutions, such as those powered by artificial intelligence (AI), to use a research-backed fundraising approach. Fundraise Up optimizes the donor journey by adding AI-based research to features such as online donation pages and data tracking and analytics.
Standout features:
Fundraise Up’s algorithmic machine learning approach analyzes patterns in donor behavior to help your nonprofit suggest the right donation amount to each donor. These unique, optimized donation suggestions are automatically shown to supporters when they arrive on your online donation form.
Pricing:
Contact the Fundraise Up team for custom pricing.
6. Handbid
Overview of this online fundraising software:
Online and in-person auctions bring supporters together to support your nonprofit and acquire valuable items or experiences to enjoy. Handbid supports these nonprofit events with online fundraising tools such as auction software and mobile bidding tools.
Standout features:
Handbid’s virtual auction-in-a-box bundle provides the tools your nonprofit needs to run successful, engaging virtual auctions. The bundle includes a video production team to help you prepare the event livestream, a virtual event assistant, coaching, and more.
Pricing:
Handbid’s pricing starts at $792 per year.
7. GoFundMe
Overview of this online fundraising software:
Billions of dollars are generated through crowdfunding each year. Crowdfunding campaigns can help fund all kinds of projects, from medical bills for individuals in need to special nonprofit projects.
GoFundMe is one of the most popular online fundraising platforms for crowdfunding. The platform makes it easy for individuals or nonprofit organizations to set up a customized fundraising page and promote the page to a wider audience. Since the platform is so well-known, your organization can benefit from the trust that the general public has in GoFundMe campaigns.
Standout features:
GoFundMe offers plenty of support for new fundraisers, including blog posts, video tutorials, and fundraising tips and ideas. This can help reduce the learning curve for inexperienced or first-time fundraisers.
Pricing:
It’s free to create a GoFundMe fundraiser and the platform requires a transaction fee of 2.9% + $0.30.
8. Donorbox
Overview of this online fundraising software:
One of the most common challenges nonprofits face when carrying out their online fundraising strategies is having a high donation form bounce rate. Supporters may arrive on your donation page, but quickly drop off without completing a donation.
Donorbox seeks to help with this issue by offering a unique UltraSwift checkout process with their online donation page builder. With Donorbox, you can easily copy and paste custom giving forms into your website, allow donors to cover transaction fees, and let donors easily save their payment information for future donations.
Standout features:
Donorbox helps foster donor loyalty by allowing nonprofits to offer monthly giving options on their giving pages and create membership tiers. You can offer different benefits to different donor tiers and allow members to manage their engagement through membership accounts.
Pricing:
The Donorbox Standard plan comes with a 1.5% platform fee and payment processing fee. However, the platform fee is capped at $25 for bank transfers.
9. DonorSearch
Overview of this online fundraising software:
If your nonprofit is looking to take on a more strategic outreach approach and increase your marketing ROI, it’s helpful to start with prospect research. Prospect research is the process of identifying individuals who have the capacity to donate and a strong connection to your cause.
DonorSearch simplifies the prospect research process with AI tools, wealth screening, and philanthropic screening. DonorSearch provides access to the largest philanthropic database in the country to help your nonprofit supplement its internal data with valuable external supporter information. This additional information includes details about your prospects’ wealth data, business affiliations, giving history, and more.
Standout features:
DonorSearch also offers multiple valuable integrations with popular CRM platforms like Bloomerang. When you combine DonorSearch’s wealth screening capabilities with the information stored in your CRM, you can identify the right ask amounts for each donor and upgrade long-time donors effectively.
Pricing:
Contact the DonorSearch team for pricing.
10. Bonfire
Overview of this online fundraising software:
T-shirt fundraising campaigns allow nonprofit supporters to support their favorite causes while adding stylish, comfortable new items to their closets. Bonfire is an online t-shirt fundraising platform that allows nonprofits to create t-shirt fundraising pages or empower their supporters to create peer-to-peer fundraising pages of their own.
Standout features:
Your nonprofit can create a customized profile page with details on your organization’s mission and active campaigns. And, with Bonfire’s Campaign Dashboard, you can send personalized thank you emails to each supporter who buys a t-shirt.
Pricing:
Verified nonprofits have 3.5% transaction fees.
Wrapping up
Your online fundraising software will help streamline your team’s fundraising efforts while providing an engaging, personalized donor experience.
For more information about online fundraising, review these additional resources:
- Free Fundraising Software: Is It Worth It? Pros & Cons. Free fundraising software can be understandably tempting. But is it the right choice for your nonprofit? Find out more with this resource.
- Online Fundraising | Ultimate Success Guide + Tips and Ideas. Investing in an online fundraising platform shouldn’t be the only component of your online fundraising strategy. Build a successful approach with the tips in this guide.
- Understanding Grassroots Fundraising: Getting Supporters To Give Online. How can you encourage supporters to donate via your online fundraising platform? Read this guide to discover the most effective ways to inspire grassroots fundraising.
