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200+ Free or Cheap Nonprofit Software Tools You Need to Know About

Author: Tatiana Morand
November 4, 2021
Contents
🕑 49 min read

Feeling like you’re doing too many tasks by hand?

That’s because you probably are.

Although nonprofits are often resistant to technological change, there are many software solutions that can solve any manual task your nonprofit is doing right now.

A few of the most common fixes we’ve seen are:

  • Walking your donation cheques to the bank? You need an online payment processing tool.
  • Sending out snail mail member notifications? Switch to texting software.
  • Don’t have time to update all your social accounts? Try social media scheduling software.

To get you started, here are over 200 online tools for nonprofits, along with expert advice, to help you decide which are best fitted to your organization. Think of this as your nonprofit tool encyclopedia.

Plus, nearly every tool on this list has a free trial, or free basic account, and many have discounts for nonprofits. You can also receive nonprofit software discounts when you sign up with techsoup.

What Nonprofit Software Do I Need?

There are countless software tools that could help your organization operate more effectively and provide a better experience for your community. You certainly don’t need to invest in all of them — the costs would quickly add up, and practically speaking, too many tools in your tech stack would get complicated and inefficient. Where possible, look for tools that serve more than one need and integrate with each other, so you can make the most of your software budget.

To help you decide which software tools to invest in, we’ve broken our list down into the following categories:

  • Accounting, Invoicing, Billing Tools — these will help you keep track of things like your expenses, payroll, donations, and member dues.
  • Discussion Forums, Online Community Tools — these will help members of your community stay in touch with you and each other when they’re not meeting in person.
  • Events Management, Registration, Scheduling Tools — if your organization puts on events, these will help manage things like invitations, registrations, payments, and logistics.
  • Fundraising Software, Online Payments, Donor Management Tools — these will help you accept and process donations, manage donor relationships, and communicate with prospective and current donors.
  • Mailing List Management, Email Marketing, Newsletter Tools — these will help you send timely, relevant, and personalized communications to members of your community.
  • Meeting Management, Conferencing, Virtual Meeting, Webinar Tools — these will help you collaborate with team members and meet with donors or partners in the virtual space
  • Membership Management, Contact Management (CRM) Nonprofit Tools — these will help you manage memberships and keep your community engaged
  • Presentation, Video, and other Multimedia Tools — these will help you create visual media to support marketing, fundraising, or other initiatives
  • Project Management, Document Editing, Sharing, Collaboration Tools — these will help you collaborate more effectively and be more productive as an organization
  • SMS Text Marketing Tools — these will allow you to send timely updates to members of your community via text message
  • Social Media Tools — these will help you grow a social media community through scheduled posts and timely engagement
  • Time-Tracking Tools — these will help you and your team members be more productive and spend your time more effectively
  • Volunteer Management Tools — these will help you recruit, schedule, and manage volunteers
  • Website Analytics, Data Collection, Tracking Tools — these will help you track the effectiveness of your website and make improvements accordingly
  • Website Builders, Blogs, Content Management (CMS) Tools — these will help you build and maintain a website
  • All-In-One Solutions for Nonprofits — these are tools that include any number of the above features, so you can take care of everything in one place

How Do I Get a Nonprofit Discount?

Software companies that serve both nonprofits and for-profit business often offer a nonprofit discount. They may not make this obvious, though, so here are a few things you can try:

  1. Look for a note about a nonprofit discount on their pricing page
  2. See if there’s a question about it in the FAQ section of their website
  3. If you don’t see any mention of it, get in touch with a support or sales agent via chat or email. Sometimes companies keep this discount secret and only offer it to those who ask.
  4. If there’s no official nonprofit discount, see if they’re willing to make an exception or create a custom plan for you.
  5. See if they’re willing to offer a subscription to their software as part of an in-kind donation or a sponsorship.

What Should I Consider Before Implementing Nonprofit Tools?

With each new tool you’re thinking of implementing, especially the more substantial ones, consider the following:

  • Timeline: How long will it take to buy and implement the new software? How quickly can you train your team and start using it? Is there a deadline by which you need everyone to be comfortable with it (for example, if you’re using an event management software before an upcoming event or a virtual conferencing tool before an important meeting)?
  • Budget: What kind of pricing plan is most appropriate for your organization? How many users do you need to pay for? Is there room in your budget for this new software?
  • ROI: What’s your projected return on investment? Is the cost of the software justified and will it help you save money and time or bring in more revenue?
  • Buy In: Who are the staff members who’ll be using the new software? Have they had a chance to trial it? Are they happy with the choice? Will it make their work easier or more efficient?
  • Board Approval: How will you go about getting approval to purchase the new software? Have you put together a presentation or proposal that outlines all of the above points? What are your options if you get denied?

Can’t I Just Do It in Spreadsheets?

You can… if your community is still small (less than 50 members and/or donors). However, as your community grows, it will get increasingly difficult to keep track of all of your relationships, communications, events, initiatives, programs, partners, and finances.

By investing in quality software tools, you and your team members will be able to:

  • Automate most of your administrative tasks so you can spend more time on more important work like building and serving your community building
  • Scale your activities and results with minimal effort
  • Save money in the long-run
  • Bring in more revenue thanks to proven marketing and fundraising tools
  • Avoid human error mistakes that come with doing everything manually
  • Easily pass on institutional knowledge and data to new staff members
  • Easily analyze data to help identify what you’re doing well and where you can improve

 

The All-In-One Nonprofit Software You Need to Try

One of the best nonprofit software solutions is an all-in-one software called membership management software. It saves time and money by automating all of the major administrative tasks of any nonprofit. For example, it can:

  • Process online payments for events, membership, renewals, and donations
  • Update an easy to search and filter contact database
  • Improve member communication through automated invoices, emails, and newsletters
  • Easily create a website where you can host events, donations, news, a blog, member-only resources, a directory, and more
  • Instantly access simple financial reports and analytics
  • And more!

Here at Wild Apricot, we’re proud to be voted the #1 membership management software on the market and help over 20,000 membership organizations save time and money.

If you’d like to see whether Wild Apricot may be the right choice for your organization, you can start your free, 60-day trial of a premium Wild Apricot account here.

Wild Apricot also has a free basic plan you can use indefinitely. Find more details on our free plan here.

Free Nonprofit Tech Tools WildApricot
Free Nonprofit Tech Tools

Keep reading to discover other software options we’ve collected for you!

 

Accounting, Invoicing, Billing Tools

What are accounting, invoicing, and billing tools? 

These are tools that will help you manage your finances — all the money that’s going in or out of your organization, whether that’s expenses, payroll, member dues, or donations.

Why do you need them?

All organizations, but nonprofits especially, need to maintain extremely accurate records of their financial transactions. They need to report this information to the government in order to maintain their nonprofit status. These tools will help make this process much quicker, easier, and free of human error.

What should you budget? 

$10-$20 per month.

Tim Chan

Tim Chan
Manager of Support, FreshBooks

TwitterFacebookGplus

“The right accounting software should make running your organization easier, not harder. Too often small organizations assume right out of the gate that they’ll need big, complicated software to manage the books. While this may be true for large nonprofits that have the luxury of a full-time accounting department on hand, most smaller organizations can benefit from much simpler accounting software.

Software designed exclusively for small organizations can help non-accountant team members more easily manage day-to-day tasks like collecting online payments from donors, tracking expenses, and running reports.”

 

1. Pabbly Subscription Billing

Pabbly Subscription Billing allows you to collect both one time and recurring payments in more than 25 global currencies using its customizable checkout pages. It also allows you to do sales analysis, tax management, offer discounts, and more.

Pricing: Plans start at $9/month.

2. FreeAgent

This web-based software is designed to help small business, partnerships and solo entrepreneurs who are not accountants to stay on top of all aspects of their finances, from estimates and proposals to invoices, expenses, bank statement reconciliation, profit and loss reports, and key dates for tax preparation.

Pricing: Free 60-day trial; plans start at £9.50/month.

3. FreshBooks

FreshBooks online invoicing service lets you track time and expenses, create, send and track invoices and estimates, and collect payments quickly. Add-ons are available to expand its capabilities.

Pricing: Free 60-day trial, paid plans start at $7.60/month.

4. Hiveage

Online billing and invoicing software Hiveage lets you add unlimited clients and create unlimited invoices, accept payments online through Paypal and Google Checkout, and import and export your data.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $16/month.

