Charities and Non-profits
Charities need CRM systems that manage both sides of their mission: the supporters who fund the work and the beneficiaries who receive it. We build platforms that connect fundraising, grant management, and impact reporting in one system.
Sector Challenges
When your CRM cannot segment donors by giving history, engagement level, and communication preferences, everyone receives the same appeals. Donor fatigue sets in and regular supporters quietly lapse.
Each funder has different reporting requirements, timelines, and outcome metrics. Without structured grant tracking, your team spends weeks compiling reports from scattered data sources.
Demonstrating impact to funders requires structured outcome measurement over time. Generic CRMs have no concept of beneficiary journeys, intervention tracking, or longitudinal outcome data.
Charity Commission reporting, trustee management, and public benefit documentation require structured record-keeping that commercial CRMs were never designed to support.
What Goes Wrong
UK charities operate under Charity Commission oversight, HMRC rules for Gift Aid, Fundraising Regulator codes, and UK GDPR with its specific rules around fundraising consent. These are the six patterns UK charities describe most often when their current CRM stops supporting the mission.
Gift Aid declarations are collected on paper or as PDFs and re-keyed into an HMRC claim spreadsheet. Errors are routine, claims are delayed, and the 25 per cent uplift is left on the table for weeks every quarter.
The Fundraising Regulator code, combined with UK GDPR, requires evidence of lawful basis and consent for specific channels (post, email, SMS, phone). Generic CRMs let you tag consent but do not evidence when, how, or against what privacy notice it was given.
The outcome data in the fundraising CRM and the outcome data in the programme spreadsheets do not match. Every grant report is reconciled by hand, eating programme-manager time that should be spent on the work itself.
Legacy income is the most valuable donor category for many charities, but pipeline management is informal. Notifications of bequest, probate tracking, and residual share calculations happen in email and legal-pad notes.
The Fundraising Regulator requires charities to identify and protect donors in vulnerable circumstances. When vulnerability is a free-text flag, the next caller misses it, and the charity ends up named in a regulator decision.
Funders increasingly demand evidence of outcomes, not just outputs. Without structured outcome indicators at the start of a beneficiary journey and follow-up at defined intervals, impact reporting is qualitative prose rather than evidence.
What We Build
Track supporters from first gift through regular giving, major donations, and legacy pledges. Segment by giving history, communication preferences, and engagement level.
Manage grant applications, awards, conditions, and reporting deadlines in one place. Generate funder-specific reports directly from CRM data without manual compilation.
Track beneficiary journeys through your programmes with structured outcome indicators. Measure distance travelled and report aggregate impact to funders and trustees.
Capture Gift Aid declarations, track eligibility, and generate HMRC claims directly from donation records. Automated reconciliation and error checking.
Manage volunteer recruitment, DBS check tracking, availability scheduling, and hours logging. Link volunteer activity to specific programmes and events.
Compliance in Practice
UK charities answer to the Charity Commission for governance and annual return, to HMRC for Gift Aid, to the Fundraising Regulator for fundraising practice, and to the ICO for data protection. A bespoke CRM should make five specific obligations cheaper to meet daily.
Gift Aid declarations are captured as structured records with declaration date, donor taxpayer status, and the gift(s) covered. The HMRC Charities Online claim file is generated directly from the CRM each quarter with built-in eligibility checks, and Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme claims are tracked separately with the matching principle enforced.
Trustee records (name, date of birth, role, conflict declarations, training) are maintained in one place. Income and expenditure summaries, restricted fund balances, and fundraising detail are assembled for the annual return directly from the data. Serious incident reporting workflows trigger on events matching Charity Commission criteria, supporting timely disclosure.
Consent for each communication channel (post, email, phone, SMS) is captured against the donor record with the source of the consent and the privacy notice version. Vulnerable-donor flags are workflow-active, pausing outbound fundraising and routing to a trained staff member rather than being a passive tag.
Every personal data field is tagged with lawful basis (legitimate interest for retention, consent for marketing, contract for services). Retention schedules purge or archive data on time, and subject access or erasure requests are fulfilled from a single dashboard rather than a scramble across email and spreadsheets.
Volunteer and staff DBS check status, expiry, and renewal workflows are tracked centrally. Safeguarding incidents are recorded against the beneficiary or event with case management workflow, escalation paths, and linkage to the safeguarding lead and, where appropriate, statutory services.
