Hello,

Can anyone suggest a piece of software that allows a non-profit to manage members and donors? We the Friends of the Stewartstown Railroad have nothing, and I would like to change this. Preferably something web-based, that has the ability to allow people to sign up through your website and/or also make donations this way.

Thanks!

Dave Watson
President, Friends of the Stewartstown Railroad, Inc.

The 1st place to look for any non-profit looking for any software is:

http://www.techsoup.org

TechSoup is a good place to get such things as MS Office, QuickBooks, etc., but near as I can tell no membership or donor management software is available at TechSoup. I guess, software designed for non-profits would not be offered in a discount site purposed specifically for non-profits?

I have heard nice things about Past Perfect software. It appears to be an integrated non-profit organization management system that includes member management, donor management and artifact management. Only problem with it is it's beaucoup expensive relative to using something like MS Access. But it does have the bells & whistles that Access doesn't.

I'll also be curious to hear what other groups say regards what they are using as well.

Thanks!

I use QuickBooks for our books and donor data base and it meets our needs. We don't have a general membership, but I've seen some references to tracking memberships. I'm not sure what those capabilities are. It's available in desktop or web versions, but the web version has an annual fee. From Techsoup the desktop license for a single user is about $50 for most 501(c)(3) non-profits. A three user license that allows for the files to be kept on a common server is about $100. I haven't tried it but I suspect you could keep your working file on a cloud based server like Drop Box. Since you have a need to maintain books anyway it may worth considering.

Depends on your budget. As stated previously, there's Past Perfect (expensive to buy) and Quickbooks non-profit version will handle donations. Most other donor and membership software nowadays is cloud-based and you sign up for a monthly fee. At least they're easy to use. If your organization is small, there's always MS Access which you can customize to your liking to track, sort and report whatever you want. Of course, you'd have to learn it if you don't know it - it seems to scare a lot of people but it's not really that hard.

One of my outfits has tinkered with something called MemberPlanet but not brought it into production.

Salesforce, the largest employer in San Francisco (has colonized all the old SP offices and then some), mainly makes sales relationship tracking software. Needless to say, that is very similar to donor management, and they have products for that. Rumor has it there's a version or tier which is gratis to small nonprofits. From a BizDev perspective this makes perfect sense, as very small outfits cost very little to support, and once they are invested in your platform, they are likely to stay as they get big.

One thing you don't want to do is drag your members onto Yet Another Platform. For instance I need to buy something from a heritage group and they want me to "sign up for an account on their website". This is yet another damn password, and I already have way darn too many. Worse, you must now enter 20 lines of your payment details, failing because you didn't put Mr./Mrs. and failing again because it erased the CVV number after the first failure, sending you scrambling for your card again.

It's better to ask for dues via platforms they are already on, and most people have either a PayPal or Amazon account. Of course, this doesn't necessarily integrate well with random member accounting systems.