5. MoneyMinder

MoneyMinder is Non Profit Central’s web-based accounting software for for nonprofit treasurers. Enter transactions, reconcile accounts and generate reports quickly and accurately, track and manage events and fundraisers, and share financial reports with your board.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $159/year.

6. Nomisma

Nomisma Solution is cloud-based bookkeeping and compliance software designed for use by accountants and small businesses. It provides a comprehensive solution to bookkeeping, payroll, accounts finalisation, Corporation Tax, and a CRM.

Pricing: Varies by product, starting at £3/month.

7. Quickbooks

A cloud accounting software that allows you to access your data on any device. They offer unlimited invoices, income and expense tracking, downloadable bank transactions, professional templates, and many other features.

Pricing: Free 60-day trial. Plans start at $10/month.

8. Quickbooks Invoice Generator 

Quickbooks also provides a completely free invoice generator, which doesn’t require a login and has no limit to how many invoices you can send. You can add your own logo, customize the invoice, and download it immediately.

Pricing: Free

9. Rerun

Rerun is for any business, organization or association that wants to automate their recurring, subscription or membership billing and accept recurring payments via credit card and ACH.

Pricing: Free 60-day trial. Plans start at $19/month.

10. Ronin

Ronin online invoicing and time tracking application allows your entire team to track time on the same projects, supports recurring invoices with custom time intervals, and allows you to accept online payments via PayPal or Authorize.Net.

Pricing: Free 14-day trial. Plans start at $15/month.

11. Sage One

Sage One Accounting is full-featured bookkeeping software made simple. All the features you need, none you don’t need, and a few you’ll wish you had forever. Customize it the way you want.

Pricing: Free 60-day trial. Plans start at $15/month.

12. Xero

Xero, for online accounting, bank reconciliation and invoicing, bills itself as “the world’s easiest accounting software.”

Pricing: Free 60-day trial. Plans start at $15/month.

13. Zuora

Zuora’s suite of web-based (SaaS) billing and payment management services is designed specifically for subscriptions and recurring payments. Zuora pre-integrates with Salesforce out of the box and its APIs can be used to integrate with other CRM applications.

Pricing: Available upon request.

Discussion Forums, Online Community Tools

What are discussion forums and online community tools?

These are online spaces where you can keep your community engaged, and where they can engage with each other and discuss topics related to your mission.

Why do you need them?

While the best form of communication is face-to-face, this isn’t always possible. That’s where building an online community can be the next best thing. A forum moderator will also have key insight into the concerns, pain points, aspirations, and motivations of your members and can use that knowledge to help your nonprofit work on increasing the value it offers.

What should you budget? 

$5-$200 per month.

Anna CaraveliAnna Caraveli
Managing Partner, The Demand Networks
Author of The Demand Perspective: Leading From the Outside In
Twitter“To truly engage and compete, you must go beyond social interaction to create communities of shared purpose that produce concrete outcomes for all stakeholders.Look for private platforms and tools that allow members to engage in meaningful relationships—interact, collaborate, share, learn and solve their top-of-mind problems. Look for features that enable you to capture and leverage intellectual capital generated by members and other stakeholders (conversations, solutions, information etc.); aggregate, reconfigure and transform it into new knowledge products and sources of value; and create self-sustaining value and feedback loopsRemember, however, that the issue here is not which tools and features you will select but how and to what end. How will you best understand and facilitate what most matters to your members/customers? What distinctive value and concrete outcomes will you deliver that make enough of a difference to their lives that they want to join? Only then do you figure out how best you can deploy technology to achieve these goals.”

 

1. BulletinBoards

BulletinBoards.com is a hosted service that lets you quickly set up a feature-rich and highly customizable private message board with no limit on the number of members or messages.

Pricing: $9.95/month with unlimited free phone support.

2. CreateAForum

A free online forum tool which supports unlimited posts, topics, and boards. Create A Forum allows you to create photo galleries and  supports an e-commerce system to help you grow your business.

Pricing: Free limited account, paid plans start at $5/month.

3. Crowdstack

Crowdstack provides an online environment for your community interact and give you feedback. Create public or private forums that can scale to any size.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $59/month.

4. Tapatalk

Free forum hosting with 2 GB storage, automatic spam detection, theme customization, rich media support, sidebar widgets, community voting, and more.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $5/month.

5. Nabble

Free forum and other fully customizable apps include mailing list, photo gallery, news and blog you can embed on your own website.

Pricing: Free

6. Ninja Post

One-click setup for a message board with social integrations.

Pricing: Plans starts at $199/month.

7. ProBoards

ProBoards is a remotely hosted message board service that lets you set up your own discussion forum in just minutes, although you may find it difficult to get your preferred username/subdomain as the service hosts more than 3,000,000 forums.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $49.99/month.

8. QuickTopic

Suitable for a quick group discussion, QuickTopic lets a group of people get and post messages in a private web forum, by email or browser.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans available upon request.

9. Unison.io

Unison is communication software for groups. From small clubs and committees to large churches and non-profits, Unison strengthens and grows communities through better communication and organization.

Pricing: Free limited account, paid plans start at $15/month.

10. Zoho Discussions

Zoho Discussions helps you to setup your own customer support communities and private communities where problems are solved, topics are discussed and ideas are exchanged. Zoho Discussions brings all under one roof. Manage feedback, ideas, questions & problems under a single portal.

Pricing: Plans start at $12/month.

11. Say2B

Customer loyalty software Say2B lets you easily reward your customers with gifts, coins and discounts. It increases customer loyalty and keeps them coming back.

Pricing: Free limited account, paid plans start at $25/month.

Events Management, Registration, Scheduling Tools

What are events management, registration, scheduling tools? 

These are tools that will help you plan and execute events — they can take care of registration, payment processing, attendee communication, and even marketing.

Why do you need them?

Events are one of the best ways to attract new members, but they can also be extremely overwhelming. Event management software automates most of the work and ensures that everything runs smoothly.

What should you budget? 

$20-100 per month.

Jeff Hurt

Jeff Hurt
Executive Vice President, Education & Engagement, Velvet Chainsaw Consulting

TwitterFacebook

“I believe Meeting/Event Professionals have to be careful of thinking that event management software is a silver bullet for creating better events and conferences. Sure, they help with efficiency and logistics. They are tools and do not replace strategy and experience design. Meeting/Event professionals should focus on strategy first, creating something different than their competition and then creating the right experience for the right target audience. Only after they focus on strategy and experience design should then look at securing an event management software tool.

Every conference and event needs an online app for their target market and there are hundreds to consider. I also suggest that events consider FastBar, a digital ticketing/silent auction app that people can use for fundraisers and receptions. It’s a cool app that people sign up for, then wear a bracelet to the event. When they purchase a drink or auction item, the host just swipes their bracelet and their credit card is charged.”

 

1. Amilia

Registration, reporting, CRM, fundraising, billing and more, Amilia is a complete event management tool for any organization.

Pricing: Plans starts at $99/month.

2. Bizzaboo

An all-in-one event platform offering a website builder, mobile app, CRM, and analytics.

Pricing: Available upon request.

3. Aventri

Aventri is a robust online event management service that simplifies registrations while helping you to plan, market and manage even the most complex events. Integrates with SalesForce.com, Cliqbook, Pathable, etc.

Pricing: Available upon request.

4. Eventbrite for NonProfits

Set up an online registration page for your nonprofit event in minutes, then take advantage of Eventbrite’s promotional tools to send email invitations or publicize your event on social networks.

Pricing: 2% + $0.79 per ticket.

5. Set a Time

SetaTime is an online scheduling software allowing users to personalize invites, send text messages, build custom forms, and more. If you’re looking for an all-inclusive appointment booking solution, or a simple scheduling software, look no further. They offer a free plan, plus 20% off paid plans for registered nonprofits.

Pricing: 14-day free trial. Free limited account, paid plans start at $7/month.

6. Event Wizard

Event Wizard lets you create and manage online registration websites for your events, each loaded with a full suite of event management tools.

Pricing: $3.45/registration, or $10,000/year for an unlimited license.

7. Formsite

Create any form with Formsite’s easy form builder. Publish your form to your site and start receiving payments and then analyse the data you’ve collected.