Regulatory Compliance
UK charities face unique regulatory obligations around fundraising practices, public accountability, and data protection. Your CRM should support good governance, not create compliance gaps, and it should free programme teams to focus on the mission rather than on administration.
Charity Commission annual return data captured through normal CRM usage, with trustee records, financial summaries, and public benefit documentation readily available.
Fundraising Regulator Code of Practice compliance with structured consent management, vulnerable donor safeguarding flags, and communication preference tracking.
UK GDPR data protection for donors, beneficiaries, and volunteers with granular consent tracking, automated retention schedules, and subject access request handling.
Investment Guidance
Every charity is different, but there are clear market bands for what a purpose-built charity CRM costs. The ranges below reflect typical investment for a UK-led build with Gift Aid, Fundraising Regulator, and UK GDPR considerations built in. For smaller charities with standard fundraising workflows, established platforms (Donorfy, Beacon, Salesforce NPSP) are often the better commercial answer, and we will tell you so during discovery.
Smaller charities, single workflow
A single focused workflow: Gift Aid declaration and claim automation, grant pipeline tracker, or beneficiary intake portal. One to two integrations with existing fundraising or finance software. For charities replacing a specific spreadsheet process.
Established charities, 5-25 users
Full donor and beneficiary CRM with Gift Aid automation, grant management, outcome tracking, consent management, volunteer coordination, and three to five integrations (finance, email marketing, payment processor, website forms).
National or multi-programme charities, 25+ users
Multi-programme platform: programme-specific beneficiary workflows, restricted fund tracking, legacy pipeline management, safeguarding case management, and integrations with fundraising platforms, Just Giving, Enthuse, and finance systems.
Fixed-price build, with ongoing support and enhancement delivered on a monthly retainer. Indicative ranges for a UK-led build. Actual cost depends on programme complexity, integration count, and the scope of your Charity Commission and funder reporting requirements. Some charities may qualify for a sector discount during discovery. See full pricing detail.
Questions Answered
The questions UK charities ask us most often during discovery. If yours is not here, book a discovery call and we will answer it directly.
Donorfy, Beacon, and Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud are well suited to charities whose workflows fit the product. A bespoke CRM makes sense when your programme model, beneficiary journey, or funder reporting requirements are the core of your differentiation, or when you have grown past the point where the off-the-shelf platform supports you without costly customisation. Most charities under £2m income should stay on off-the-shelf.
Gift Aid declarations are captured as structured records, linked to specific gifts, and validated against HMRC eligibility rules. The Charities Online claim file is generated directly from the CRM each quarter, with error-checking that catches ineligible claims before submission. GASDS claims are tracked separately with the matching principle enforced.
Yes. Every donation, grant, and income item is tagged with fund designation at the point of receipt. Restricted fund balances are reconciled continuously, and programme expenditure is allocated to the correct fund through structured workflows. The annual accounts preparation becomes substantially faster.
Yes. We have migrated from Donorfy, Beacon, Salesforce NPSP, Raiser’s Edge, ThankQ, iMIS, and bespoke Access databases. Migration includes donor records, donation history, Gift Aid declarations, grant records, beneficiary records, and communication history.
You do. Code is delivered to your GitHub or GitLab organisation under a permissive licence, the database runs in your cloud account (AWS, Azure, or GCP), and there is no vendor lock-in. We offer ongoing support contracts, but you are free to engage any competent development team to maintain the platform after handover.
Consent is captured per communication channel (post, email, phone, SMS) with the source, the privacy notice version, and the timestamp. Vulnerable-donor workflows pause outbound fundraising and route to a trained staff member for assessment. Preference updates are processed immediately across all channels.
Yes. Beneficiary records hold structured outcome indicators (baseline, interim, follow-up measurements) tied to programme theories of change. Funder reports are generated from the data rather than compiled by hand, and aggregate impact metrics can be produced for trustees and annual reports.
Regulatory change is continuous in the charity sector. The architecture is designed to make rule changes cheap to implement. Gift Aid logic, consent workflows, annual return fields, and safeguarding processes are configuration rather than hard-coded logic, so regulatory change can be handled in days.
Services
Bespoke CRM Development
CRM Consultancy
CRM Data Migration
CRM Integration
CRM Support & Maintenance
CRM Training
Charity CRM
Book a free discovery call. We will discuss your fundraising workflows, your impact reporting needs, and whether a bespoke CRM is the right investment for your organisation.
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