Nonprofit fundraising in 2024 is dominated by the digital space. But what are the best online fundraising platforms for nonprofits?
Let’s be real: it can be overwhelming. There are tons of online fundraising platforms and software out there that claim they’re the solution to all your problems and promise to bring you hundreds of thousands of dollars. But, they can’t all be miracle software that meets all your fundraising needs, right?
Well no, you aren’t suddenly going to start raking in millions just by hopping onto a new online fundraising platform for your nonprofit, but finding the right platform for your needs can make a huge difference.
When you select the right platform, you get all the fundraising tools you need at your fingertips, enabling you to set your fundraising plans in motion and expand your fundraising opportunities.
So, what is the best online fundraising platform for your nonprofit?
The short answer? It depends on your fundraising needs. To help you pinpoint the best platform for your needs, we’ve compiled this list of the 10 best fundraising platforms in 2024.
1. Best Online Fundraising Platform For Nonprofits: CauseVox
CauseVox is your all-in-one solution to digital fundraising. It operates on one basic principle: your online fundraising platform should be easy to use, reduce the clunk, and help you raise more money with less effort. They make this happen by providing tons of features, incredibly responsive support (that’s powered by people instead of robots), and an intuitive administration dashboard with all the information you could ever want.
CauseVox is a great option for crowdfunding campaigns, peer-to-peer fundraising, in-person and virtual fundraising events, and online donation forms you can easily embed for your website: pretty much anything. The best part is that it takes minutes to set up a page.
Pricing:
CauseVox has rates starting as low as FREE (yes, you read that right), ranging up to $315 per month.
Features:
CauseVox has tons of features and is always releasing new ones. Current features include:
- Peer to Peer Fundraising, with both individual and team pages
- Crowdfunding
- Embeddable Donation Forms
- Event Ticketing
- Fundraising CRM
- Integration Options Through Zapier
- Analytics
- Pledge Donations
- Customizable Donation Tiers
- Recurring Donations
With CauseVox, you get everything you need to run digital fundraising for your nonprofit.
Explore how you can get more results in less time using CauseVox’s online fundraising platform. Watch a CauseVox demo on-demand.
2. Best CRM For Donor Management: Kindful
No matter how you’re fundraising, it’s essential to have a way to keep track of your donors and easily see their relationship to your organization. Yes, every nonprofit needs a CRM, and no nonprofit is satisfied with their CRM.
Enter Kindful: Kindful is our favorite choice for donor management for smaller nonprofits and offers some fantastic features so that you can easily implement moves management and tailor your communications to your donors. Kindful is most helpful behind the scenes: your employees will love having it to support their fundraising efforts and give them all the details about each donor.
Pricing
Kindful plans start at $100 per month with a $199 startup cost.
Features:
- Donor life cycle analytics
- List segmentation
- Donor accounts
- Unlimited admin users
- Relationship tracking
- Dozens of integrations
- Unlimited fundraising pages
- Embeddable donation buttons
- Recurring giving
- Event registration
- Crowdfunding
- Text to give
Kindful is a great way to organize all of your donor data and improve your donor retention through the use of an intro CRM with great features. You can schedule a demo on their site to get started.
3. Best Platform For Small, One-off Fundraisers: GoFundMe
You probably know of GoFundMe as a platform for individuals running crowdfunding campaigns. What you may not know is that it also hosts nonprofit crowdfunding campaigns. It works more or less the same for a nonprofit as it does for individuals: quickly and easily set up a page telling your community why you’re raising funds and how much you hope to raise, then share! It takes just a couple of minutes to go from zero to launched. GoFundMe doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of some of the other fundraising platforms (ie: the branding isn’t white-labeled), but it’s a simple wat to run a single crowdfunding campaign.
Pricing:
The only cost of GoFundMe is a 2.2% fee + 30 cents on each online donation. It’s free to set up and run your campaign.
