Donor database software is non-negotiable for growing nonprofit organizations that want to scale up fundraising efforts while deepening relationships with supporters. The best nonprofit CRM software can do it all: track giving history, personalize messaging, automate repetitive tasks, generate tailored reports, and create automated workflows.
Building up donor retention strategies, acquiring new donors, and creating donor-centric campaigns are important fundraising goals. But if your software creates more chaos than opportunities, you might have reporting inaccuracies, outreach roadblocks, and data fragmentation, all while racing to keep up with relevant fundraising trends.
The best donor database software gives you the tools, data, and confidence you need to make better decisions, connect deeply with donors, make timely asks, and spread awareness about your mission.
Virtuous is the responsive fundraising nonprofit CRM designed for nonprofits that want to nurture meaningful relationships while reducing mundane, manual administrative tasks using intuitive tools and features for donor management, automation, segmentation, reporting, and more.
What to Look for in the Donor Database Software
Your mission is garnering attention, your audience is engaged, and you’re expanding fundraising and marketing strategies to gain more reach—all signs that you’re in growth mode. To avoid being held back by ineffective and outdated software, invest in donor management software that adapts to your ever-changing needs and prioritizes donor engagement and retention.
Here are key features to look for when shopping for a new CRM for nonprofits:
Contact and Relationship Management
Contact management minimizes siloed donor data isolated in different platforms. With a responsive CRM system, you get a clear picture of each supporter and can organize them by individual, household, organization, or foundation. Using accurate and complete donor data, you can understand their needs, interests, and preferences to communicate with them appropriately.
Imagine sending an email requesting a donation while the recipient is in mid-conversation with customer support about a technical issue on your donation form. Contact and relationship management tools help prevent awkward situations like this by tracking interdepartmental interactions in one place for donor journey transparency.
You can also set up different contact types and segment donors into groups based on their giving history, how active they are, and what they care about. For example, use donor segmentation to tailor communications to where each supporter is in their donor lifecycle—whether they’re recurring donors, lapsed supporters, volunteers, or event participants.
Sending personalized emails to your donors can lead to open rates that are 82% higher than generic emails. Additionally, by using tags to categorize donors based on their communication preferences and interests, you can further personalize your outreach, ensuring that each message not only reaches the right inbox but also strikes the right chord.
Tags on Virtuous help organize donors by groups or preferences and can be used across different queries and in automated workflows. Plus, smart tags step it up by automating how tags are applied or removed based on custom rules you set. This means you can easily keep your segments up-to-date, letting you focus more on connecting with your supporters.
Data Segmentation and Reporting
Data segmentation divides your donors into specific groups based on common attributes, such as donation history, demographics, and financial standing. Donors respond positively when you speak directly to who they are and where they are on their journey.
Segmentation can do even more when paired with powerful reporting tools. With Virtuous, you gain access to the responsive insights dashboard, which displays metrics like donor retention rate, total unique donors, and donor lifetime value.
Plus, each team member can customize their dashboard to highlight the metrics that matter most to their role. Plus, with custom reports, you can track key fundraising activities and donor trends in real time, helping you tweak and improve your strategies as you go.
Automation and Workflows
As a growing nonprofit, you might face a common dilemma: increased workload and limited resources. Time-saving automation features reduce the burden of manually meddling with data.
Think of the effort you’d need to send thank-you emails for every single donation you receive—big or small. With fundraising automation, you can set personalized emails to be sent automatically to acknowledge your donors after they take action.
Automation not only lets you send emails automatically to acknowledge donor actions but also offers multiple use cases that streamline your engagement strategies. With tools like Virtuous, you can automate welcome emails to new donors, send birthday wishes, and trigger follow-up messages based on donor behavior, such as event attendance or campaign donations. This flexibility allows you to maintain a continuous, personalized dialogue with your supporters across various touchpoints.
Fundraising and Donation Tracking
No matter the size of your organization, you need donor database software that can help manage your fundraising campaigns and track donations in real time. Centralizing your fundraising data allows you to generate insightful reports, helping you identify trends and opportunities in your donors’ giving behaviors.
Choose a solution that can handle different gift types—whether online, offline, or in-kind donations such as jewelry, gift cards, or vehicles. Additionally, look for features like event registration and peer-to-peer fundraising tools, which can diversify revenue streams for your nonprofit.
Integrations With Other Nonprofit Tools
It’s vital to have flexible CRM software that can integrate with the other tools your nonprofit relies on. Choosing responsive donor database software means all your tools can talk to each other seamlessly, creating a single source of truth. This not only streamlines your data management but also boosts the accuracy of the information you rely on to make decisions.
How Virtuous Stands Out as a Donor Database Software
Balancing the uncertainties of acquiring new donors, engaging existing supporters, and navigating external pressures can feel like an extreme juggling act. Virtuous stepped in to help nonprofits reimagine donor management through a responsive fundraising approach, which puts the donor at the center of fundraising and grows giving through personalized donor journeys that respond to the needs of each individual.
Intelligent Donor Management
With Virtuous, donor management becomes more than just tracking transactions—it’s about building relationships at every stage of the donor experience. By using data-driven insights, automation, and segmentation, nonprofits can create donor journeys that adapt to each individual’s engagement level and interests. From first-time donors to long-time supporters, Virtuous helps ensure that every interaction feels intentional, relevant, and personalized.
