At the Olivet Boys & Girls Club, a fundraising report once required four people. They ran the numbers, compared results, found discrepancies and tried again. Executive assistant Rose Morales kept a separate spreadsheet because she trusted her own calculations. In a DonorPerfect-published customer interview, she described the moment the problem escaped the office: a fundraiser received one revenue total while the newsletter carried another.
- A nonprofit CRM that connects donor records, gifts, reporting and outreach.
- Its practical appeal: fewer handoffs between taking a donation and following up.
- The buying test: run your actual workflow, then price the whole setup.
The first thing to fail was confidence in the number. The next casualty was time. After switching to DonorPerfect, Morales said one person could produce the report. This is a historical customer account, rather than a verdict on how every organization uses competing software. Still, it gives us a useful place to begin. Fundraising software earns its keep in the hours between asking for money.
01 / The work between the gifts
DonorPerfect sells software to nonprofits: donor profiles, gift histories, pledges, donation forms, reports and communications. Its customers include schools, community organizations, animal welfare groups and arts institutions. The company reports serving more than 11,000 organizations and 75,000 fundraisers. Those are different units: an organization can have several people using the system.
Think of a donor record as a shared memory. A household relationship can connect two supporters. A soft credit can recognize someone who influenced a gift without making the payment. Custom fields let a team capture information its own work requires. These details matter when a relationship extends beyond the person who first entered it.
That places DonorPerfect in the nonprofit CRM market alongside products such as Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge and Bloomerang. Its pitch combines configurable records with fundraising operations and connected specialist tools. The distinction worth testing is how much of your daily work those connections actually remove.
02 / When 3,000 people became too many
At Indiana’s Historic Artcraft Theatre, donor and member coordinator George Chimples had a specific problem. The theater’s existing setup lacked a ticketing integration that automatically recorded donor information. He entered it by hand. Once the donor base passed 3,000, he and the board agreed to switch.
DonorPerfect’s account of that move emphasizes schedules, data review and training. Chimples said the team accelerated migration to accommodate the old contract’s expiry, reducing an anticipated month without CRM software to a week. An integration problem had become a calendar problem. Buying new software also meant managing the gap between two systems.
“Being able to have the schedule was helpful and took a lot of stress away.”
George Chimples · Historic Artcraft Theatre
The lesson travels beyond this particular product. Put the renewal date on the migration plan. Decide who checks the imported records. Reconcile gift totals before declaring victory. A feature checklist will rarely tell you whether someone has responsibility for these jobs.
03 / Enter once. Remember properly.
La Promesa Foundation, a Catholic broadcasting nonprofit, described another version of the same tax on staff attention. Employees keyed card details into a terminal, then recorded the gift separately in their fundraising system. Monthly pledges repeated the work. Integrated processing connected authorization and the gift record; automatic monthly giving reduced repeated entry and supported acknowledgments.
- 01GiveA supporter completes a form.
- 02RecordGift and donor data reach the CRM.
- 03RespondAcknowledgments and follow-up begin.
Recurring giving also needs something worth returning to. In another company case study, Living Hope International reported that 64% of its donors gave recurring gifts. Its child sponsorship program paired regular payments with personal connections, email updates and timely acknowledgments. The software handled collection; the organization supplied the relationship. Copying the payment setting alone would miss much of the explanation.
04 / Older than the browser
DonorPerfect’s history has two starting dates. SofterWare began in 1981 with camp and childcare software. Starkland Systems released DonorPerfect in 1987. SofterWare became its North American distributor in 1989, launched DonorPerfect Online in 2001 and acquired Starkland in 2002. The mobile app followed in 2011.
Today, the business describes itself as owned by founders and employees. Its parent emphasizes customer service and work-life balance, and recognizes staff through a quarterly values award. The official company story even features founder Nathan Relles on a hoverboard. Database people, apparently, also enjoy alternative forms of transport.
In January 2026, SofterWare announced its acquisition of longtime partner Givecloud. The announcement did not disclose a purchase price. Givecloud adds online giving experiences including digital wallets, mobile checkout and donor portals. Bringing that partner inside the business signals a priority: make the donor’s front door fit more closely with the records behind it.
05 / Buy the workflow, price the handoffs
The commercial model is subscription software, with Core, Plus and Pro packages. Constant Contact is included, while capabilities vary by tier. QuickBooks integration and auction tools appear in Plus and Pro; custom API access appears in Pro. Published vendor pages have shown entry prices of $99 and $119 per month. Treat either as an advertised starting point and obtain a current written quote.
The useful budget includes processing, migration, training and any separately purchased tools. A team needing one occasional donation form may find this breadth excessive. A team without time to clean records or agree on reporting definitions can carry its confusion into a new database. These are practical constraints on the purchase, whatever the brand.
DonorPerfect also offers a free AI Fundraiser Bot for drafting nonprofit communications. It can help start a letter; staff still need to check the facts and supply the organization’s voice. The same buying principle applies to the larger platform: bring a real task, watch it happen and count the work left over. Then ask what your team would do with those recovered hours.