Pricing: Plans start at $21/month.

8. Meetup

The Meetup network makes it easy for anyone to organize a local group or find one already meeting up face-to-face.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $30/month.

9. Regpack

Regpack enables organizations to register applicants quickly and effectively. Regpack’s technology enables individualized registration packages, while seamlessly integrating online payments and providing a sophisticated yet intuitive user management platform. Features include the ability to A/B test forms and fields, insight reporting, enhanced security, data backups, and integrated payment processing.

Pricing: Plans start at $125/month + 2.1% payment processing fee.

10. Reservio

Reservio is a simple scheduling tool. It includes an easy-to-view calendar to see all your appointments at once, online booking, customer management, reminders, and more.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $10/month.

11. OnceHub

OnceHub is an online scheduling service that enables all meeting attendees to compare real-time availability and quickly find the best time for all. It was specifically designed to integrate with Google Calendar to prevent double booking.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $10/user/month.

12. Setster

Embed a scheduling widget on your website to show times and services; visitors request an appointment time, and Setster sends confirmation emails to both parties. Integrates with iCal, Google Calendar, Outlook.

Pricing: Free 15-day trial. Plans start at $16/month.

13. SUMO

SUMO Scheduler is the only appointment scheduling solution built 100% native on the world’s #1 CRM, Salesforce. Clients understand how manually scheduling appointments is a waste of time and resources, ripe for human error and customer attrition. By removing the manual back and forth of phone and email tag, SUMO helps organizations to decrease no-shows, increase productivity and C-SAT. Available 24/7 365 on any device, they do the heavy lifting of appointment scheduling.

Pricing: Available upon request.

14. SurveyAnyplace

SurveyAnyplace is a great survey tool to collect feedback in a fun, interactive way from your latest events. Users can sign up for free for an unlimited amount of time before subscribing to their essential package, which has a lot of additional features.

Pricing: Free 7-day trial. Plans start at $39/month.

15. Whova Lead Retrieval App

Whova allows exhibitors at trade shows and expos to easily capture and manage contacts (booth visitors) with a built-in business card scanner and QR scanner. It helps exhibitors to attract more visitors through a profile, product showcase, and online promotions. The captured contacts can be easily exported to other CRM platforms such as Salesforce and WildApricot.

Pricing: Free for exhibitors to use if the organizer purchases Whova.

Fundraising Software, Online Payments, Donor Management Tools

What are fundraising software, online payments, and donor management tools?

These are tools that can help you fundraise online, execute peer-to-peer or crowdfunding campaigns, collect payments and donor information, and much more.

Why do you need them?

When it comes to fundraising, you want to spend more time generating leads, and less time completing paperwork. Fundraising software can automate all your payments, ticket sales, and reports, plus it can help you create donation pages and spread the word online. We also have a post on 200+ fundraising ideas to get you inspired.

What should you budget? 

$50-$200 per month.

1. 4aGoodCause

4aGoodCause is an all-in-one platform that allows nonprofits to accept online donations, event registration, membership payments and conduct crowdfunding and peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns.

Pricing: Plans start at $84/month.

2. Donorbox

Donorbox is powerful fundraising software that is super simple to set up and attracts more recurring donors. Start fundraising with a fast, optimized donation payment system in 15 minutes.

Pricing: 1.5% Donorbox transaction fee + payment processing fees.

3. DonorPerfect

DonorPerfect provides a complete fundraising and donor management solution to help you reduce your workload and build relationships with your constituents.

Pricing: Plans start at $99/month.

4. DonorTools

Donor Tools is a nonprofit donor database to help charities and churches make smart decisions and raise more money.

Pricing: Free 60-day trial, then $39/month.

5. Double the Donation

Double the Donation is an all-in-one donation software for nonprofits looking to increase revenue through matching gifts.

Pricing: Plans start at $799/year.

6. eTapestry

eTapestry by Blackbaud is a web-based software that tracks donors, prospects or alumni while managing gifts, pledges and payments to enhance nonprofit fundraising.

Pricing: Available upon request.

7. FirstGiving

FirstGiving provides tools to manage peer-to-peer fundraising, grassroots campaigns, and donor communications, as well as visibility into your data so you’ll see what’s working best. Easy-to-use fundraising pages (free) let your individual supporters share and promote your cause.

Pricing: Plans start at $600/year.

8. Fundly

Fundly is a “Keep-it-All” crowdfunding platform that lets individuals and organizations raise money for the causes they care about. In addition to its crowdfunding services, Fundly offers Fundly Pro, which is designed for nonprofits looking to crowdfund and/or set up peer-to-peer fundraising pages.

Pricing: 4.9% platform fee + 2.9% credit card processing fee and $0.30/per transaction.

9. GiftTool Solutions

GiftTool suite of integrated services allows nonprofit organizations to effectively manage their online donations, shopping cart, event registration, membership sign-up, opt-in marketing, surveys, online tests, ballots, pledges, and more.

Pricing: Plans start at $25/month + one-time setup fee of $250.

10. Panorama

Panorama by FrontStream is an all-in-one digital fundraising platform designed to help nonprofits plan, manage, and promote fundraising events.

Pricing: Available upon request.

11. Givelify

Givelify is a three-tap, easy way for donors to give to any cause from their smartphones. They offer donation tracking for users and a web portal for registered nonprofits that allows them to customize their presence on Givelify, track donations and receive donation payouts.

Pricing: 2.9% + $0.30/transaction.

12. Network For Good

Network for Good is a donation management tool that has processed over $1 Billion in donations for more than 100,000 nonprofits. It’s 3 main capabilities are peer-to-peer fundraising, donation pages, and donor management.

Pricing: Plans start at $200/month.

13. Bonfire

Bonfire is a t-shirt fundraising platform that offers all nonprofits exclusive fundraising tools and a reduced processing fee for donations from 8% to 3.5%. There are no inventory costs and your organization gets to keep 100% of the profits.

Pricing: Free

 

Mailing List Management, Email Marketing, Newsletter Tools

What are mailing list management, email marketing, and newsletter tools?

A comprehensive mailing list management tool can keep track of all your contacts, newsletters, campaigns and even provide analysis on open and click rates.

Why do you need them?

If your contact list is growing and you’re still using outlook and excel to communicate with your contacts, you’ll soon reach a breaking point.

What should you budget? 

$10-$90 per month.

1. ActiveCampaign

Beautiful templates, robust tracking (including social media reactions), plus a user-friendly interface makes ActiveCampaign one of the most popular choices for small business and nonprofits as well as some of the Fortune 500 big boys. Loads of guides and resources will help new users learn best practices for email marketing and get up to speed with this service.

Pricing: Plans start at $15/month for up to 500 subscribers.

2. AWeber

AWeber email marketing software offers email newsletters, autoresponders, RSS to Email, website sign-up forms, email web analytics tools, and a good reputation for deliverability.

Pricing: Free limited account, paid plans start at $16.15/month.

3. Campaigner

Easy-to-use email marketing campaign management tool lets you get started quickly. Send your first campaign in 2 minutes.

Pricing: Free 60-day trial. Plans start at $59/month.

4. Constant Contact

SpeakUp! Email Marketing by Constant Contact lets you create professional-looking emails with no technical expertise, manage your contact lists and measure results. More than 400 templates, a step-by step Email Wizard, and point-and-click interface.

Pricing: Plans start at $20/month.

Ream More: How 1 Simple Email Will Make Every New Member Happy

5. Emma

Emma is an email marketing platform focused on sending personalized, relevant, and timely emails with minimal effort.

Pricing: Plans start at $89/month.

6. iContact

iContact helps businesses, nonprofit organizations, and associations to create, send, and track email newsletters, surveys, and autoresponders. Over 300 professionally designed email templates available.

Pricing: Free limited account. Plans start at $20/month.

7. Mad Mimi

Powerful yet simple email marketing service makes it easy for anyone to create elegant e-newsletters, manage lists, track opens and clicks. Good reputation for customer support.

Pricing: Plans start at $10/month for up to 500 contacts.

8. MailChimp

MailChimp do-it-yourself email marketing service lets you create attractive HTML emails, build subscription forms, manage your contact lists, and track results. Integrates with Excel, Salesforce, Highrise, etc.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $9.99/month.

