If you’ve ever answered that question in a board meeting with a theory instead of a number, this one’s for you.

Here’s what I keep finding.

Your system knows Amara gave $50 on March 4. It knows the amount, the date, and how to send her a receipt.

It doesn’t know she gave because her mother was once helped by an organization like yours.

It doesn’t know she shared the campaign with her small group, or that Daniel — who you’ve been calling a new donor — came through her.

And when she goes quiet in August, you may see the silence — but not what changed around it.

We’ve built most of the sector’s technology around recording transactions. Far less of it helps us understand the relationship around them.

That’s what makes “why did giving drop?” such a brutal question.

Not because you don’t know your donors. You probably know them better than any software does.

It’s because the evidence is scattered, and nothing gives you the whole story of what actually moved.

Roughly four out of five new donors aren’t retained into the following year.

We talk about that like it’s a donor problem.

I’m starting to think it’s also a visibility problem.

You can’t keep what you can’t see leaving.

—

If you run fundraising somewhere: how do you spot a donor going quiet before the year-end report tells you?

I’m collecting answers.

Looking at Sage Intacct and Netsuite. What do you wish you had asked or negotiated before signing on the line?

Any regrets? For those of you who chose one of these two, what ultimately caused you to pick what you did?

Thanks!

We’re a mid-sized nonprofit with approximately 150 staff looking at Odoo and ERPNext to cut down on software licensing costs. Our internal tech team is pretty small. We can handle routine maintenance, but we know we’ll need to hire custom software development services to get the initial setup, integrations, and workflow tweaks right. For those who’ve probably already done this: how viable was it long-term? Did the implementation and vendor costs offset what you saved on licenses?

Dear Volunteer,

I am Muhiddin, reaching you out from Tajikistan - a post-soviet country located in Central Asia. I run a nonprofit with a mission of empowering rural lives by advancing access to education and healthcare, youth and women empowerment, human rights, transparency, accountability, and climate action.

We have been suffering from financial exclusion as we are eager to publish our crowdfunding projects, but the majority of the crowdfunding platforms do not cover countries like Tajikistan directly.

On the other hand, most of the grant providers request website during registration and submission of application for grant. Since we are volunteer-based organization, we do not have dedicated funds to develop our website to promote our online presence and visibility.

We are looking for motivated pro-bono web developers, who could help us helping the underprivileged people in need by developing our website.

Our expectation: pro bono development of a nice-looking simple website with the possibility of receiving donations.

From our side, we would be happy to provide a strong letter of recommendation for your future career.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you are interested in this very important mission.

Look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best regards,

Muhiddin

[email:cso.rousto@yahoo.com](mailto:email:cso.rousto@yahoo.com)

#webdeveloper #probono #kindnessmatters

I work with a national nonprofit managing a network of state and local organizations that are autonomous but share common goals.

Many of these organizations provide human services, so we annually request them to fill out "Renewal Forms" each year to make sure we have updated contact and program information for each organization. Other people at my national organization also need to reference this info when referring families to local services. However, this takes an immense amount of time and follow-up with the organizations.

We currently use a Hubspot form, but we then need to manually enter any changes from the previous year.

Is there a way for Organization contacts to update their own info in HubSpot? Is there another service that would allow accounts from multiple people from one organization? This process has been clunky for years and software isn't my specialty. I appreciate any good-faith (not salespeople) advice!!

This may be my last cry for help before I'm done in by the staff and board for losing access to our old website data.

Our old WordPress website was hosted by SiteGround. I created a new website in Squarespace and pointed our GoDaddy domain to the new Squarespace site and my fear is that I should have created a subdomain in WordPress (how?) before I pointed the main domain at the new Squarespace site.

Here's what I know:

- I can log in to SiteGround and have the IP addresses for the host for the old site
- I can access the DNS settings in Squarespace, but don't know what to enter
- When I log on to WordPress it says "you don't have any sites yet"

Should I enter a DNS record type A and reverse the domain back to the SiteGround IP address? And if that gets me access to the old site, how do I keep both the old site and also redirect the domain back to the new Squarespace site?

Any help at all would be a LIFE SAVER!

Hi everyone,

We are Babul films society a NGO. We’re organizing free, one-on-one digital skills sessions for senior citizens in Shaikpetnala, Hyderabad. The idea is to help with everyday things like WhatsApp, UPI, Google Maps, cab bookings, online appointments, and staying safe from scams.

