There are lots of resources out there for nonprofits. Whether you’re looking for free resources like funding resources for nonprofit, free nonprofit management software, or free social media management tools for nonprofits to free nonprofit membership portals, you’ll find them in this post here.
Are you passionate about building nonprofits? Do you want to help other nonprofits? Do you want to work with the nonprofit sector, but aren’t sure how to get started? If so, you’ve come to the right place. Here I will show you free resources for nonprofit organizations, as well as free nonprofit management software, tools, and tips.
Social Media Management – Buffer
Does social media management cause you some anxiety? Do you find yourself running around thinking about what to tweet or what to share on Facebook? Do you sometimes realize the end of the day is approaching and you still haven’t posted anything?
Buffer lets you create and schedule content when you have time and then posts it on your behalf according to the schedule you set.
In this way, Buffers allows you to manage all of your accounts in one place, saving time.
You can choose the dates and times you want to publish to each social media account, and you’re good to go.
You can schedule posts directly from Buffer’s website, through a plugin, or via your newsreader. Buffer also lets you collaborate with your nonprofit team, which is especially useful when you have one person providing photos, someone else creating blog posts, and another person interacting with the supporters.
Since Buffer enables you to post frequently and consistently with minimal effort, it can help you build a stronger following. Its analytics tools will also evaluate your posts to deduce the best possible times to share your content. Buffer also makes reporting a breeze since you’re able to track key engagement metrics very easily.
Their blog is amongst the best ones in the business, and their support team is available and helpful.
Pricing
Buffer offers Starter Plans at $0 and $15 each (where the free plan allows you to manage three social media accounts), and Business Plans at $99, $199, and $299 each. Buffer also offers a 50% discount to all registered nonprofit organizations. All they need to see is your official documentation, such as a copy of your 501(c)(3), or your country’s equivalent, to support your nonprofit status.
Design – Canva
Today’s audience demands engaging high-quality visual content. The standards for photos and videos posted on social media is only getting higher.
OpenView Marketing Lab’s “Beginner’s Guide to Stunning Visual Content Marketing,” reports that company Facebook pages who post status updates with visuals in the form of videos and photo albums create up to 180 percent stronger engagement.
Powerful stats like the ones below, further remind us of the power visuals hold.
- Colored visuals increase people’s willingness to read content by 80%.
- When information is relevant, readers spend more time looking at the images than the content.
- Visual content is more than 40x more likely to be shared on social media.
For many nonprofits, this can be a stressful ordeal unless they employ a professional designer.
However, many nonprofits cannot afford one. Canva offers a great solution to nonprofits who wish to create great visual content anyway.
Canva assists in the creation of visual content for social media and marketing materials. It offers thousands of templates, making it quick and easy to create appealing graphics. Its premium version, Canva Work, offers even more tools to try out.
Canva makes creating visual content for social media channels a breeze. It’s very easy to use, includes templates, and lots of useful how-to information.
You can even set up a brand kit including your brand colors, fonts (you can even upload a font if you have one), and logos. It’s also easy to create and save branded templates so that everyone on your team can access them.
Pricing
Canva offers Canva Work for free to registered nonprofits.
Task Management – Asana
Asana is one of the best free project management tools with an attractive interface. Whether your nonprofit team is tracking a big or small project, you are sure to stay organized and on track by utilizing Asana’s basic tools: project workflows, task assignments, team establishment, due dates, and comments.
In Asana, users join Projects and Teams as applicable. Each Project has a task list. Each task can have subtasks, as well as an assignee, due date, attachments, comments, tags, and followers. You use these tasks and subtasks to track work. The comments and other data help you understand what’s happening with the task so that you don’t need to discuss matters over email or some other way. As tasks and subtasks are completed, all of their history and everything that occurred ends up being attached to the task itself.
As soon as a change is made or a task is assigned, Asana users receive notifications in their inbox, and are invited to check, follow, like, or comment the update. You can even draw the attention of a particular team member by simply mentioning him/her in task comments to make sure they’re in the loop.
More advanced features include the ability to upload documents, and integration with a variety of programs including Google Chrome, Dropbox, MailChimp, Okta, and many more.
Asana doesn’t offer a chat feature, but you can integrate Asana with Slack (mentioned in this list).
While Asana should not be confused with a project management software since it doesn’t include Gantt charts, time-tracking, and some other advanced tools for managing projects specifically (for that we recommend Podio which has an incredible amount of flexibility), it is great for task management, workflow management, and basic process/project management.
Pricing
Asana is free for up to 15 users. If you have additional users, or you would like to upgrade to utilize more advanced features, Asana Premium is available for $8.33 or less per user per month.