9. Mailman

Mailman is web-based software for managing electronic mail discussion and e-newsletter lists. Mailman supports built-in archiving, automatic bounce processing, content filtering, digest delivery, spam filters, and more.

Pricing: Free, distributed under the GNU General Public License.

10. NetAtlantic Email Marketing Suite

A well-regarded email service with pricing to scale with the size of your mailing list.

Pricing: Available upon request.

11. Omnisend

Omnisend is a powerful ecommerce marketing automation platform. With Omnisend, you can reach your customers or members via email, SMS, Facebook Messenger and even Push Notifications. Pricing is based on subscribers and functions.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $16/month.

12. VerticalResponse

More than 700 email templates to choose from, social sharing features, real-time tracking, live chat help and online guides to get you started. Services include direct mail postcards, online surveys, image hosting, and more.

Pricing: Free 60-day trial. Plans start at $11/month.

13. NEWOLDSTAMP

Their email signature marketing platform lets you create a professional email sign-off and brand your nonprofit to everybody you communicate with. By optimizing your email signature, you can unobtrusively promote your latest articles, upcoming events, and fundraising initiatives to highly targeted audiences.

Pricing: Plans start at $8/month.

 

Meeting Management, Conferencing, Virtual Meeting, Webinar Tools

What are meeting management, conferencing, virtual meeting, and webinar tools?

These are tools you can use to organize virtual meetings and events.

Why do you need them?

Software can help you increase engagement and communication amongst your team. Plus, holding a virtual meeting may be more convenient if your staff has to travel or lives in different regions.

What should you budget? 

$10-$90 per month.

Dr Richard LentDr. Richard Lent
Co-founder, Meeting for Results
TwitterFacebook“For virtual discussions, it is particularly important to be clear about the purpose of any specific discussion items. A virtual meeting participant who doesn’t understand the purpose is likely to disengage or to disrupt the discussion with basic questions.There are three opportunities to prepare a better structure for engaging everyone in an effective discussion.Before the meeting:

  • Send out a list of meeting participant names and locations. Enclose pictures of participants. Better yet, create a slide that shows everyone around a table, complete with photos and names.
  • Identify individuals to take on specific roles in conducting the meeting…note taker, time keeper and so on.

As the meeting begins:

  • Plan to have each participant introduce him/herself in a brief Go-around.

During the meeting:

  • Plan to address participants by name on a regular basis to give everyone a chance to be heard and keep all engaged. Having a copy of your team member’s pictures handy can help you track participation and note important comments.
  • Try to limit presentations to no more than five minutes without some kind of interaction.

See Leading Great Meetings: How to Structure Yours for Success for more information and 32 tools to structure any meeting to make it more productive.  In particular, see Part IV for structuring effective virtual meetings.

 

1. BoardEffect

Features include online board books, scheduling, approvals, archives, new member orientation tools, surveys, ad hoc groups, and more.

Pricing: Available upon request.

2. BoardPaq

Cloud service and app for planning, running, and managing paperless board meetings.

Pricing: Available upon request.

3. Bookafy

Online software for bookings, demos, meetings, and appointments.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $7/month.

4. DirectorPoint

Helps you manage committees, members, calendar, files, annotations, surveys, private discussions and much more.

Pricing: Plans start at $15/month.

5. GoToMeeting & GoToWebinar

Webinar software for any type of online meeting. Easily schedule a group call in just a few clicks, or coordinate a larger session with up to 1,000 attendees at once.

Pricing: Plans start at $89/month.

6. HighFive

No more starfish phones or pin codes, with HighFive calls begin with just a click. Featuring video screen sharing, and availability to everyone on your domain.

Pricing: Available upon request.

7. LucidMeetings

Automate and standardize your meetings in one centralized platform. Features include automated tracking, timing, reminders, scheduling polls, professional email invitations, calendar invites, and meeting templates.

Pricing: Plans start at $12.5/host/month.

Free Cheap Nonprofit Software Tools

8. PickTime

PickTime is a completely free online appointment-making software that makes scheduling a piece of cake. Use it to schedule room times, class bookings, events, and more.

Pricing: Limited free account, paid plans start at $9.99/month.

9. SuperSaaS

SuperSaaS is a completely customizable online appointment scheduling software. They offer a wide range of options, so that you can set up the booking process to fit any and all requirements you may have, all while keeping the software some of the most affordable available.

Pricing: Free limited account, paid plans start at $8/month.

 

Membership Management, Contact Management (CRM) Nonprofit Tools

What are membership management and contact management (CRM) nonprofit tools?

Reaching the limits of maintaining your membership database in Excel? There’s a better way, and it’s called membership management software. Easily search, update, organize, and filter all your members using this type of software.

Why do you need them?

Membership management allows small associations and nonprofits to automate the ‘boring stuff’: managing contact records, automating membership applications and renewals, handling website updates, tracking event registrations, and sending out receipts and reminders.

What should you budget? 

$15-$50 per month.

Wes TrochlilWes Trochlil
Founder, Effective Database Management
Twitter“When choosing member management software, I would recommend any organization consider the following five questions:

  1. How many clients does the vendor have that look like my organization? If your organization is mostly organization membership, does the vendor have other clients that have mostly organization membership?%
  2. What is the vendor’s reputation in the market? You’ll have to ask around, including calling the vendor’s references, and asking THOSE references for references.
  3. Does the vendor’s product address the majority of our functional needs? Do you need events registration, product sales, online directories, committee management, exhibit sales? (This assumes you’ve created a functional needs list that you can compare to the vendor’s offering.)
  4. Does the vendor’s pricing model fit our needs? Some vendors have low or no-cost implementation fees with higher monthly fees, while other vendors have high implementation fees and lower monthly fees. Others may have both! Which model fits your budget and cash flow?
  5. What kind of customer support is available, and at what cost? Some vendors provide unlimited customer support with their monthly fees, while others may provide limited support with additional fees.”

 

1. AddressTwo

Organize your contacts, manage leads, follow-up, tasks and activities with this simple CRM. It’s designed for small business, not just a downscaled version of enterprise-level software, so may be a good fit for many smaller nonprofits as well.

Pricing: Plans start at $14.95/month.

2. Memberize

Memberize is hosted membership site software that provides nonprofits and other organizations with web-based event, membership, communication and Web content management technology.

Pricing: Plans start at $50/month with a $150 setup fee.

3. SageCRM

SageCRM.com is a low-cost, easy-to-use on-demand CRM solution. A fixed monthly price covers the hosted CRM application, support, training, backups and updates. SageCRM.com also offers the flexibility to migrate to an on-site CRM software system as your needs evolve.

Pricing: Available upon request.

Free Cheap Nonprofit Software Tools

4. Salesforce

Salesforce is the leading customer relationship management solution. Salesforce Group Edition starts for less than $9 per user per month, nonprofits receive a 50% discount on training, and qualifying nonprofits may apply for a Nonprofit Edition license donation.

Pricing: Available upon request.

5. TimeLog Project

TimeLog Project is a web-based system that combines time tracking, project and staff management, customer relations (CRM) and invoicing tools— everything you need to run a nonprofit, except a website and online community.

Pricing: Plans start at €4.50/license/month.

6. WebCRM

Easy-to-configure online CRM offers templates, shared web-based calendar, custom reports, import/export Excel data and other formats, and lets you send emails and SMS directly from the software. Automatic updates and automatic backup.

Pricing: Free 14-day trial; plans start at 22 GBP/month.

7. Zoho CRM

Free for 3 users with basic features – tasks, call log, calendar, reports, etc. – as well as Sales Force Automation, Marketing Automation, Customer Support, Web Forms, File Storage, Data Administration.

Pricing: Plans start at $14/month.

 

Presentation, Video, and other Multimedia Tools

What are presentation, video, and other multimedia tools?

These can help you quickly create and share stunning videos, presentations, and designs.

Why do you need them?

You may not be a graphic designer, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to create great visuals! Visual media is absolutely necessary for any kind of marketing or fundraising campaigns.

What should you budget? 

$10-$40 per month.

1. Animaker

Effortlessly create studio-quality animation videos with a simple drag & drop interface. There are tons of free templates and a huge library of animated assets to choose from.

Pricing: Plans start at $10/month.

2. Creatopy

Creatopy is an easy-to-use tool that allows anyone to create stunning visuals or animations to promote their website on the internet. You can design beautiful ads starting from their ready-made templates using their free images, shapes, icons, and popular fonts.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $17/month.

