Donor retention guide: 7 strategies for fundraising success
- Fundraising ideas
- Nonprofits
- Donor Engagement
Online fundraising is an essential part of every nonprofit organization’s overall fundraising strategy, and the nine applications that follow are some of the best online fundraising tools we’ve found to help your organization boost its revenue.
These nine tools are proven to make it easier for supporters to engage with your organization and to make your staff more efficient in their work:
- Bonterra Fundraising
- Mobilize
- Bonterra Giving Days
- Canva
- RoundUp
- Bonterra Case Management
- Bonfire
- eCardWidget
- Double the Donation
For each tool, we’ll describe the main features, why we recommend it, and some information about how you can access the platform or app.
1. Bonterra Fundraising: Best nonprofit fundraising tool for online donations
Fundraising tool overview
Bonterra Donor Management’s Fundraising solution (formerly EveryAction) is the perfect option for managing donations and optimizing your fundraising strategies.
Using advanced segmentation capabilities, Bonterra Fundraising helps you target the right donors for successful fundraising and target them through their preferred methods. It even helps you convert prospects into loyal donors with professional and mobile-friendly subscription and donation forms. With Bonterra Fundraising, there’s nothing your organization can’t do online.
Best fundraising features
Our favorite Bonterra Fundraising features include:
- Mobile-optimized donation forms which allow supporters to donate with just one click.
- Drag-and-drop builder that makes it easy to launch donation forms and easy to embed them into any site.
- Data-informed personalized fundraising asks.
- Unified omnichannel marketing capabilities.
Personalization, marketing, and data analysis features combine to help you build a sustainable donor base and keep supporters invested in your organization.
2. Mobilize: best online fundraising tool for volunteer events
Fundraising tool overview
Bonterra’s Mobilize solution is an online event platform with the ability to create community-based events and manage volunteers. It works extremely well for nonprofits, advocacy groups, and anyone wanting to mobilize supporters toward a common cause.
Our favorite features
With Mobilize, you can post your first event in minutes and start taking registrations and RSVPs immediately. The tool allows you to create:
- Single-shift events
- Recurring and multiple-shift events
- Virtual events
- In-person events
- Calls to legislators' offices
Increase event attendance with automated communication and attendee follow-up, plus additional features like post-event feedback surveys, personalized volunteer experiences, and a faceted searchable interface for showcasing your organization’s events across categories, dates, and even locations.
You can also mobilize supporters to create and host their own events in support of your organization. They can share custom links with their own networks of friends, family, and colleagues to increase participation and help you gain new supporters.
3. Bonterra Giving Days: Best online fundraising tool for individual days of giving
Fundraising platform overview
Bonterra Giving Days (formerly GiveGab) is a fundraising solution that helps nonprofits organize and collect money during individual days of giving. Bonterra Giving Days is a great tool for nonprofit networks to host affiliate events like 24-hour giving days, in addition to raising awareness and funds through embedded social media engagement and peer-to-peer campaign features.
Best fundraising tool features
This day of giving platform includes features that give your organization transparency and live updates on metrics that matter, such as:
- Live Giving Day statistics
- Flexible landing page builder
- Integrated search engine optimization
- Social media integrations
- Custom logo design and downloadable marketing materials
Giving Days donation forms can also be shared by your supporters and hosted on external websites, turning nearly any advocate into a fundraiser for your organization.
4. Canva: Best online tool for creating fundraising graphics
Fundraising tool overview
Canva is a graphic tool that helps you create online and print graphics for nearly any application, no graphic design experience required. Using a drag-and-drop builder and thousands of pre-built templates, you can start easily designing graphics for your nonprofit in a matter of minutes.
Best fundraising tool features
Canva can help you build graphics such as:
- Website images
- Infographics
- Images for email and social media
- Flyers
- Cards
- Invitations
Upload your nonprofit’s logo and create a color palette of your brand colors to easily align every graphic with your branding. Any graphic you create can be exported into multiple formats. You can create animated videos, GIFs, and even send your creations out for printing and mailing. Canva also integrates with dozens of apps and social media networks.
Canva has a free tier with tons of features and a paid pro tier that provides additional applications and media types. They offer their premium version free for nonprofits.