Donation Software – Donorbox
Online fundraising has become bread and butter for nonprofit organizations around the world. It garners millions in charitable giving for the nonprofit industry every year. Online fundraising lets donors give easily and frequently and it keeps their information secure. It also lets nonprofits collect donations from anywhere, capture more donor information, increase their brand awareness, and raise funds cost-effectively. Win-win!
And fundraising is, in addition to delivering your programs/services, the most important activity for a nonprofit. You can’t serve your beneficiaries without funding.
Therefore, it’s quintessential to choose great donation software.
Donorbox is a powerful fundraising software that is very simple and fast to set up. You can start fundraising with a fast, optimized donation payment system in 15 minutes. Over 50,000 organizations from 40 countries use the Donorbox fundraising software. Organizations can seamlessly embed a custom form to their website or use a pop-up widget.
This effective fundraising software offers many impressive features. Donorbox is optimized for recurring donations with its simple and effective checkout. Donorbox also offers the fundraising thermometer feature, which in combination with the recurring donations increases the number of donations.
It offers plug-and-play plugins for WordPress, Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace, and it not only accepts donations in multiple currencies (USD, EUR, CAD, GBP, AUD, plus more) but has also recently introduced ApplePay and Google Pay as payment options.
Donorbox also features simple and beautiful donation forms, an embeddable donor wall, company matching search, donor management system, and many more useful features for your nonprofit.
Pricing
Donorbox is free to start. Donorbox charges a small platform fee of 1.5% for the month’s donations. Our fees are the lowest in the market, and we charge no setup fees.
Email Software – MailChimp
Email marketing has been chastised for being a thing of the past, but study after study puts email marketing as the most effective way for nonprofits to build awareness, acquire leads, convert prospects, and retain current customers, even after compared to social media.
MailChimp lets you easily customize and brand your emails. You can use their range of templates or create your own. You also have the ability to remove the MailChimp logo from the bottom of each email.
MailChimp also provides thorough analytics that allows you to see how many subscribers have opened your email, which links were clicked the most frequently, how many people unsubscribed after receiving your email, and even how your response compares to the industry average.
Another great feature of Mailchimp is automation. On Mailchimp, you can create and schedule automated emails that follow up on donations, questions, and more.
With MailChimp, your nonprofit can also perform A/B testing, as well as target and segment donors. MailChimp integrates with apps you already use, allows you to create beautiful, mobile-friendly landing pages, and even offers a mobile app.
The options with Mailchimp are numerous!
Pricing
If you have less than 2,000 email subscribers, you can use MailChimp’s most basic plan for free. This is great news for nonprofits who are fairly new to the industry and have limited funds.
CRM – Salesforce
Salesforce created the Nonprofit Success Pack specifically for nonprofits, with the intention of allowing nonprofits to focus on their impact. Over 30,000 nonprofits around the world use Salesforce, from small organizations working in a single community to multinational NGOs and foundations.
The Nonprofit Success Pack features a flexible, open data architecture and pre-built constituent and donor management components.
These are the average benefits reported by their customers in their annual “Voice of the Customer” Survey:
– 89% of Salesforce.org customers say Salesforce has helped improve their ability to achieve their mission
– +49% faster response to constituents
– +24% donor retention
– 32% service and support costs
– 17% cost per dollar raised
The Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack, being customized for nonprofits, helps your entire organization to cultivate donor relationships.
It enables nonprofits to observe every interaction with a funder or volunteer. Having a lot of information, organized in a systematic way, can help you establish and grow donor relationships, manage the donation cycle. The NPSP offers the type of user-friendly and engaging experience which today’s donors expect.
One of the appealing features of NPSP is its ability to be configured for the needs, goals, and day-to-day processes of any organization with minimal custom programming. The tool is designed to grow with you.
Finally, it’s powerful – you ultimately get the same tool that Fortune 500 companies using the “regular” Salesforce get.
Pricing
10 user licenses/logins to the NPSP are free for nonprofits (additional licenses for the NPSP are $36/month).
Communication – Slack
If you’re tired of getting buried in endless emails and you’re starting to feel confused about who replied to what and in relation to which project, Slack is the right tool for you.
Slack is considered a “messaging app”. The idea behind Slack is to make communication and collaboration between coworkers easier.
The system is structured somewhat similarly to social media. There are ‘channels’ on the left side – you can create a channel for a project, a team, or an idea. When you create a channel, everyone can see what is going on in that channel. These are called “open channels”. You can also create private channels where you can share confidential information with just a few team members. You also have the option of sending direct messages in order to reach one coworker quickly and directly.
Slack keeps all of your team communication in one place so that all the emails, Whatsapp, or even Facebook and Skype messaging can reduce or end. This makes your team less likely to get lost in dispersed communication.