3. Canva

Create any design using Canva’s pre-made designs and graphics.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $12.99/month.

4. Design Wizard

Design Wizard is online graphic design tool used to create impressive designs without the need for technical expertise. They have a catalog of over 1.2 million images and 20,000 templates to choose from.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $9.99/month.

5. Easel.ly

An easy infographic and chart making tool with 1,000s of templates to choose from.

Pricing: Plans start at $2/month.

6. LucidChart

Easily create flow charts, wireframes, and all kinds of other diagrams online, and collaborate with others in real time. Free for 1 user with 2 collaborators, 25 MB, limited document complexity.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $7.95/month.

Read More: 4 ways to put a PowerPoint Presentation on your website

7. Mindflash

Create an online training course from your existing presentations and videos.

Pricing: Available upon request.

8. Panopto

Easily record any video presentation that can be shared with your team. Panopto indexes the content inside your video presentations so that any spoken or shown on-screen word can be searched for.

Pricing: Available upon request.

9. Piktochart

An online infographics tool with an easy-to-use drag and drop builder and hundreds of simple graphics to choose from.

Pricing: Free limited account, paid plans start at $39.99/year for nonprofits.

10. Powtoon

The simplest tool to create animation, or cartoon presentations. Create your own or edit an already build presentation. Easy-to-follow tutorials for any beginner.

Pricing: Plans start at $19/month.

11. Prezi

Create a visually engaging presentation from scratch or using one of many professional templates. Upload nearly any file format of media, collaborate, and share your presentation.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $15/month.

12. Renderforest

Easily create videos for YouTube, explainer animations, service promotional videos, music visualizations, and more with Renderforest. Create and publish videos for free.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid pans start at $5.99/month.

13. Slideshare

Owned by LinkedIn, Slideshare is one of the easiest ways to upload and share presentations, infographics, documents and more.

Pricing: Free.

14. Typito

Create stunning videos fast and easy. Typito is a web-based video creation tool that has been described as “Canva for video”. With a simple drag-and-drop interface, it allows you to quickly create videos with beautiful typography, images, and videos.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $8/month. Registered nonprofits are eligible for 50% discount on annual subscriptions.

15. Vcasmo

Vcasmo is a presentation-sharing site that shows video on the left of the viewer’s screen and slides on the right, so you can effectively narrate your slides as if giving a live presentation.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $16.99/month.

Project Management, Document Editing, Sharing, Collaboration Tools

What are project management, document editing, sharing, and collaboration tools?

These are tools designed to help you and your team members manage projects effectively and productively.

Why do you need them?

Ever tried to dig for an attachment in an email that starts like this: RE: FWD: RE: RE: RE: ? Use these tools to eliminate the frustrations of coordinating projects through email and help increase your team’s productivity.

What should you budget? 

$5-$100 per month.

Shiv Narayanan

Shiv Narayanan
Founder, How To SaaS
Twitter

“The real problem you’re trying to solve with project management tools is improving the way your team communicates. With a centralized hub for each project, there is always one exact place where a team member can find all the information they need to make a decision.

I also recommend reading up on the principles of Scrum, the art of doing twice the work in half the time.”

 

1. Asana

Asana is an easy way for teams to track their work. From tasks and projects to conversations and dashboards, Asana enables teams to move work forward.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $10.99/month.

2. Basecamp

Basecamp web-based project management and collaboration software lets you share files, meet deadlines, assign tasks, and centralize feedback.

Pricing: Free 60-day trial, then $99/month.

3. Box

Share, manage and access all your business content online or by mobile.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $5/user/month.

4. ClutterPad

ClutterPad is an online project management and collaboration tool that includes: todo lists, calendars, messages, chat rooms (and private chat), contacts, document version control, and an online file manager.

Pricing: 60-day free trial. Plans start at $19/month.

5. Dropbox

An easy and secure way to upload and share any type of file with anyone.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $9.99/month.

6. EditMe

“The original hosted wiki solution,” EditMe offers an easy way for even non-techy people to build collaborative websites and wikis that are actually easy to use.

Pricing: Plans start at $19/month.

Read More: Take a look at this nonprofit calendar we created using over 1,000,000 points of data to discover which months other nonprofits are engaging in activities like volunteer recruitment, networking events, yearly goal setting, and board meetings.

7. EtherPad

EtherPad is an open source, web-based word processor that lets multiple people edit the same document simultaneously with changes shown instantly on everyone’s screen. No limit to “undo” levels.

Pricing: Free

8. Evernote

Evernote is a cross-platform app for mobile or desktop that helps you organize, archive, discuss, and present all your notes.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $7.99/month.

9. Goplan 2.0

Goplan lets you manage a group calendar (and export or sync with mobile devices), track time, assign tasks and tickets, manage files, collaborate and discuss.

Pricing: Paid plans start at $10/month, with a 60-day free trial.

10. GoogleDrive

Easily create and share your Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Surveys, and many other files with anyone, anywhere. All you need is the shareable link and people can view, edit, and comment on all your files.

Pricing: Free

11. GrowinCloud

GrowinCloud is a comprehensive business management software for small and medium sized organizations. It can help you with online appointment scheduling, contact management, leads capturing, online document management, and more.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at £10/month.

12. Huddle

Powerful project management and collaboration tools include whiteboards, discussion forums, file sharing, calendars and task assignment, even phone and web conferencing within your secure online workspace.

Pricing: Available upon request.

13. iMeetCentral

iMeetCentral connects people across teams, buildings, time zones and continents. Build online workspaces, share files and centralize communication so you’re more organized and more productive.

Pricing: Plans start at $25/month.

14. Jira

If you’re familiar with Scrum and Kanban boards, Jira is the tool for you. Plan, track, and organize all your tasks and assign tasks to others. Integrates with Confluence, Bitbucket, HipChat, and many others.

Pricing: Available upon request.

15. LaunchNotes

LaunchNotes is the single source of truth for software teams to communicate product change, internally and externally. By getting the right updates to the right people at the right time, LaunchNotes enables your entire organization to move at the speed of your development team while ensuring end users are never surprised by product changes.

Pricing: Free for nonprofits.

16. LibreOffice

LibreOffice is an open sourced software suite, similar to the Microsoft Office Suite that includes a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a presentation program, a graphics editor, and a database management program (similar to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.).

Pricing: Free for nonprofits.

17. MyCommittee

MyCommittee lets you create meeting agendas and minutes, share documents and collaborate, reply to comments, and communicate with members and contacts.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $29/month.

18. PBworks

PBworks provides a broad set of collaboration products that help businesses work more efficiently and effectively.  They serve markets such as advertising and marketing agencies, law firms, and education, as well as the broader business market.

Pricing: Available upon request.

19. ProjectDesk

Project Desk online project and task management tool provides a virtual workspace for your team to share information and collaborate on projects with task tracking, document sharing, threaded discussions, automated email, and more.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $49.95/month.

20. ProofHub

ProofHub is an all-in-one project management software. Its main features include task management, online proofing, Gantt charts, reports, time tracking among others.

Pricing: Plans start at $45/month.

21. Redbooth

Redbooth is easy-to-use project management software for creating high-performing team.

Pricing: Plans start at $9/month.

22. Slack

A messaging app for teams. Easily create a channel about any topic and add whomever you like to the discussion. Create private channels, or direct message others.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $6.67/month.

23. Twiddla

Browse websites in a shared, real-time whiteboard, annotate, share files, and chat with the people you invite to your brainstorming session. No account is needed to start a “meeting”.

Pricing:  Free limited account. Paid plans start at $14/month.

24. Trello

Trello organizes all your tasks (cards) into an easy to view, shareable board. Drag and drop cards between lists to show progress. Add as many people as you need and drag them to cards. Add and reorder lists as you need. Trello adapts to your project, team, and workflow.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $5/month.

25. Wriber

Wriber uses artificial intelligence to help busy people write better content, faster. Wriber intuitively searches the web based on what you’re writing to provide you with research sources, relevant statistics, related videos, and ideas to spark your thinking, plus it helps you optimize every post for SEO value.

Pricing: Free 14-day trial. Plans start at $29/month.

26. VivifyScrum

VivifyScrum is a project management tool for small teams and large organizations alike. It offers agile collaboration boards, team and time management features and even an in-built time-tracker.

