Best Donor Management Software 2025

What is Donor Management Software?

Donor management software is used by nonprofit organizations to manage the relationship with their donors. It helps solicit, collect, track, and analyze contributions made by donors. It enables nonprofits to network with donors during fundraising campaigns. It boosts fundraising by analyzing donation data to personalize communication strategies. This analysis promotes increased giving, engagement, and new donor acquisition. As a centralized solution, donor management software helps reduce overhead and lowers fundraising costs.

Donor management software is closely related to and often integrated with Nonprofit Fundraising Software, Nonprofit CRM Software, and Donor Prospect Research Software.

It supports online and mobile donations, in-person fundraising events, and usually accepts a wide variety of payment methods.

Emerging Donor Management Trends

• Mobile platforms: The use of mobile platforms, including text-to-give options is expanding, as an increasing proportion of donations are made on mobile devices. Mobile implementations of donor management software are a powerful tool for staff at a fundraising event. It allows them to access donor profiles in real-time, enhancing the solicitation process.

• Marketing automation: The inclusion of marketing automation features within donor management systems. These features further enable nonprofits to run marketing campaigns targeting their donors.

• AI: Increasingly, artificial intelligence (AI) technology is being used to analyze donor records to help improve engagement.

• Blockchain: Blockchain is being considered as a way to help increase accountability and transparency in donations, through traceable milestones offering more visibility into how funds are being used.

Donor Management Software Features

Donor management software includes many of these features:

• Manage donor contact information and donation history

• Multi-channel donor communications and mass messaging

• Task management, create and manage donor contribution workflow

• Messaging templates

• Support acknowledgment and gratitude letters and tax receipts

• Reporting and analysis of donor profiles and activity

• Mobile fundraising tools

• Marketing automation

• Email and SMS marketing tools to build fundraising campaigns

• Integration with social media to communicate fundraising activities

• Payment processing - multiple payment gateways

• Pledge Management – track future donor commitments

• Online advocacy

• Donor information and fundraising dashboards offering real-time status

• Website integration

Platforms supported include Cloud/SaaS/web-based, mobile and desktop.

Donor Management Software Comparison

These points should be considered when purchasing donor management software:

• Integration: Donor prospecting research, fundraising, marketing automation, and CRM features are sometimes included within one product. However, if a marketing automation or CRM system is already deployed in your organization, evaluate how well your donor management software choice will integrate with those systems.

• Mobile: Are fundraising events a sizable part of your donor programs? If so, mobile optimization and support tools will be valuable assets for your organization.

• Data Security: Donor-related financial profiles and contributions contain sensitive financial information. Looks for platforms that will safeguard donor payment information and personal details.

Pricing Information

Donor management system pricing is driven by the range of features offered and the number of contact/donor records supported. Many vendors scale their offerings for small, midmarket, and enterprise-level organizations. Pricing generally starts at $20 a month, increasing to hundreds of dollars per month for more advanced plans. A quote is sometimes required for enterprise-level support. Most vendors offer free trials, and there are some limited free versions available as well.