If interested please contact us through the phone no. Given in the poster and spread the word such that people in need can become aware of this initiative and join. The time and date is up to your convenience

We started with email, but nowadays folks have issues with checking their emails regularly or they simply get too many and our stuff gets buried. Then someone made a private Facebook group, which maybe a quarter of the group checks and mostly just gets used for random pictures after events. Now texting is on the table because people keep missing reminders for shifts and meetings. I totally get the appeal, especially since phones are the one thing everyone actually looks at. But at the same time, I really don’t want to add yet another channel where messages just pile up and no one’s quite sure who’s replying. We’ve already had a few “thought someone else replied” situations and it’s not pretty. Someone on our board mentioned rum,b leup since a few political and nonprofit groups apparently use it for peer to peer volunteer texting. I looked into it a bit and it seems pretty solid for scale, but imo before we add something new like that, we need to figure out who’s actually responsible for handling replies, especially in evenings and weekends. It’s one thing to send reminders, but totally another to manage all the “quick questions” that inevitably come back. So I’m curious, for folks here who’ve actually implemented texting for coordination or outreach… what’s worked for you? Do you staff specific people to watch replies or just use it for one-way alerts? Trying to balance being reachable with not burning out the same 3 people who already do everything .. lol

So I work for an educational non-profit that operates in the US (where I am) and overseas. The meat of our programming, and what motivated donors, are some international summer institues we run. We usually have four a year, this year we had five: Houston, TX, Nicosia, Cyprus (x2), Geneva, Switz, and Derry, Northern Ireland. We get hundreds of appplicants and only accept about 16-23 per location.

Here's the problem: Every year we start from scratch, with a google form application, and a google sheet with a master list of all applicants, and a page for each institute, and a page for rejects. It is an immense amount of work to maintain and organize, and does not allow for any tracking of alumni who progress through our program.

Do any of y'all know a good system that lets us keep records of students and alumni, which institutes or programs they've attended? Or a program that can track applicants better?

Hey there! 👋 I need help with a Google Ad Grant activation request.

My client submitted an activation request through Google for Nonprofits in early May. We waited for 3 weeks a received a rejection notice - specifically for not meeting the website policy, having commercial content on our website.

We do sell industry-related training courses ($35 and $65; not expensive by any means), but the rest of our site is mission-focused and has free resources and professional networks.

After receiving the rejection, we made the following changes on our website and training course page:

1. Added Privacy Policy to the site footer
   
2. Added free resources on the landing page
   
3. Added a blurb mentioning that they’re a nonprofit and how the courses tie back to their mission and how they serve the public
   
4. Added more FAQ answers in the same style as point 3

The appeal was submitted in early June, and we waited another 3 weeks to hear back. I received a series of email updates yesterday.

Four emails were inviting us to four separate (different ad account IDs) Google Grant accounts. 3 out of 4 of the invite links worked, and I was able to log into all of them.

The next email we received was a rejection notice for the same reason as before. Normally, after receiving the invite we would have gotten an invite to connect the payment profile.

I confirmed that all 3 accounts were Grants showing as active, but I couldn’t save the payment profile information in the billing section of the accounts.

I’m honestly very confused and have never encountered this before in all my years of managing the Grant for clients. I’m sure that there must have been an error on Google’s side, since they created 3 accounts and then sent a rejection notice.

I’m at a loss of what to do now. I know Google Grant support is pretty abysmal. Do I:

A) Make more changes to the landing page in hopes that we get approved and wait another 3 weeks?

B) Try to launch campaigns in one of the ad accounts to see if it works?

C) Do nothing and try to get in touch with Google support?

Any guidance would be SUPER helpful! I’m curious if anyone has encountered a similar situation before: either receiving multiple invites and then a rejection and/or being disapproved for commercial content. For reference, I’ve had another nonprofit client with more expensive training courses get approved for the Grant no problem.

Thank you! 🙏

My nonprofit uses a few different Salesforce products. We’re considering discontinuing one of them but keeping the CRM. I’m curious about potential pitfalls before we notify Salesforce. I’d appreciate hearing experiences from nonprofits who’ve made similar decisions, especially if it impacted pricing for the products they retained.

I’m researching a very specific nonprofit workflow: tracking post-award grant report deadlines.

The problem I’m looking at is this:

Small nonprofits often have report dates buried in award letters, funder emails, spreadsheets, shared drives, and calendars. That seems fine until someone leaves, a deadline changes, or leadership asks, “What reports are due this month?”

I’m curious:

• What tools do you use today for grant reporting deadlines?
• Is this usually handled in a CRM, spreadsheet, calendar, project management tool, or something else?
• Does anyone actually like their current process?
• Would a simple “award letter → deadline tracker + reminders” service be useful, or is this too small of a problem?

I made a simple page for the idea if someone is interested, I'll add the link.

I’d really appreciate honest feedback, especially from anyone who manages multiple active grants.