Pricing: Free 7-day trial. Plans start at $4/user/month.

Best Free Nonprofit Software

SMS Text Marketing Tools

What are SMS text marketing tools?

These tools allow you to communicate with members and donors via text message.

Why do you need them?

Did you know that text marketing has the highest digital communication open rate at 95%? That’s a hard-to-ignore stat with a lot of opportunity: marketing campaigns, event reminders, member chat, etc. The list goes on and on.

What should you budget? 

$10-$100 per month.

Alexa Lemzy

Alexa Lemzy
Content Manager, TextMagic
Twitter

“Text messaging is a very personal way of communication, so make sure your supporters agreed to receive messages from you. Show them the value and they will opt in.

Whenever you choose text messaging software, look for time-saving features. Sending out SMS directly from your email and scheduling texts in advance are good examples.

Pay attention to the geographical coverage – if you run an international campaign, you will want all your supporters to get your messages instantly. Also, check if the company guarantees security (data backups, encryption).”

 

1. ClubTexting

Clubtexting allows easy creation of segments so that you can send targeted texts. Plus they have an open API so that you can integrate your text messaging into your website or internal CRM system.

Pricing: Plans start at $19/month.

2. EZTexting

EZTexting is a bulk SMS messaging service that supports all major Canadian cell phone carriers as well as US.

Pricing: Plans start at $19/month.

3. Gnosis Media Group

GMG offers a comprehensive text to donate service which can even be used as a payment processor if you don’t have your own. You can get fully set up in about 20 minutes and they offer a money-back guarantee.

Pricing: Plans start at $12/month.

4. JA.TXT

Reliable text software capable of sending a variety of different campaigns including quizzes, surveys, coupons, and other customizable campaigns. An account manager will work with you one-on-one to deliver the best possible outcome for your team.

Pricing: Plans start at $99/month.

5. TextMagic

A text messaging service for any type of business, foundation, or association. It allows you to craft personalized text messages, schedule and send out alerts. You can check out the stories of their nonprofit customers in their Case Studies.

Pricing: $0.04 per text.

 

Social Media Tools

What are social media tools?

These are tools that can help you schedule posts and publish them automatically, as well as analyze their effectiveness.

Why do you need them?

Being active on social media can help you grow your online community and spread your message to more people.

What should you budget? 

$10-$100 per month.

1. Bitly

Shorten any URL and track how many clicks it gets.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $29/month.

2. Buffer

Buffer allows you to schedule, publish and analyse all your posts in one place and will also share your posts at peak times so that they get max exposure.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $5/month.

3. BuzzSumo

This tool allows you to see which articles rank highest on social media. Simply paste any article in BuzzSumo’s search bar and it will tell you how many shares that article has on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Pricing: Free 60-day trial. Free limited account. Paid plans start at $99/month.

4. Discover.ly

A Chrome extension that allows you to see the social media info (Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc.) information of any of your contacts in Gmail.

Pricing: Free

5. Google Alerts

Get notified whenever your organization or any other organization you wish to follow gets mentioned on the internet.

Pricing: Free

6. Hootsuite

Automatically find and share content your audience will love, and keep your social presence active even when you’re not. Schedule 100s of posts at a time. Use Suggestions to find great content to share. View scheduled messages by day, week, or month in calendar view.

Pricing: Free 60-day trial. Plans start at $49/month.

7. MeltWater

A social media monitoring tool that allows you to track your brand, your competition, and relevant news. Their campaign analysis will give you insight into what campaigns worked and why.

Pricing: Available upon request.

8. Sendible

An all-in-one, easy to use dashboard to write and schedule all your social media posts. Engage, monitor, grow, and measure your posts with in-depth analytics.

Pricing: Free 14-day trial. Plans start at $29/month.

9. TapClicks

A power analytical tool that will track everything from your email marketing, social media, and PPC campaigns.

Pricing: Available upon request.

10. Tweepi

Tweepi helps you identify influencers and tweet at them to gain followers.

Pricing: Plans start at $10.75/month.

11. TweetDeck

Created by Twitter, with TweetDeck you can view multiple timelines in one interface with advanced features to help manage multiple twitter accounts. Schedule and post tweets right from Tweetdeck.

Pricing: Free

12. Social Insider

Get insight into your competitors’ social media strategy, discover how they’re ranking, and what kind of content you should create next with advanced reporting and analytics.

Pricing: Free 14-day trial. Plans start at $83/month.

13. PromoRepublic

You know you’re doing great content when you get lots of engagement, reactions, and new followers. Then again, that’s what happens when a content plan is audience-oriented. With PromoRepublic you can create your own posts or edit ready-to-use templates — try this social post scheduler to always deliver content on time.

Pricing: Available upon request.

Time-Tracking Tools

What are time-tracking tools?

These are tools that track how you and your team members are spending their time.

Why do you need them?

Each month you can conduct an analyses of how long it takes you to complete on-going tasks so you can look for ways to improve and scale your work.

What should you budget? 

$5-$30 per month.

David Klein

David Klein
Director of Marketing, ClickTime
Twitter Facebook
“Nonprofits have very specific time tracking requirements. When you are selecting a time tracking platform, it’s important to consider how it will help you manage program costs, report on functional expenses, and ensure compliance with auditors or other regulatory bodies. Best-in-class time tracking technologies can provide deep operational insights that empower your organization, and allow you to share data-driven stories with your funders, grantors, or members.”

 

1. ActiTIME

ActiTIME lets you track time in a web browser, on mobile, or in a Chrome extension. It also has accounting and project management capabilities.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $6/month.

2. ATTO: Timesheets for Employees

Atto is a time and location tracking app designed to help small businesses manage projects, minimize costs from time wasting activities, and maximize productivity of employees. The app is one of the most sophisticated time tracking tool in the market and it’s available for iOS and Android devices.

Pricing: Free 14-day trial, then $5/user/month.

3. Cashboard

Cashboard lets you track time, create estimates and invoices, and accept payments online. Timer widgets are available for Mac OS X, Windows and iPhone, and Cashboard integrates with 37signals’ Basecamp.

Pricing: Plans start at $8.25/month.

4. ClickTime

ClickTime makes it easy to track employee time against the programs and grants you manage. Thousands of organizations use ClickTime to ensure compliance, improve program management, and drive increased funding.

Pricing: After a free 60-day trial, ClickTime Nonprofit is $8/user/month.

5. Clockify

Clockify is a time tracker and timesheet app that is 100% free for an unlimited number of users and projects. It lets you add time manually, track it in real-time, generate reports, and more. It also provides integration with 100+ best project management, development, productivity, and business apps. Clockify is suited for teams, freelancers, and enterprises, who can select the low-cost self-hosted version of the app.

Pricing: Free

6. Elementool Time Tracking

Monitor projects and resource performance, define different tasks, compare estimated time requirements with actual time reports, calculate the project cost based on the time reports submitted by the users, create Gantt charts and more.

Pricing: Available upon request.

7. Harvest

Harvest lets you track time and send invoices from one integrated application, with employee timesheets, online payment collection, and strong visual reports to help you track your organization’s resources.

Pricing: Free 60-day trial. Free limited account. Paid plans start at $12/month.

8. Intervals

Intervals is web-based project management software that “marries time tracking and task management in a collaborative online space.”

Pricing: Plans start at $29/month.

9. OfficeClip Web Timesheet & Expenses

Part of the OfficeClip business suite, you can download and install Web Timesheet and Expenses on your computer or use the hosted version online.

Pricing: Available upon request.

10. Time Doctor

One of the best-known time tracking tools. Top features include time tracking, screenshot monitoring, apps and websites tracking, task management, and detailed reports to maximize productivity.  Time Doctor also provides integration with top management apps.

Pricing: Free 14-day trial. Plans start at $7/month.

11. Timesheet

Timesheet.com by Tenrox is an easy-to-use web-based tool that integrates with all major accounting, payroll and CRM application, as well as Outlook and SharePoint. Real time dashboards and reports let you instantly see all project time, cost and billing information.

Pricing: Available upon request.

For even more time tracking tools, here’s a great post on 11 Time Tracking Software Tools Nonprofits Swear By.

 

Volunteer Management Tools

What are volunteer management tools?

Volunteer management tools are used to recruit, schedule, and manage volunteers.