Features:
- Mobile app
- Social integration
- 24/7 customer care
- Unlimited campaigns
- Registration and ticketing
If you want to quickly and easily set up a quick crowdfunding campaign for a concentrated purpose, GoFundMe is going to be your best bet. Get started by signing up as a charity on the site.
4. Best CRM For Donor Retention: Bloomerang
Bloomerang is a high-powered software that has a lot of features for helping you understand what your donors are doing, then making it incredibly easy for you to meet them where they are. If you want a CRM that relies on high-powered automation so that you can do less work and know more about your donors, while giving you plenty of space to customize each interaction, Bloomerang is for you. It’s an absolute powerhouse for donor retention because it’s designed around continued communication and engagement with your donors.
Pricing:
Bloomerang starts at $99 a month and goes up to custom prices for larger shops. They also have a special program for small and new nonprofits, including a free option.
Features:
- Interactive dashboard
- Giving summary including engagement level
- Constituent Timeline
- Amazing reporting
- Email design and distribution
- Letters and mailing
- Website integration
- Social listening
- Automatically updates addresses
- Third party integrations
- Unlimited Users
- Event registration
- Single and recurring donations
- Pledges
Bloomerang is a fantastic choice if you’re looking to really ramp up your donor stewardship because it gives you tons of information about your donors and tools to keep in touch with them. Head over to the Bloomerang website to check out a demo and learn more about what it can do for you.
5. Best For Donor Stewardship For Larger Nonprofits: Virtuous CRM
Yes, we’ve already mentioned a couple of CRM options, but the best CRM isn’t going to be the same for every nonprofit. Virtuous CRM is the Cadillac of CRMs: it has absolutely everything you could want. That’s not going to be the right fit for every organization, especially if you’re new, small, or running on an extremely tight budget. But if you have the size and capacity to use it? Virtuous will support a large fundraising team doing targeted work on all kinds of donors with reports that tell you the best times and ways to make your next ask.
Pricing:
Virtuous CRM starts at $350 a month.
Features:
- Unified view of each donor
- Email integration
- Automated tasks and calls
- Team management
- Ask pipelines
- Robust reporting
- Suggested gift asks
- Goal tracking
- Project and campaign reporting
- Accounting integrations
- Volunteer management
- Event management
- Mobile app
- Integrations
- Grant management
If you’ve already got a robust fundraising machine running in your organization and you want a CRM that’s going to take you to the next level, Virtuous CRM is the choice for you. Head over to their website for tons of resources, a demo, or to get started.
6. Best for Donation Matching: Double The Donation
I love a matching gift. Honestly, who doesn’t? The challenge with matching gifts is having an effective way to capture corporate matching opportunities when you get each donation. That’s where Double the Donation shines.
It’s a huge database to help you spot which gifts you’ve already received that qualify for employer matching. Additionally, Match 360 automates this process for you, helping you automatically capture those employer matching opportunities.
This isn’t a platform that you’ll use to run your fundraising campaign, but it works fantastically in conjunction with a fundraising platform.
Pricing:
Double the Donation’s premium tool is offered at $499 per year, and 360MatchPro starts at $3,000 per year.
I love to take a look at Double the Donation when I’m about to launch a campaign that needs an extra boost. A matching grant is a great way to light a fire under donors, so if you’re ready to find the perfect one for your campaign, head over to Double the Donation.
7. Best For Auction Fundraising: Clickbid
Here in 2024, silent auctions look quite a bit different than they did 10 years ago. If you are able to host in-person events, your attendees expect the ability to bid on their phones and get easy notifications when they’re outbid. And if you’re still running your events virtually, it’s impossible to run an auction without an online auction platform. My organization has tried quite a few of these over the years, and the best we’ve found is Clickbid.
You can start with a simple package for the number of events you want to run, and add on all the extras if you need them. If you’re simply running a peer-to-peer campaign, or hosting an event that doesn’t include a silent auction, Clickbid won’t be your best bet. But, if you do need that auction capability, nothing can beat it. Building the event page takes just a few minutes, and while adding all the items for your auction is a little more time-consuming, it’s straightforward and you can even import your items.