Plus, with behavioral insights, you can view relationship-building recommendations like feedback, wealth indicators, donation patterns, social media interactions, and email responses. This takes the guesswork out of donation appeals and encourages donor conversations.
Automation & Engagement Tools
With Virtuous, automation does more than save time; it frees up staff time to focus on tasks that matter: deepening engagement and growing giving opportunities. Without these automated workflows, you’re spending days on data maintenance, running queries, and writing individual emails. Here’s how automation simplifies your workflow:
- Data hygiene: Automates data entry and regular updates, keeping your database clean and up to date.
- Personalized emails: Automate donor welcome series, event follow-ups, birthdays, milestones, receipts, and nurturing campaigns effortlessly, ensuring consistent, timely, and customized engagement with each donor without burdening your team.
- Membership renewal reminders: Send automated alerts to both your team and donors about membership renewals, ensuring no lapse in support.
- Custom reports: Allow each department to create tailored reports that track and analyze various metrics relevant to their short and long-term goals.
- Lapsed donor re-engagement: Automatically identifies donors who have stopped giving and initiates outreach to rekindle their support.
Fundraising & Donation Tracking
Virtuous provides a comprehensive view of each donor, including financial details, relational giving, major donor status, recent gifts, giving history, donor notes, follow-up tasks, event attendance, wealth information, and other insightful data for your nonprofit.
Pull pre-built and custom fundraising reports to access the data you need to inform strategic planning, create meaningful campaigns, and send timely messages to donors who are ready to engage with you.
For more sophisticated nonprofits, Virtuous BI offers advanced analytics and custom reporting capabilities. With powerful data visualization tools and predictive analytics, Virtuous BI enables nonprofits to make data-driven decisions with confidence, optimize fundraising strategies, and identify new growth opportunities.
Integrations & Flexibility
Fundraising can feel easier when you’ve got responsive donor database software that seamlessly integrates with your technology stack. Virtuous connects your online donation platform, marketing platform, email service provider, accounting software, and others through native integrations, Zapier automations, and an open API.
Data flows across platforms so you can scale operations without leaving dozens of tabs open or switching tools—giving you a complete, real-time view of your fundraising performance.
Success Stories: How Nonprofits Grow With Virtuous
The World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS) is a leading voluntary movement that instills confidence in girls and young women across the world. Before using Virtuous, its communication and technology capabilities were limited. No segmentation, no data visibility, and no platform integration with its email service provider. When the pandemic hit in 2020, and it was still managing data with just an Excel spreadsheet, the team knew it was time to pivot to affordable and user-friendly software.
The transition to Virtuous instantly gave WAGGGS a growth partner, data visibility, automation, and improved donor relationships. The organization surpassed its fundraising goal by £150,000 and raised a total of £600,000.
“I think we discovered how modern technology can help us. So Virtuous challenges us to become more modern, and we challenge Virtuous to be more global.” – Inga Pikse, Head of Philanthropy and Individual Giving
Similarly, Arkansas Children’s needed to make a switch to future-proof its healthcare system, which is solely dedicated to treating children. The organization could no longer rely on cumbersome legacy software and time-consuming spreadsheets that limited data visibility, increased data inaccuracies, and made cross-team collaboration non-existent.
Virtuous was an easy choice for Arkansas Children’s. The team was in dire need of a scalable, web-based solution that provided marketing tools, automation, ease of use, and instant access to critical data. Integration with other technology platforms was also a priority.
“Virtuous is a good CRM choice for nonprofits in the fundraising world. Because you’re getting a partner who has a lot of experience in the industry, you can achieve a large-scale migration with low risk. Partnering with Virtuous was the right decision for our organization, our team, and our donors.”—Matt Price, Director of Customer Relationship Marketing
Handling donor relationships and ensuring timely communication is now effortless for the team, and it’s optimistic about achieving a positive ROI within the first year of using Virtuous.
Comparing Virtuous to Other Donor Database Software
With so many donor database options out there, it’s important to find one that truly supports your nonprofit’s growth. The right CRM should do more than just store donor data—it should streamline operations, automate tasks, and make it easier to build meaningful connections with supporters.
User-Friendly Interface
Virtuous is a platform that’s both easy to learn and intuitive to navigate. The learning curve is less steep than overly complex legacy systems that require extensive training or an IT background, allowing your nonprofit to adapt quickly. Plus, a customizable dashboard gives you—and every member on your team—data and information crucial to your success at your fingertips.
Fundraising and Process Automation
While some donor database software platforms have promising price tags, they unfortunately lack basic workflow and email automation. Virtuous’ automated workflows encourage you to prioritize engaging with donors rather than fussing over menial tasks, making fundraising more efficient, effective, and fun.
Personalization at Scale
What’s the use of donor database software if it can’t grow with your nonprofit? A scalable CRM should adapt as your needs evolve, not create more work. With responsive fundraising features, built-in marketing automation, and smart donor segmentation, you can deliver meaningful, personalized messages that keep supporters engaged.
When outreach feels relevant, donors stay connected—driving stronger fundraising results. Unlike other platforms that require time-consuming manual filters, Virtuous makes personalization effortless.
If you’re a growing nonprofit ready for responsive donor database software that can champion your cause and grow with you, schedule a demo with Virtuous today.