Why do you need them?

Volunteers are the lifeblood of many nonprofit organizations. These tools can automate a lot of the administrative work so you can spend more time building personal connections with them and making sure they have a great volunteer experience.

What should you budget? 

$10-$40 per month.

Barry Altland

Barry Altland
Writer, Speaker, Consultant, Head, Heart and Hands Engagement Collective
Twitter

“As a key staff member for a faith-based homeless ministry in Florida, we have a need for technology to meet a variety of our different digital administrative tracking functions.  Since we receive monetary support from our community through grants, regular online giving, as well as one-time, or large lump sum, in-kind and event-driven donations, the tool must allow us to easily track all of these in one application.

As well, we have need to track all our volunteer hours, both regular weekly ministry operations as well as event-driven and “pop-in” volunteers.  This data is mission-critical for grantwriting purposes, and it must be easily extracted from the application.

We have staff members and volunteers who do much of the data input, and they each have varying levels of prior experience and comfort with technology.  Given their varied skills, they still must be able to effectively master the tasks within the technology with a minimal learning curve.

Most solutions have so many additional features we have yet to fully explore, including Events Management and others.  Since every NPO is unique, so are their needs, and our organization sought a tool to meet ours as efficiently and effectively as possible, all with a singular monthly subscription fee.  We chose Donorsnap, and have found it to be a great all-in-one solution for us!”

 

1. BetterImpact

Easily keep track of all your volunteers on the cloud. Features include volunteer application forms, training tracking, email communication, scheduling and reporting.

Pricing: Available upon request.

2. Donorsnap

Donorsnap will handle all your registrations, online donations, and even recurring donations. It’s an all-in-one tool for all your donation needs.

Pricing: Plans start at $39/month.

3. Galaxy Digital

All-in-one community engagement software that can help recruit, manage, track and retain volunteers. Mobile-friendly.

Pricing: Available upon request.

Free Cheap Nonprofit Software Tools

4. Samaritan

Recruit, manage, and measure your volunteers’ efforts with Samaritan. Samaritan also offers integration with a wide range of platforms like Facebook and PeopleSoft. Independently rated #1 software for volunteer recruiting and management. Built-in live criminal checking and e-campaigns. All budgets supported.

Pricing: Plans start at $4,750/year.

5. SignUp

A full volunteer planner featuring customizable sign up pages, email tracking and delivery, a full scheduling assistant and donation collecting.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $9.99/month.

6. Sumac

Volunteer management tool for recruiting and analysing volunteers. Other features include donor management, email marketing, and payment processing.

Pricing: Plans start at $35/month.

7. Volgistics

A comprehensive volunteer management system with scheduling, tracking, reporting, volunteer portal, group tracking, and text and email communication. Start a free trial, or a trial pre-loaded with sample data.

Pricing: Plans start at $9/month.

8. VolSoft

If you have a large volunteer base, VolSoft will help you keeps track of your volunteers and creates statistical reports on their activity. Each volunteer will have their own unique profile and sign in and out of.

Pricing: Available upon request.

9. VolunteerSchedulerPro

Volunteer Scheduler Pro is an all-in-one management system for Volunteers. Features include, flexible scheduling, automatic reminders, online substitutions, custom enrollments, email, reporting, and tiered access.

Pricing: Plans start at $25/month.

10. WhenToHelp

Access WhenToHelp on the cloud to create and publish schedules, notify volunteers automatically with email and text messages, and find replacement volunteers quickly.

Pricing: Free 60-day trial. Plans start at $15/month.

 

Website Analytics, Data Collection, Tracking Tools

What are website analytics, data collection, and tracking tools?

These tools help analyze how well your website is working, what pages people are visiting, and how long they’re staying there.

Why do you need them?

You have a good website, but you want to make it better. An easy way to understand where there’s room for improvement is by integrating an analytical tool. And if you’re maintaining a membership database, here are 10 mandatory membership fields to keep track of.

What should you budget? 

$10-$80 per month.

Andrew GarbersonAndrew Garberson
Search Department Manager, Bounteous
Twitter

“Nonprofits have unique tracking and reporting challenges because goals can be difficult to quantify in dollars, especially compared to ecommence or other sectors. How do you put a monetary value on finding a new volunteer or spreading mission awareness?

I urge my nonprofit partners to start the web analytics process offline on a whiteboard with two columns: digital goals on one side and the metrics we can use to measure them on the other side.

Google Analytics is often the obvious next step because it is easy to implement and free for most nonprofits. It’s peas-and-carrots partner is Google Tag Manager, which allows nonprofits to turn nearly any type of website engagement into a trackable conversion that we can report on with Analytics.”

 

1. Clicky

Clicky is a real-time web analytics service that allows you to track site pageviews.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $9.99/month.

2. Crazy Egg

CrazyEgg creates a “heat map” to help you visualize exactly how visitors interact with your website, and lets you export or share the data with other users.

Pricing: Free 60-day trial. Plans start at $24/month.

3. Feature Upvote

Feature Upvote helps you centralize feedback in one online board. Users add and upvote feedback directly. You quickly surface the most valuable ideas. Feature Upvote is a less time-intensive (and spam-free) alternative to community forums.

Pricing: Free 60-day trial. Plans start at $79/month.

4. FeedBurner

Google’s FeedBurner provides custom RSS feeds and management tools to web-based content publishers, including an email subscription service and an optional advertising system. Track how many people have subscribed to your RSS feeds and with what service or program.

Pricing: Free

5. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a powerful web analytics solution, now with Google Adwords integration to track the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. Detailed reports help you learn who your website visitors are, where they come from, and how they interact with your website.

Pricing: Free

6. Google Tag Manager

Why wait months for site code updates? Google Tag Manager lets you launch new tags any time with a few clicks, so you never miss a measurement or marketing opportunity.

Pricing: Free

7. Google Webmaster Central

Google’s collection of webmaster resources are invaluable to answer your crawling and indexing questions, help you to increase traffic to your site, and connect you with your visitors.

Pricing: Free

8. Histats

Histats offers unlimited and unrestricted real-time website traffic statistics with forecast and comparison charts to help you understand visitor trends for every page or group of pages on your site.

Pricing: Free

9. TeamViewer

TeamViewer provides a “24/7” network and website monitoring service that lets you know instantly when your website or intranet is down, reports response time, and tracks your website visitors.

Pricing: Plans start at $60.90/month.

10. QuestionPro

QuestionPro’s Nonprofit Waiver Program offers registered nonprofit organizations free access to the survey software for data-collection and analytics for as long as they need.

Pricing: Free for nonprofits. Premium plans start at $129/month.

11. Saber Feedback

Saber Feedback makes it easy for you to get instant visual feedback from your users. Simply add a feedback button, customise your feedback forms and receive feedback in a way that suits you. Works on websites, web apps and online courses. Quickly identify problems, streamline your ticketing system, and spot growth opportunities.

Pricing: Free 10-day trial. Plans start at $29/month.

12. StatCounter

StatCounter is an invisible web tracker aimed at websites with 250,000 pageloads per month or less, offering real-time traffic statistics for multiple websites, lifetime summary stats, and a detailed analysis of your last 500 pageloads. Live demo.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at €7/month.

13. ContactOut

ContactOut is a tool that makes recruiting a breeze. As a browser extension, ContactOut shows you personal contact information of LinkedIn profiles which isn’t normally displayed (such as private email, phone number and social accounts).

Pricing: Plans start at $39/month.

Website Builders, Blogs, Content Management (CMS) Tools

What are website builders, blogs, and content management (CMS) tools?

These tools help you build and maintain a website.

Why do you need them?

If you don’t have the finances to hire a site developer, an easy-to-use online website builder is the next best route to go. Many common features include a custom domain, a blog, and member-only areas. If you want a more in-depth review, you can also see our list of the best website builders for nonprofits.

What should you budget? 

$10-$100 per month.

Lamees AbourahmaLamees Abourahma
President & Founder, Webbright Services


“When it comes to choosing a website building software there are key features you should consider for your membership-based organizations:

Cloud software – choose a software that you can access over the internet from a browser instead of one that you need to download to your computer. There are many advantages for cloud software, my favorite being the automatic upgrades. With a cloud software you don’t need to manually install any updates every time the software has a new release; a cloud software is automatically updated by the software company and does not require any work from the user. In addition, a cloud software can easily be accessed by site administrators from any computer with an internet connection and a browser.

