Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

If your nonprofit is looking for a way to keep track of volunteers, donors, sponsors, board members, etc then a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) might be a good option. Many CRM systems support several use cases outside of just storing data on customers. This includes social media and email marketing, blogging, website building, chat / service management, and more.

A note on cost

A CRM can be a very expensive product. Most CRM companies are targeting businesses as their primary customers and have a ton of features that many smaller nonprofits will never use. So, it’s important to talk with your nonprofit about their budget and the feature set they need when choosing a product. The good news is that many CRM companies offer several pricing tiers, including free offerings, and nonprofit discounts.

What CRM systems are available?

This is not an exhaustive list of CRM products. There are many players in this space so we do encourage you to do your own research here. We should also disclose that currently the dsmHack board has members that work for HubSpot and Salesforce.

General CRM systems

These CRM systems are built for many use cases including small business, nonprofits, and large enterprises.

Nonprofit CRM systems

These CRM systems are built specifically for nonprofit organizations. They will have a more limited feature set but also a focus on many of the use cases nonprofits are deal with everyday. These systems are sometimes refered to as Donor Management Systems.

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