Answers about DonorsBase, organized for humans and AI

DonorsBase is a donor-management and online-fundraising platform for charities, nonprofits, churches, schools, and community organizations. It combines a donor CRM, an embeddable donation form, recurring giving, automatic gift receipts and year-end tax summaries, campaign and event tracking, segmented email marketing, dashboards, and integrations with Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.Net, QuickBooks Online, and Mailchimp.

DonorsBase is built for organizations that take charitable donations and need a single system of record for donors, gifts, and the communications around them. That includes registered 501(c)(3) charities in the United States, registered Canadian charities, churches and faith communities, K-12 and higher-education institutions, hospital and healthcare foundations, community foundations, and international NGOs. It scales from a single-person fundraising team up to organizations with tens of thousands of donors.

DonorsBase combines the best of a donation form (like Givebutter) with the depth of a donor CRM (like Bloomerang or DonorPerfect) in a single product, instead of stitching them together. Every plan includes every feature — there are no separate add-ons for receipts, recurring giving, or analytics — and pricing scales by donor count instead of per-staff seat. All three first-class payment gateways (Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.Net) are included on every plan.

DonorsBase is a hosted, multi-tenant SaaS product. There is nothing to install or maintain. Enterprise customers can discuss dedicated environments, data residency options, and VPC deployments.

Today DonorsBase is optimized for the United States and Canada, with country-specific receipt formats for both. Multi-currency capture works globally; additional country-specific tax-form templates are on the roadmap.

DonorsBase plans scale by the number of donors managed: Free (up to 50 donors), Growth ($120/month, up to 250), Pro ($275/month, up to 1,000), Scale ($650/month, up to 3,000), and Enterprise tiers from $1,000/month (5k donors) up to $9,000/month (50k donors). Every plan includes every feature.

Yes. The free plan supports up to 50 donors, all three payment gateways, donations and receipts, basic analytics, recurring giving, and tax summaries. There is no time limit and no credit card required to start.

Yes — payment processing fees are charged separately by Stripe, PayPal, or Authorize.Net at their standard rates and are not part of your DonorsBase subscription. DonorsBase itself does not add a platform fee on donations. You can let donors optionally cover processing fees at checkout so 100% of the gift reaches your cause.

No. Every plan includes every feature: donor management, recurring giving, all three payment gateways, automated receipts, year-end tax summaries, dashboards, email campaigns, multi-org support, and integrations. Plans differ only by donor count and the level of support included.

Yes. You can upgrade or downgrade at any time and the change takes effect on the next billing cycle. If you exceed your donor count we will reach out about an upgrade rather than blocking your account.

Most teams are accepting their first donation in under an hour: sign up, connect a payment gateway, embed the donation button on your site, import your donors via CSV. Full migration from another platform — including historical gifts, segments, and recurring schedules — typically takes one to four weeks depending on data complexity.

Yes. DonorsBase accepts CSV imports for donors and historical donations. The importer suggests duplicate merges, validates email and phone formats, and lets you map your column headers to DonorsBase fields. You can re-run imports as many times as needed.

No. Historical donations import alongside donor records, so year-over-year comparisons, lifetime giving totals, and prior-year tax summaries all stay intact. You do not lose continuity when you switch platforms.

Yes. Importing your own data via CSV is free on every plan. Hands-on, done-for-you migration from another platform — where our team maps fields, imports historical gifts, and ports recurring schedules — is an optional one-time paid service, scoped to your data volume and source system, and it's included with Enterprise. Common source platforms include DonorPerfect, Bloomerang, Kindful, Little Green Light, Givebutter, Network for Good, Givelify, Tithe.ly, Planning Center Giving, and homegrown spreadsheets.

Yes — when the source platform uses Stripe, PayPal, or Authorize.Net, recurring schedules can be ported without re-asking donors for card details or restarting the schedule. We will walk you through the steps that depend on your source platform's export format.

Donors give through a donation page or an embeddable donation button on your website. The form is fully branded, mobile-optimized, and supports custom amounts, suggested presets, fund or campaign selection, optional cover-the-fees, tribute or memorial dedications, and one-time or recurring schedules.

Yes. The embeddable donation form is a small script you paste into any HTML page or CMS (WordPress, Squarespace, Webflow, Wix, Ghost, plain HTML). The donor never leaves your site and the form inherits your brand colors.

Through Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.Net combined: credit and debit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover), ACH bank transfers, eCheck, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal balance, Venmo, and bank-debit. Apple Pay and Google Pay via Stripe Payment Request Button are on the near-term roadmap as default-on for the donate page.

Yes. You can enable an optional checkbox on the donation form letting donors add the processing fee to their gift, so the full intended amount reaches your cause.

Yes. You can create unlimited campaigns and funds and configure a dedicated donation page or embed for each. Donations are then attributed to the right campaign and fund automatically in reports and receipts.

Yes. Tribute and memorial gifts are first-class: donors capture the dedication name and type at checkout, and the receipt and follow-up emails reflect the dedication.

