A comparison guide: Which CRM is best for your charity?

GDI Team
May 19
7 min read

Updated: May 20

By Eleanor Mare (GDI Fellow)

When small charities start to scale up their impact, they often need to keep track of more moving parts – perhaps contact details of new donors, updates from partner organisations, or a growing volunteer base. In the early days, a shared spreadsheet and verbal updates may be enough to manage this. But as your team and operations grow, things may start to fall through the cracks.

That’s where a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system can make a big difference. It gives your team one place to store contact info, log communications, and keep everyone on the same page.

GDI recently helped several charities explore their options for CRMs. In this post, we’ll share some of the key things we’ve learned in the process, to help demystify what CRMs can help with and how to choose one.

A quick note: to make this article more concrete and actionable, we’ll reference some specific CRMs and related tools – but to be clear, these are not endorsements, just real-world examples.

What is a CRM and Why do I need one?

At its core, a CRM allows you to store information about each of your contacts and log all communication you have with those contacts. By having this information in a central place, anyone in your team can easily get up to speed with any of the relationships your organisation has.

If you resonate with any of the following, a CRM might be what you need.

“I keep losing track of who I talked to and what we discussed.”
Automatically logs emails, lets you add notes on calls and meetings, and keeps a history of all interactions in one place.

“I forget to follow up with important contacts.”
Set follow-up reminders and task assignments, so you always know when it’s time to check in with a funder, partner, or key supporter.

“Our team isn’t on the same page about relationships.”
Everyone can see the latest interactions, notes, and progress on key relationships.

“We’re juggling too many spreadsheets and email threads and struggling to find information when we need it.”
Consolidates all contact information in one organized, searchable system.

“It’s taking too long to find and aggregate the information I need for reporting.”
Can automatically generate reports, or connect with external dashboarding tools

“We don’t have a clear system for managing partnerships and opportunities.”
Tracks partnerships, collaborations, and grant applications through custom pipelines, so you can see what stage each opportunity is in.

This is just scratching the surface. Non-profit focussed CRMs may also help with

Taking website donations and automatically capture new donor details
Selling tickets to an event and capturing attendee details
Managing your volunteer base
Tracking applicants and recipients of grants you may be giving out
And more…

What if I need something more specialised?

A CRM can do a lot, but there are related tools that may be more relevant depending on what your organisation’s focus is. It’s worth knowing that these exist:

Client Management System (CMS) / Client and Case Management (CCM) systems: These are designed for organisations like counselling services or foster care placement providers; anyone that provides their services directly to individual clients and needs to record detailed and sensitive information. This information might be more than just ‘I emailed Jane Doe on Thursday and haven’t heard back’ – it could be ‘last week Jane told the caseworker that she was struggling with anxiety due to upcoming exams’. Because of the sensitive nature of the information, these systems should have a strong focus on configurable privacy settings. As an example, InfoXChange offers a CCM system that is widely used in the Australian government and non-profit sector.

Donor Management Systems (DMS): A system tailored for fundraising, focusing on donation tracking, donor engagement, and campaign management. Some CRMs include donor management features, but dedicated DMS platforms are optimized for nonprofits. A well-known example of this is Raiser’s Edge.

Volunteer management systems (VMS): These systems are designed to manage large numbers of volunteers, in particular scheduling shifts, tracking hours, and managing volunteer onboarding or training. For example, BetterImpact offers a VMS that I’ve used from the volunteer side.

Some CRMs include features relating to case, donor and volunteer management too, but they may have more limited functionality compared to the specialised system.

How CRMs are priced

When we did this research in late 2024, we were focussed on finding the lowest-possible cost platforms for our charity client. We found that although there were some completely free options, the starting price for most platforms was around $20 AUD/user/month.