Pricing:
Annual license of $795 with add-on options.
Features:
- Mass messaging
- Dedicated support
- Ticketing
- Livestream event
- Auction catalog
- Text to register
- Event website
- Text to Give
If you’re looking to expand your online fundraising into the auction space, check out the demo on Clickbid’s website to see which tools will be the best for you.
8. Best For Social Fundraising: Facebook
Did you know you can add a Facebook button to your nonprofit’s Facebook page? Once you’ve applied to accept donations on Facebook, you and your supporters can run fundraisers for you through Facebook. It’s not ideal if you’re looking to target an audience of donors across multiple channels (so you can’t really use it as your main fundraising paltform), but it’s a great choice if you have a robust social media following and want to capitalize on that. Plus it’s incredibly easy for supporters to make a fundraiser if they’re already on Facebook.
There are a few things to consider, however. You’ll need to choose between receiving funds via Facebook payments or Network for Good. Through Facebook payments, you’ll receive direct deposits bi-weekly and will get the contact information of only the donors that opt-in to sharing that with you. Alternatively, with Network for Good you’ll get payments in 45-75 days. And of course, Facebook controls the look and feel of the page, and has their branding on it.
Pricing:
Facebook covers the fees for nonprofits.
Facebook fundraisers are an easy and free way to raise money if you’re trying to target your audience on Facebook.
9. Best For Corporate Giving: Benevity
One of the most powerful areas of untapped potential in giving is the corporate world. Whether you’re looking for gifts from corporations, paycheck giving from employees (especially when they’re matched) or grant programs, there are major resources here that you want to be using.
That’s the beauty of Benevity: it’s a tool to do all of that. On your end you can raise money, post volunteer opportunities and search for grants, while businesses can use it for workplace giving, matching, and more. If you’re interested in making more connections with corporate partners, this is a must have. It’s incredibly easy to register your nonprofit so that employees can select you for workplace giving, and if you want to take it further you can build up a profile for your organization too.
Pricing:
There is a 7% fee on check payments, as well as a variable charge for the platform based on administration costs.
Features:
- Workplace giving
- Matching
- Volunteering
- Corporate granting
- Mobile app
- Detailed reporting
Getting your nonprofit registered on Benevity is basically a must: this makes it possible for employees to select you as part of their paycheck giving. Even if you’re not planning on using Benevity’s other features, make a quick stop to get your organization registered so you can receive donations.
10. Best For Grant Fundraising: Candid
We can’t forget about grants! Grants are a major part of any fundraising strategy and with good reason: they can be high pay off for less effort. But one of the biggest challenges with grants is finding the ones that are right for your organization and programs. Enter Candid. You may not be familiar with Candid: that’s because it’s the recent merger of Foundation Center and GuideStar, and it has all the expertise and history of those two organizations.
On the nonprofit side, it has a huge database of grants and foundations to help you find funding, plus webinars and training on all kinds of nonprofit topics. It’s also a great resource for potential donors who can use it to research your organization. Candid won’t be the site you use to actually do your fundraising, but it’s an essential tool for building up your grant work.
Pricing:
$200 monthly, with a price break for billing annually or biannually.
Candid is a fantastic resource for nonprofits who want to take their fundraising to the next level. If you’re ready to start chasing some serious grants and making major foundation connections, Candid is the place to go. You can always get started with one of their free webinars!
Jumpstart Your Online Fundraising
No matter what your needs, the best place to start for your online fundraising is with CauseVox. CauseVox can help you knock your fundraising campaigns out of the park and raise more with less effort. If you’re ready to move your fundraising events and campaigns to the virtual space with crowdfunding, ticketing, and peer-to-peer fundraising, let CauseVox make the process more simple with less clunk.