5. RoundUp App: Best online fundraising tool for small donations
Fundraising tool overview
RoundUp is an application that rounds up users’ normal spending to the nearest dollar and donates the extra charge to your nonprofit. If a donor uses a credit card that they connected to their RoundUp app to buy a latte for $4.85, for example, the app rounds that up to $5.00 and sends your nonprofit the extra $0.15. That means whenever your supporters buy dog food at PetSmart or a pair of jeans at Target, your nonprofit gets a few spare pennies.
It might not seem like much at first, but RoundUp boasts that the average app user actually donates between $15 and $20 per month from all of their purchase roundups.
Standout fundraising features
RoundUp has:
- An app that can be synced to supporters’ existing credit or debit cards.
- Automatic tracking of supporter’s purchases.
- Extra funds routed through RoundUp and then sent off to your nonprofit securely.
Register your nonprofit with Roundup, send your supporters a link where they can download the app and select your organization, and start counting those extra coins!
6. Bonterra Case Management: Top online fundraising tool for showcasing your organization’s impact
Fundraising solution overview
Bonterra Program Management’s Case Management solution (formerly Social Solutions) helps your nonprofit track your community impact from the first touchpoint through to the final realized impact. It then makes your data available with beautiful reports and analytics which can be shared with your donors and potential donors to increase your fundraising engagement.
Best fundraising tool features
Bonterra Case Management includes:
- Dynamic custom dashboards for internal processes and impact reporting that can be shared with your team, board members, grant-makers, and members of the public.
- A community network that connects you to other organizations like yours, so you can capitalize on best practices implemented by thousands of organizations solving social issues worldwide.
Demonstrating your organization’s impact is faster and easier with this online fundraising solution.
7. Bonfire: Top online fundraising tool for t-shirt fundraising
Fundraising tool overview
T-shirt and apparel fundraising is an increasingly popular way to raise money for your nonprofit and Bonfire makes it easy to create, print, and sell custom apparel for your next fundraising event or for your advocacy campaign.
Fundraising tool features
Bonfire allows you to create a campaign quickly with point-and-click simplicity. You can:
- Choose from several products like t-shirts, hats, sweatshirts, and water bottles.
- Customize items and set up your store in minutes.
- When your campaign ends, Bonfire ships sold products directly to your buyer.
Using Bonfire’s creation and fundraising tools, you can raise funds, increase brand awareness, and let supporters share their love for your organization publicly.
8. eCardWidget: Best online fundraising tool for eCards
Fundraising tool overview
eCardWidget is a unique fundraising solution that allows you to create and share custom eCards with donors. Create branded eCards, embed the widget into your website or campaign page, and let donors send an eCard to a friend by making a donation.
Our favorite features
eCardWidget includes features that can help you with fundraising, marketing, and donor appreciation, such as:
- Simple drag-and-drop eCard designer
- Integration with any website builder
- Peer-to-peer marketing capabilities
- Ability to send eCards via email, text, or social media
These features make it easy for donors to make a gift in honor of someone and to spread the word about your organization to their friends and family.
9. Double the Donation: Best online fundraising tool for matching gifts
Fundraising tool overview
Double the Donation’s online fundraising tool is a necessity for matching gifts. Double the Donation stresses the idea that staying in sight means staying in mind because they know that $6-10 billion worth of matched donations goes unclaimed every year. Double the Donation prides itself on helping your donors speedily access their matching gift programs to get the process started. They believe that the promotion and automation of matching gift requests can boost the initial donation amount, too!
Best fundraising tool features
Double the Donation’s online fundraising platform provides:
- An embeddable widget for nonprofits to use on their donation forms that helps donors determine their eligibility status in just a few moments.
- An extensive database of companies that already provide matching gift programs.
- A comprehensive platform to manage automated follow ups, message customization, and aggregate statistics for matching gift strategy.
- Integrations with many nonprofit donation tools and CRMs to keep all your data easily accessible.
Double the Donation handles all of the paperwork for the employee and the employer, making record-keeping and donation processing much easier for your organization. The product also integrates with many nonprofit CRMs to keep all your data easily accessible.
Finding the right online fundraising tools for you
Now that you have a baseline for the best online fundraising solutions, consult your budget and goals to determine which solutions would be best for your organization. Remember to keep reevaluating to make the most out of your online tools.