Completely free options

Two large CRM platforms offer a free tier:

Salesforce offers 10 users for free if you qualify for their Power of Us program
HubSpot offers 2 users for free (and offers discounts to nonprofits for their paid versions)

The big caveats here are that:

The functionality will be limited in these free versions
Scaling beyond the free tier (e.g. if your team grows) could get very expensive very quickly
These large, comprehensive platforms may be more confusing or challenging to get set up with, and may be overkill for small charities with only a few staff

Paid options

On the lower-cost end of the spectrum we found Bigin CRM has its lowest tier at $11 AUD/user/mo. However, this is not a charity-specific CRM.
Most platforms cost > $20 AUD/user/mo, and the pricing is usually tiered based on the number of users and the number of records you need to store. One we particularly liked the look of was Beacon.

Special mention: platforms that don’t charge per user

Very few platforms have a user-independent pricing structure, but there are a few, and if you have a large team on a limited budget this might be worth considering.

VegaWorks allows unlimited users for $35 AUD/mo.
ChilliDB allows multiple staff to share a single license for $56 AUD/mo.
Keela offers unlimited users with pricing starting from $160 AUD/mo. Their pricing scales only with the number of records – so all their features are included even at their lowest price point.

How to Choose

Choosing the right CRM is going to be very specific to your situation. However, this is the basic process.

First, answer these core questions

How much are we willing to spend per month on this tool?
How many users need to be able to access and edit the data in the CRM?
How many records (contacts) do we need to store in the CRM?
What specific problems do we need this tool to solve? (e.g. generating reports, connecting to a dashboard, or managing events)

Next, identify some possible platforms of interest, and make a shortlist.

It can be hard to compare different pricing structures, so for each platform, calculate how much it will cost for you, based on the number of users and records you need.
Consider your other needs, e.g. reporting or email integration
Consider what the user support is like, and how user-friendly the platform is. How will you get your questions answered? Where is the platform based – is it in a similar time zone in case you need support within business hours? Or is there an active community asking and answering questions online?

Trial one or two platforms to evaluate if they’ll meet your needs

Apart from the really large platforms, you’ll often be able to set up a call with the sales team where they can talk through how the platform could meet your needs and answer any questions you have
Most platforms offer a free trial of some kind so that you can explore what it’s like to use the software before committing to it

GDI Case Studies

In the last few months, GDI has helped three Australian charities with their CRM decisions.

Charity #1 was a community organisation that wanted a CRM that was free or very low cost, but they also needed access for ten board members. After looking at the pricing options, they ultimately decided they weren’t ready to accept the cost of a CRM yet, and decided to try to organise their information better without using a CRM. As their operations and budget scale up in the coming year, they may revisit the shortlist when they feel it’s needed.

Charity #2 was an advocacy-focussed organisation that needed to track advocates and political figures, as well as some donors. They were drawn to Keela because of its simplicity and integrations with some of their existing tooling. They had a small team and wanted something that would work mostly out of the box, compared with Salesforce/HubSpot.

Charity #3 was an education-focused organisation that needed strong email integration and the ability to easily group and filter data for analysis and reporting. After investigating several options, they chose to pursue HubSpot because of its powerful email integration.

Final Thoughts

Choosing a CRM for your charity can be a bit of a daunting task. Hopefully what we’ve shared in this article will help make the process easier.

Of course, choosing a CRM is only the first step. Onboarding can be a slow process, and it’s as much an organisational change project as it is an IT project. Going forward, your CRM will only be as good as the data you put into it – maintenance and data hygiene is critical. Having one person in your organisation take responsibility for this can be an effective approach.

Despite these challenges, as data professionals, we would advocate for using a CRM system of some kind rather than ad-hoc spreadsheets or shared note-taking tools. Getting all your data into a CRM means that you’re essentially storing that data in a structured database (with strong security as well). This will help you:

Scale up your operations
Generate reports and statistics to demonstrate your impact
Ask careful questions of your data to identify areas for improvement

Getting your data all in one central, structured location is a must for any downstream data work that you may want to do in future. If you want some more support, GDI’s volunteers are ready to help – feel free to reach out!

About GDI:

The Good Data Institute (established 2019) is a registered not-for-profit organisation (ABN: 6664087941) that aims to give not-for-profits access to data analytics (D&A) support & tools. Our mission is to be the bridge between the not-for-profit world and the world of data analytics practitioners wishing to do social good. Using D&A, we identify, share, and help implement the most effective means for growing NFP people, organisations, and their impact.