Yes. Donors can choose monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, or annual schedules at checkout. Custom schedules are available where the gateway supports them.

DonorsBase automatically retries failed payments on a smart schedule and emails the donor a self-service link to update their card. Your team also sees failed payments on the dashboard and can follow up directly.

Yes — that is the donor portal. Donors log in, view their giving history and receipts, securely update their card or bank details, change the recurring amount, pause or resume the gift, or cancel — without contacting your office.

Yes. Donors can upgrade a recurring gift in one click from the donor portal, and your team can request an upgrade through campaign emails that link to a pre-filled change form.

Yes. Branded, IRS- and CRA-compliant receipts are emailed automatically the moment a donation settles. You can customize the from-name, from-address, subject line, and body copy.

At year-end you generate annual statements for every qualifying donor in one bulk action and email them out in minutes. Donors can also re-download the PDF themselves through the donor portal at any time.

Yes. Receipts and year-end summaries can be generated in US (IRS-compliant) or Canadian (CRA-compliant) format, with the appropriate charitable-status numbers and language.

Yes. From the donor portal, supporters can re-download any individual gift receipt or year-end summary themselves, eliminating the support burden on your office.

Each donor profile shows contact information, household and relationships, complete giving history with fund and campaign attribution, lifetime giving total, recurring schedules, communication history, tags, notes, and a chronological activity timeline. Custom fields are on the roadmap.

Yes. Households let you group spouses, families, or businesses so giving rolls up correctly and joint receipts can be issued to the right name.

Yes. Use tags, recency, frequency, fund interest, lifetime giving, or last-gift date to define segments. Segments power email campaigns, exports, and dashboards. Persisted smart segments shared across campaigns and journeys are on the roadmap.

Yes. The CSV importer suggests merges based on email, phone, and name overlap. You can also run a dedupe pass on the existing database from the donor list.

Yes. Donor and donation data is exportable to CSV at any time. We treat your data as yours, and donor portal supports per-donor export and erasure for GDPR-style requests.

Yes. Compose a campaign, point it at a segment, schedule, send, and report on opens, clicks, and conversions — without leaving DonorsBase.

Yes. Every email includes a one-click unsubscribe; the suppression list is enforced across all campaigns and transactional sends. This keeps you out of the spam folder and out of CAN-SPAM and CASL trouble.

Welcome and lapsed-donor flows are supported today. A general-purpose journey builder ('if X then Y' multi-step workflows) is in the Wave 2 roadmap.

Total raised, monthly recurring revenue (MRR), new donors, retained donors, year-over-year change, fund and campaign breakdowns, gateway breakdowns, LYBUNT (last year but unfortunately not this year), and SYBUNT (some year but unfortunately not this year). All filterable by date range and exportable.

Yes. Donations, payouts, refunds, and processing fees can sync to QuickBooks Online so the platform totals always tie out to the general ledger. A Stripe payout reconciliation report is on the roadmap.

Yes. Every administrative action — record edits, refunds, role changes, integration changes — is recorded with who did it and when. Audit logs have a configurable retention window and are SOC-friendly.

Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.Net are first-class and included on every plan. You can use one or all three simultaneously.

Yes. The QuickBooks Online integration syncs donations, payouts, refunds, and fees so your books match the platform without manual journal entries.

Yes. Push donor segments and donation data to Mailchimp without exporting CSVs, so your email tool always has fresh data.

A public, versioned REST API with API keys, plus signed outbound webhooks for events like donation.created and recurring.failed, is on the roadmap. Today, integrations work through the documented internal endpoints used by our own clients.

Card data is collected directly by the payment processor (Stripe, PayPal, or Authorize.Net) using their hosted fields or tokenization, so DonorsBase never sees or stores a primary account number (PAN). This dramatically reduces PCI scope for your organization.

Yes. DonorsBase is multi-tenant: each organization's donor and donation data is logically isolated and every database query is scoped to the tenant. We run automated checks that block tenant-scope leaks at code-review time.

Yes. TLS is enforced on every connection, the database is encrypted at rest, secrets are encrypted with a key-management service, passwords are hashed with a modern algorithm, and inbound webhooks from third parties are signature-verified.

DonorsBase supports the operational pieces required by GDPR and CCPA: donor data export, donor data erasure, suppression of marketing communications, and an audit log of administrative changes. Donor portal flows for self-service export and erasure are in active development.

Yes. Staff can enable TOTP-based two-factor authentication from Settings → Security. We recommend it for all organization administrators. SAML and OIDC SSO for staff are on the Wave 3 roadmap for enterprise customers.

Yes. A single login can manage many separate organizations — chapters, dioceses, foundations, schools — and switch between them instantly. Each organization's data stays cleanly separated.

Yes. Roles and granular permissions let you give finance read-only access to the books, give fundraisers donor-edit access, and give the board view-only dashboards.

Yes. Super-admins can impersonate a tenant user to help with a problem; every step taken under impersonation is recorded in the audit log with both the impersonator and the impersonated user identified.