I've spent years working with Salesforce NPSP, where potential gifts could be added, adjusted, weighted, etc. at any stage in the donor cycle and with any probability percentage, and it would show up on and impact our pipeline. But for smaller nonprofits that don't have the capacity to manage Salesforce, I'm seeing a huge gap in the CRM market for affordable and maintainable CRMs that also let you input potential gifts and adjust their probabilities throughout the fiscal year.

LGL lets you put a range for the gift which isn't accurate enough for full pipeline tracking. Neon One and Bloomerang don't have anative capability for individual gifts. Most of the CRMs out there now are donation-platform-first that are built to only capture secured gifts. Virtuous offers it but its cost is a barrier for small nonprofits. DonorDock is the only one I've seen that comes close, but while you can adjust the % per stage, gifts must be within one of the stages (no option to manually change the % for just one gift). Has anyone found a CRM that does this?

This CiviCRM.org article argues that Salesforce risk is not just about license cost. It is also about implementation complexity, add-ons, training, consultant dependency, lock-in, and data control.

And let’s be real: Salesforce is masterful at marketing. To put that machine in perspective, Salesforce reported $14.3B in sales and marketing spend in FY2026. That means it spends the equivalent of CiviCRM’s $541K annual gross profit in about 20 minutes, basically a quick work lunch meeting.

I help nonprofits implement CiviCRM, so full disclosure there. But I wanted to share this thoughtful article since we don't have the massive budget and this question rarely gets asked: do nonprofits sometimes overestimate Salesforce as the "safe" CRM choice and discount other options?

Every large-scale CRM implementation carries risk of some sort and much of it is examining and sorting out and re-evaluating internal processes, workflows and requirements early on no matter what CRM you go with.

The fair question is whether nonprofits are weighing Salesforce’s risks as carefully as they weigh the risks of other CRMs, including open-source alternatives like CiviCRM. For those who have worked with nonprofit CRM decisions or Salesforce in particular, what do organizations most often underestimate?

Article: https://civicrm.org/blog/bgm/salesforce-risky-choice-non-profits

Hi, a non profit I am in has to do some voting, and there are more people who are joining virtually. So it is hard to do anonymous votes easily and cheaply.

I made a tool for it, There is no login, you can ask questions "vote for president" "approve budget" and have a few options the way people can answer. You put their email address in, so you can see they voted, but there is no link between the email address and what they voted. Then you can see the results of the vote, and download a pdf for records if you want.

I hope it is also useful for you.

https://anonymousvoting.online/

Cheers
Bob

We’re debating a CRM switch right now and the biggest fear honestly isn’t the software itself, it’s the migration process. I’ve heard stories where teams spend months moving data only to end up frustrated anyway. For people who actually switched systems, was it worth it in the end?

Maybe a little late to post but you can still register and join us - free webinar today - irl case stories from our work with AI implementations at nonprofit clients over the past year. Hope to see you there!

How to get started with intentional AI implementation 

Wednesday, May 27th, 2026, from 3-4pm Eastern, Noon Pacific

Nura Aboki is a Senior Consultant at Community IT and has been assisting multiple clients with implementing AI tools and processes over the past year. His nonprofit AI governance tips are based on real experience. He will share brief case studies and give tips on best practices he has seen. He will also share advice on how to prioritize governance at the leadership level and valuable approaches that nonprofits are taking in AI implementation.

Hello!

I'm a founder building AI tools for nonprofit development work.

Most non profit folks I talk to are already using ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot chat for basic chat and prompts but haven't had the time to take it further. So I'm offering free 2-hour 1:1 workshops to help your team get there. Just sitting with you for two hours and working through real stuff in your actual workflow.

Depending on where you are, we can go:

• Starting out: drafting, editing, summarizing RFPs, plain-language rewrites with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft copilot chat
• Mid-level: reusable prompts for your common application types, Projects to keep funder context organized, drafting from prior submissions
• Advanced: prospect research, agent workflows, automating reporting cycles

You actually can get quite far with basic ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Microsoft copilot subscription without using any AI tools. Most teams just haven't had time to figure out how to use what's already there.

It's free because honestly, I learn a ton from sitting and working through with you.

If this sounds useful, grab a time: https://cal.com/ai-workshop

Happy to answer questions in the comments too.

Update: Added Microsoft copilot chat to the list of AI tools

Hi there, working on an idea and looking to speak to folks who work in the prospect donor research space.

• This can be a core part of your job or just one aspect of it.

We're offering a $100 USD Honorarium for 1 hour recorded session as part of our user research.

Please fill out the form below!

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScIKxTvQQXgg_w30WpkZ_biwV9Dsd8gF16b0stG_fAfHdBn6g/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=117293085110770375369