SofterWare gives generosity its time back

The trouble began with a good thing: more people giving. At Spay & Neuter Kansas City, online fundraising through Qgiv meant more gifts to record in DonorPerfect. CEO Michelle Rivera was spending five to six hours a week entering transaction information by hand. The money had arrived. The work had barely started.

A Qgiv case study describes what happened when the organization connected the two systems. Existing donor records updated automatically; new donors received new records. Between implementation in November 2017 and feedback collected in mid-2019, the organization reported saving 350 to 420 hours of manual entry. That is a wonderfully unglamorous software result. Someone could stop typing.

First a camp. Then a cause.

SofterWare, the privately held company behind DonorPerfect, began in 1981. Its early history includes EZCamp, released on a Tandy TRS-80 in 1982, and childcare software EZCare. Nathan Relles and Douglas Schoenberg, identified today as co-founders, built a business around the particular chores of particular organizations.

That matters because a camp director and a fundraiser do not describe their work in database terminology. They have registrations, gifts, receipts and people waiting for answers. Software earns its place by understanding those nouns. SofterWare eventually narrowed its attention: its history dates the sale of EZCare/Camp to 2021, concentrating the business on nonprofits and payments.

DonorPerfect Online arrived in 2001; SofterWare acquired its developer, Starkland, the following year. The sequence is revealing. This was a company moving an established fundraising job onto the web, then buying the business behind the tool. The problem persisted while the machinery changed.

Follow the gift

Consider a donor making a monthly contribution. The organization needs to accept the payment, recognize the person, record the gift, send an acknowledgment and remember the relationship next month. A spreadsheet can hold a name. A payment tool can accept money. The handoffs create the opportunity for SofterWare.

DonorPerfect supplies the fundraising database: donor profiles, gift tracking, reporting and communications. ReadySetAuction covers the event business, from collecting auction items and selling tickets to mobile bidding and checkout. SafeSave handles integrated payments. Constant Contact and QuickBooks integrations connect outreach and accounting to the fundraising record. Each addresses a job that otherwise risks becoming another export.

At Terra College Foundation, the friction was visible at a golf outing. Its published customer account describes staff previously calling a college cashier to enter card numbers. A mobile reader let guests pay on site while records synchronized with DonorPerfect. Roughly a third of about 120 golfers used it. The foundation subsequently bought a second reader. Sometimes the persuasive product review is another purchase.

The missing piece came home

On January 5, 2026, SofterWare announced it had acquired Givecloud, a longtime technology partner serving more than 2,000 nonprofits worldwide. Givecloud brings donation forms, digital-wallet payments and a donor portal where supporters can manage information and gifts. The acquisition makes the giving experience a more closely connected part of the DonorPerfect business.

The reasoning is visible in Givecloud’s Great Plains Food Bank case study. Before the change, online gifts required manual batch entry into DonorPerfect. Donors had limited control over recurring gifts, and the donation experience felt disconnected from the organization’s website. Automatic syncing, donor self-service and consistent branding helped persuade the food bank to choose Givecloud.

“We make it easy to do good.”

SofterWare’s unusually testable company slogan

That slogan reaches into the workplace, too. SofterWare describes employee groups for giving back, wellness, diversity and inclusion, and women’s professional development. Its leadership biographies include beekeeping, card tricks and coaching youth sports. These details give the software business a human scale. The customers are trying to help people; the employees have lives beyond the next release.

The customer list spans animal welfare, education, public broadcasting and hunger relief. Those organizations need different reports, but they share a dependence on people returning to give again. DonorPerfect’s food-bank offering, for example, tracks recurring gifts, pledges and in-kind support alongside ordinary donations. It complements food-distribution systems rather than replacing them.

There is also work around the software itself. SofterWare’s team includes data-conversion specialists, onboarding managers and trainers. Their presence makes sense: moving donor history requires more than a login. An organization needs to preserve useful information, decide how to code future gifts and teach colleagues where everything belongs.

The price of getting Tuesday back

DonorPerfect advertises fundraising suites starting at $99 a month, with Core, Plus and Pro configurations. That is a starting point for a quote. Buyers still need to establish their plan, required integrations, support and payment costs. A subscription’s sticker price cannot tell you how much staff time an awkward process will consume.

The alternatives include Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge, Bloomerang and simpler donor databases. Preferences differ. In Bloomerang’s own Food Bank of Lincoln case study, the organization describes replacing DonorPerfect while seeking a cost-effective, user-friendly database. A vendor’s idea of easy does not settle the question for every customer.

The practical lesson travels beyond nonprofit software. Run one ordinary transaction through the entire process before buying. Then try a duplicate donor, a recurring gift and a correction. Ask the person doing the work to build the report. If the organization lacks clean records, a responsible owner or time to learn the system, connecting more tools can simply move confusion faster.

For a fundraising team, the goal is specific: spend less of Tuesday reconciling generosity and more of it speaking to someone who might give again. SofterWare’s most convincing customer story measures progress in hours. It is a useful unit. Everyone knows what they would do with a few more.