Another advantage to Slack is that it can be integrated with many other web services: Google Drive, Trello, Asana, Dropbox, to name but a few.
You can share files, spreadsheets, links, and more. You can search in Slack, as well as make calls and share your screen.
Pricing
Slack is completely free to use. The first paid option starts at just $8 monthly per user. The Slack for Nonprofits Program offers eligible organizations a free or discounted upgrade of one workspace to a paid plan. Here are the details:
Standard Plan: They offer workspaces with 250 or fewer members a free upgrade, and an 85% discount for workspaces above that size.
Plus Plan: They offer workspaces of any size an 85% discount.
Analytics – Google Analytics
Analytics is something every organization that maintains a website should do, for-profit, or nonprofit.
Google Analytics allows your nonprofit to track online conversions, both hard conversions, and soft conversions.
Hard conversions are ones that contribute directly to organizational operations or programs. Think online donations, volunteer registrations, or form submissions for more information.
Soft conversions are online activities that lead to hard conversions. Think of them as engagement steps, like downloading an annual report or visiting more than ten website pages.
Another great feature Google Analytics offers is tracking pages with high drop-off pages. This allows you to see which pages deter visitors from completing calls to action (like donating). This lets you immediately spot the bottlenecks and work on them.
One of the best things about Google Analytics is that you can make informed decisions on where your nonprofit staff should spend their time. Resource capacity is frequently an issue for many nonprofits, and Google Analytics helps remedy these issues. You can understand which visuals are effective, which blogs attract the most readers, which campaigns bring in the most results, and so on. When you know what works and what doesn’t, you can make better decisions for your nonprofit.
Pricing
The basic service is free, which is usually sufficient for most websites, but there is a paid premium version available.
Bonfire – Best for Selling Merchandise Online
Bonfire is an online merchandise design and sales platform designed for nonprofits. With flexible options to sell your custom t-shirts directly to supporters or launch a crowdfunding-style campaign, Bonfire can help you raise money and get your organization’s name out there! Launching a campaign is 100% risk-free.
Fundly – Best for Crowdfunding Campaigns
Fundly is a crowdfunding platform designed for nonprofit organizations. While many similar platforms are ideal for individuals, Fundly offers the more advanced design, data, and marketing features that an organization needs. It’s completely free to start a Fundly campaign, and there are minimum fundraising requirements before you can keep your funds.
Mobilize – Best for Volunteer Recruitment
Mobilize is a volunteer recruitment and management platform for mission-based organizations of all sizes. Post your in-person or virtual events to their rapidly growing network of passionate volunteers looking for their next cause to support. Mobilize is trusted by nonprofits, advocacy organizations, and even presidential campaigns. It’s completely free to use Mobilize’s core event registration and volunteer management tools.
YouTube – Best for Video Content
YouTube is the household name for video content, but it’s often overlooked by nonprofits. It’s a powerful outlet for sharing your organization’s videos (like campaign announcements and recorded livestreams), and it allows you to very directly communicate with your audience. Plus, YouTube Social Impact offers free built-in donation tools, interactive features, and extra resources for verified nonprofit organizations.
Facebook Live – Best for Livestreaming
Facebook Live is the leading livestreaming platform for organizations and individuals alike. With intuitive tools for streaming from a smartphone or camera, Facebook Live is a great option for casual livestreams or more complex programming. Plus, you can embed a donate button into your videos to raise extra support! As a platform that your audience is already familiar with, Facebook Live is a natural choice for streaming your virtual events.
Nabble – Best for Online Forums
Nabble is a free platform for creating online discussion forums. As nonprofits have shifted more of their engagement strategies to the virtual sphere, having a dedicated place for your community to discuss your mission, campaigns, and ongoing challenges is an easy way to strengthen your connections. Plus, Nabble’s forums are easily embedded into your own website.
SignMeUp – Best for Event Sign-Ups
SignMeUp is an online event registration platform for organizations of all sizes. Whether you’re hosting virtual events or organizing in-person activities, effective registration processes will be key to keep everyone on the same page. SignMeUp is free to use, registrants just pay a service fee when signing up for events.
Fundraising Report Card – Best for Fundraising Analytics
Fundraising Report Card is a free fundraising analytics tool for nonprofits. Simply import your fundraising data and start studying your performance using their pre-set dashboards for a wide variety of KPIs and performance metrics. Organizations of all sizes rely on Fundraising Report Card to learn more from their data and continually improve their outreach and fundraising efforts.
Conclusion
When it comes to tools for nonprofits, there are tons of low-cost or free options out there. Nonprofits have to keep their expenses very tight since funding is often limited. These can make it easier to find the software you need to help run the various aspects of the organization.