Best CRMs for UK Charities in 2024
Need to decide on a CRM for your third sector organisation? Do the options feel overwhelming?
We’ve got your back - we’ve written this blog to inform and guide you on what might be the best choice for you, your team, your supporters and your organisation. It does of course include GoodCRM as an option, but we’ve outlined some other CRM provider options with what we hope is a fair assessment of their features.
If you’re just starting your research into charity CRMs, it won’t take you long to find out that most CRMs will help with your supporter, customer and donor data. But did you know that an integrated CRM can help you do so much more? An integrated CRM can help you to track event data, nurture donor relationships to ensure your supporters are experiencing the best donor interactions with you, grow memberships, measure the impact of donations and collect monitoring data for funding reports, and so much more.
The key to success is finding out what is the right fit for your organisation. By making the right choice, you’ll be managing all these processes, freeing up the time in your team to get on with the business of doing good.
Top Charity CRMS:
GoodCRM. Easy and affordable data management for organisations in charity, non-profit & culture spaces.
Pros: Charity specific and developed in collaboration with the sector. Manages fundraising, memberships, contact management and monitoring/evaluation. No limits or additional charges based on your number of constituents. Real human support, with lots of 1:1 support, free webinar Masterclasses and training. Plus some affordable options for additional support/consultancy.
Potential cons: No granular user access/restricted permission levels quite yet, but will be coming in 2024 - might be a drawback for very large organisations with complex teams.
2. Salesforce. Focus on boosting productivity, and maximising growth.
Pros: Well known product. Lots of possibilities in terms of integrations with other software (but this could be a con for a less tech-savvy team who want something simple out-of-the-box).
Cons: Not charity specific, huge tech company with less expertise within the third sector. Can be expensive to implement. Some customers complain that it’s too ‘sales’ focussed and not well suited to charities/third sector.
3. Donorfy. Cloud based and built for fundraising, by fundraisers.
Pros: Useful fundraising tools, such as collecting GiftAid declarations for submission to HMRC. Built in reporting and analytics for your fundraising campaigns.
Cons: Mainly focussed on fundraising and donor management, rather than other aspects of CRM. Could become expensive as your price increases as you add more constituents.
4. CharityEngine. Based in the US since 2008.
Pros: Range of features, including online donations and memberships. Could be a good, all round solution for managing most aspects of CRM in a charity.
Cons: Very expensive (prices start at $450 per month). Limits on the number of constituents you can hold, so you may be forced to upgrade your plan if you have more constituents.
FAQs about charity CRMs
What is Contact Relationship Management?
When your data is organised and managed by a CRM platform, you have a more comprehensive understanding of your supporters, donors, participants and other types of stakeholder, which leads to more aligned messaging for fundraising and donor journeys. Many activities can be automated into a ‘workflow’ to help you meet your objectives for the year. Also crucially, with a fully integrated CRM, data silos are removed, making cross-departmental collaboration easier and clearer, ensuring both supporters and beneficiaries are supported to the best of your organisation capabilities.
Why do charities need a CRM?
With a CRM at the heart of your organisation, your charity gains complete and real-time tracking of every interaction with supporters, donors, memberships and volunteers. It also helps you to develop impact monitoring data ready to be gathered for reporting, at your fingertips. The information shown on a record can cover a wide variety of areas such as interaction history, donations made, hours volunteered, marketing preferences, engagement rates and much more. It frees up your time - giving you back capacity to do the good stuff!
Is it difficult to set up a CRM?
Once you’ve settled on what software functionality matters to you, and you’ve got the package you need within your budget, you need to include set-up in your decision making. How much support will you get from your supplier? Here at GoodCRM when you become a client with we book a Diagnostic Session with you too - this is included with your set-up fee, and is designed for us to get to know you and your organisation so we can support you better with your set up and signpost you seamlessly through the GoodCRM features. Nothing to be scared of - we're with you every step of the way!
If you feel overwhelmed by the thought of CRM set up we're here for you. GoodCRM Accelerator is our consultancy & implementation support for GoodCRM subscribers. Our experts are by your side every step of the way. We can design your CRM, implement it, embed it into your organisation and even take care of your CRM admin on an ongoing basis. Pick and mix the support options you need, or go all inclusive. Contact us for more details: hello@goodcrm.co.uk / 0333 344 6515