Easy to use – One of the biggest challenges organizations have with their website is that they can’t make updates directly to the website. Look for software that gives you direct access to your website with a content management system (CMS) – a tool that will allow you to make easy edits to the website. Some content management systems have a WYSWYG (i.e., What You See is What You Get) and do not require HTML or CSS skills to make website edits.

Additional factors that you should look into include: training and support; price structure; software development methodology and resources; data security.”

1. CFSites

CFSites offers a simple way for people with limited technical skills to create a website for their cause. Features include a setup wizard and visual editor, 3MB storage, your own URL, and more than a dozen templates.

Pricing: Free

2. Drop Pages

“By simply creating a Dropbox folder that you then share with Droppages you can quickly throw together a working website using just text files and folders,” explains Paul Boag, and you can easily update your DropPages site by mobile, because Dropbox itself is so widely integrated with many applications. See Boag’s video on how to Create a Website Using DropBox and a Text Editor to get a sense of whether this might be the right website-building approach for your organization.

Pricing: Plans start at $8/month.

3. Doodlekit

Doodlekit is a fully hosted online website builder and CMS (Content Management System) that helps anyone from first-timers to web designers build a website with blogs, forums, shopping carts, custom forms and more.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $10/month.

4. Ethion

A website builder with built-in email marketing to make it easy to keep in touch with your audience.

Pricing: Free 60-day trial. Plans start at $9.99/month.

5. Elevation Web Nonprofit Website Design

Elevation Web is a full-service agency that builds high-quality websites for nonprofits. They specialize in website design, graphic design, search marketing, and copywriting.

Pricing: Available upon request.

6. Homestead

Point-and-click, drag-and-drop website builder for non-techy users. Customizable templates, site stats.

Pricing: Plans start at $7.99/month.

7. Jimdo

Easy website builder with online store option.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $12/month.

8. Manila

Hosted Manila is the software-as-a-service (Saas) version of UserLand Software’s Manila web publishing and blogging application.

Pricing: Plans start at $99/year.

9. Magix Website Maker

Create dynamic Flash homepages, hosting included.

Pricing: Free 60-day trial. Plans start at $9.99/month.

10. MorWeb

MorWeb is a responsive design CMS website builder and blogging platform. It’s used by non-technical people to quickly create and update responsive website designs in the cloud without any coding.

Pricing: Plans start at $99/month.

11. Non-Profit Soapbox

Built on the Joomla! open-source CMS, Non-Profit Soapbox is a powerful website creation tool. Salesforce can be integrated so users can manage their own contact information.

Pricing: Plans start at $99/month + $3,500 setup fee.

12. pixpa

pixpa is an online portfolio website builder with integrated e-commerce, client proofing, and blogging tools. No coding needed.

Pricing: Free 15-day trial. Plans start at $7/month.

14. SITE123

SITE123 allows you to easily build a website quickly, even from your mobile phone. They provide many professionally designed templates, but options are limited in order to prevent you from making design mistakes. Features include free hosting SEO tools, a free image library, and unlimited webpages.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $12.80/month.

15. Squarespace

A fully hosted and managed website solution, Squarespace sites come standard with an integrated statistics system and 20+ integrated modules including a blog package.

Pricing: Plans start at $12/month.

17. Weebly

Weebly offers easy-to-build hosted websites with 65+ templates, WYSIWYG drag-and-drop content widgets, and unlimited blogs within your site.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $7/month.

18. Wix

Wix has plenty of templates to choose from for any type of website. Features include a drag and drop builder, custom domain name, one-pager websites, and mobile responsiveness.

Pricing: Plans start at $14/month.

19. WordPress.com

The hosted version of WordPress blogging software is available in over 50 languages. Set up a single-author or group blog (public, private, or password protected) on a WordPress.com subdomain, with a selection of design themes, 3 gigabytes of file storage, and more.

Pricing: Plans start at $5/month.

20. Wufoo

Drag and drop website forms that are easy to build. Add contact information, checkboxes, attachments, you name it.

Pricing: Plans start at $14.08/month.

21. Yola

Yola (formerly SynthaSite) is a website builder with drag-and-drop technology that makes it easy for anyone to create a website and to add popular social media widgets, PayPal or Google online stores, blogs, chatroom, and more.

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $4.95/month.

22. Weblium

Weblium is an AI website builder that allows you to create a fast mobile-adaptive site in 1 hour. User-friendliness is its top priority. You can use 200+ ready-made blocks and templates, and change design schemes in one click, while the built-in AI will keep your design perfect whatever changes you make. What’s more, Weblium has a team of human webmasters ready to help you 24/7!

Pricing: Free limited account. Paid plans start at $8.25/month.

 

All-In-One Solutions for Nonprofits

What are all-in-one solutions for nonprofits? 

All-in-one solutions blend together many of the features we’ve already discussed in a single platform.

Why do you need them?

From maintaining a contact database, to coordinating events, processing payments, managing member communication, and building your website… the list goes on and on. Don’t spread yourself thin trying to learn so many different systems. All-in-one software can rid you of this headache.

What should you budget? 

$50-$200 per month.

We of course want to mention our own online software for nonprofits:

1. WildApricot

WildApricot is all-in-one web software that helps small associations and nonprofits to automate the ‘boring stuff’: managing contact records, automating membership applications and renewals, handling website updates, tracking event registrations, and sending out receipts and reminders.

Pricing: Free 60-day trial. Free limited account. Paid plans start at $60/month with free upgrades and support, no long-term contracts, and no setup or processing fees.

WildApricot takes all the capabilities of MailChimp, Excel, EventBrite, Outlook, and WordPress and combines them all into one comprehensive platform.

2. MemberClicks

While WildApricot is perfect for small organizations, MemberClicks serves professional associations, trade associations and chambers of commerce with more staff members and a larger contact base. It’s an all-in-one website solution, including an online CMS and permission-based group management to donation forms for collecting information and payments. Click here to learn more about MemberClicks.

Pricing: Available upon request.

3. ActiveNetwork

Active Network web-based software for nonprofits offers membership management, facility reservations, program registration, donations (integrates with Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge), reports, website content management, online payments and more.

Pricing: Available upon request.

4. Blackbaud

Blackbaud incorporates nearly every tool a nonprofit of any type and size could ever need. Look through their A-Z list of more than 20 products.

Pricing:  Available upon request.

5. CharityEngine

CharityEngine is an all-in-one CRM option for nonprofits with built-in donation forms, email marketing capabilities, event management tools and much more. Its many offerings combined with affordable pricing make it a great choice for the growing nonprofit.

Pricing: Available upon request.

6. CitySoft Community Enterprise

Community Enterprise modules allow organizations to manage many key activities online in one open-source software system, wither hosted by CitySoft or on your own server.

Pricing: Plans start at $50-$75/month.

7. Cvent

All-in-one event management including features for conferences, on-site check-in, email marketing and payment processing.

Pricing: Available upon request.

8. Firespring

Thousands of nonprofits use Firespring’s signature product which includes a robust website CMS, and tools for fundraising, member management, event registration, email marketing, thought leadership and SEO. Connects seamlessly to other products via API.

Pricing: Available upon request.

9. MemberMouse

MemberMouse is an easy to use WordPress membership plugin that allows you to sell products, subscriptions and memberships, setup a password protected member’s area, offer 1-click upsells and downsells, manage customers, automate customer service, track critical retention metrics and more.

Pricing: Plans start at $29/month.

10. Tendenci

Tendenci membership management software is a comprehensive Web site solution designed for large associations.

Pricing: Plans start at $199/month.

11. Tools4Shuls

A full line of web applications developed for synagogues and Jewish nonprofits: calendar, online donations, announcements, content and media archive, image gallery, and (coming soon) e-newsletter modules plug into your existing website.

Pricing: Modules are $18 -$36 per month each, and you choose only the modules you need.

12. YourMembership

YourMembership is a complete online member community and membership management system. Features include website design and hosting, invoicing, analytics and email marketing.

Pricing: Available upon request.

Try Now

Have questions or comments, or would like to be added to our list? Email Tatiana at tmorand [at] personifycorp.com

 

The Membership Growth Report:

Benchmarks & Insights for Growing Revenue and Constituents

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