Donor management 101: Tips, tools, and everything you need to know

Donor management is crucial for community foundations, funders, and social good organizations. It helps them track contributions, communicate with key partners, and show their backers they appreciate their support.

However, managing your donor relationships can become a time-consuming, tedious task.

Regardless, keeping tabs on your supporters is essential to properly engage donors, retaining their ongoing contributions, and tracking key data about your organization's cash flow. These are all major issues for contemporary charitable organizations, but the right donor management software can simplify engagement, retention, and data tracking for your foundation.

Donor management systems make it easy to store, organize, and access donor data, communicate with supporters, manage donations, and expedite your fundraising success. This guide unpacks donor management, explores 2025’s most popular donor management platforms, and helps you choose the right one for your organization. 

What is donor management?

In essence, donor management involves tracking, engaging, and nurturing donor relationships. It is essential for maintaining a wide support network and receiving repeat donations. 

Normally, mid-level donors give to the same foundations year after year for, on average, more than a decade. Upholding positive relationships with these contributors remains essential to keeping your organization well-funded now and into the future. 

Proper donor management keeps contributors in your orbit by:

• Improving donor retention: Donor management includes outreach—such as Thank You messages, follow-up emails, and requests for future donations. These donor communications show your supporters you value their contributions, increasing the likelihood that they’ll stick around to donate again in the future.

• Increasing giving potential: Repeat phone calls don’t work, but they’ve been shown to reduce how much donors are willing to contribute to a cause. However, other forms of communication included in donor management—such as email and social media messages—can expand your scope, introduce your foundation to new donors, and increase your overall donations.

• Strengthening relationships: Donor management allows you to reach your supporters and build relationships on their terms—wherever they may be waiting. Most donations and donor engagements happen on websites and desktop devices—but Gen Z and X prefer to engage with organizations over social media, apps, and text. You can seamlessly strengthen bonds across various platforms with the right management tools. 

While they’re similar in effect, donor management and fundraising differ. Fundraising involves soliciting donations—whether going door to door, making calls, or campaigning online. Donor management, on the other hand, is how you interact with individuals who already contribute to your organization.

Key components of effective donor management

Nonprofits and charitable organizations can effectively manage their donor relationships by:

• Tracking donor information: A centralized database for your contributions, communication history with donors, and engagement attempts lets you know who to message and who already regularly contributes to your organization. 

• Crafting effective engagement and communication strategies: All outreach—such as emails and social media DMs—should be personalized with the recipient’s name and other specifics. Gratitude campaigns and other engagement activities show contributors you truly value their donations. 

• Allocating funds transparently: Donors want to know how their gifts are being used and who your foundation ultimately supports. Releasing detailed reports explaining where every penny is sent raises donor confidence and mitigates fears of misappropriation. 

• Automating workflows and reports: Robust, modern donor management tools allow you to automate many tedious tasks, such as posting donations and creating reports on organizational spending.

Top donor management tools and software

In order to use donor management software to its full potential, you need to know the best platforms on the market and how they can benefit your organization. As of 2025, the leading donor management systems include the following.

1. Foundant CommunitySuite

Foundant CommunitySuite is purpose-built for both funders and fund recipients. The platform guides organizations through the end-to-end donor lifecycle, from collecting donor data to fund tracking, automated reporting, and more. 

It even boasts features that help you increase donor engagement, like:

• Outlook email integration

• Custom Giving Hub organizational homepages

• Enhanced insights that measure your donations and campaign performance

CommunitySuite also provides seamless data flow between disparate systems via its Grant Lifecycle Manager (GLM) and Scholarship Lifecycle Manager (SLM). These integrated programs manage everything from collecting applications to requesting references; their connection to CommunitySuite means no donor database or information is siloed from any other.

2. Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT

Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT is a popular fundraising and donor management platform. It automates some of the nitty-gritty tasks of managing donor relationships, such as:

• Optimizing pledge forms

• Calculating feasible ask amounts

• Identifying high-potential donors

Raiser’s Edge NXT is primarily used by funders and community foundations who already work with Blackbaud’s accounting tool, Financial Edge NXT. Raiser's Edge can be a viable choice if you’re set on using Financial Edge and want a donor management tool to integrate seamlessly into your workflow. Otherwise, stick to a more versatile and varied solution like CommunitySuite.

3. AkoyaGO

AkoyaGo combines donor, financial, and grant management into a simplified tool. It provides a unified source with robust reporting for your organization's information, allowing you to collate previously siloed departments as CommunitySuite does. 

However, what it doesn’t offer users—as opposed to Foundant’s donor management software—includes:

• Pledge tracking

• Revenue sharing

• The capability to report and track multiple admin fees

AkoyaGo can be a reasonable tool for community and private foundations with less complex donor and financial management requirements. If you want a more robust toolkit of solutions, however, go with CommunitySuite instead.

4. Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud—Fundraising

Salesforce is well-known for its catch-all Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) solution, which is used across various industries. Its Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud—Fundraising offers a few key donor management features, including:

• Donor profiles to inform your communications and help you craft messages

• Segmentation features that help you sort your partners by donation amount, location, and more

• Campaign insights that tell you if your current outreach efforts are worth their investment

Besides these basics, Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud—Fundraising is also optimized for integration with other Community Foundation software—specifically the nonprofit accounting tool, NPact.

CommunitySuite, however, can manage donors, funders, finances, and more from a single, purpose-built tool.

5. DonorPerfect

DonorPerfect positions itself as a nonprofit CRM with certain donor management, fundraising, and marketing capabilities. It has several of the main features of donor management software, including:

• A singular database to manage your constituents

• The ability to build out donor profiles and custom relationship rules

• A viable data import tool

Smaller foundations may be able to get started on DonorPerfect, but as they grow, they’ll find themselves looking elsewhere for more scalability and broader features. The system isn’t specifically designed for the community foundation audience, so it’s better to skip it right from the start for a more purpose-built tool like CommunitySuite.

Best practices for donor management success

For the best results managing your donors—and to find a tool that helps you along the way—focus on:

• Segmenting your contributors: Sort donors into groups based on their giving history and interests. Then, personalize your outreach effort to reflect the different segments of your base.

• Automating and streamlining communications: Typing personalized messages and crafting email campaigns can be time-consuming, but with the right donor management tools, you can automate most of this work—along with reports, donor acknowledgments, and more.

• Tracking donor engagement metrics: See which campaigns work and build future efforts around them. Tried-and-true strategies improve donor retention and can lead to a lifetime of giving from your committed contributors.

• Offering flexible giving options: From one-time gifts to recurring donations, matched contributions, legacy giving, and more, offer as many ways to donate as possible so your partners can provide however they feel comfortable.

• Building long-term relationships: One-time gifts help out, but recurring donors allow your organization to continue operating and bettering the world year after year. 

Why Foundant CommunitySuite is a top choice for funders

Foundant CommunitySuite is built for foundations, grantmakers, and anyone else managing funds in pursuit of social good. Its integrated donor and fund management tools eliminate data siloing to help your organization run more smoothly and efficiently.

Plus, CommunitySuite boasts the market’s widest variety of useful donor and finance management tools. With automated, custom reporting, donor insights for enhanced engagement, seamless donor data software migration, and more, it’s the one-in-all solution for foundations of all sizes.

Strengthen your donor relationships with the right tools

Thoughtful donor management can lead to repeat, future contributions, higher donations, and a stronger connection to your community of contributors. If you’re in the market for donor management software, be sure to license a solution that offers unlimited scalability alongside seamless integration. That way, you’ll only ever need one tool.

And, since you’ll only need one system, make it the best available with Foundant CommunitySuite.

Start a conversation with Foundant today to see how CommunitySuite can improve your donor engagement strategy.