Free CRM for nonprofits. Built into your fundraising.

Is Zeffy actually a CRM, and does it work for a small nonprofit or a large one?

Yes, and it's the same CRM either way. Every supporter gets a profile that fills itself in: their giving history, the events they've attended, their membership status, the emails you've sent them and whether they opened them, plus any notes and lists you add. Nothing to configure first and no database background needed, which matters when the person looking after donor data is also the person running the campaign.

For a larger organization the argument isn't simplicity, it's that nothing changes as you grow, and the tools a bigger team needs are already in there. Group families into households and see their combined giving, roll everyone who gives from the same employer into one company profile, track pledges, log offline checks, add your colleagues with their own permissions. An organization with 40,000 contacts pays what an organization with 300 pays.

Email works the same way. You can reach 30,000 people a day from your own domain, or 5,000 without one, and confirmation and thank-you emails don't count against that. Mailchimp and Constant Contact both charge by the size of your contact list, so the same audience costs you more every year it grows.

Is Zeffy's donor CRM really free?

Free means the whole product, not a starter tier. No subscription, no per-contact pricing, no transaction fees and no credit card fees. Nothing is held back behind an upgrade either, so the CRM you're using in year three is the one you started with on day one. The full breakdown is on our pricing page.

Zeffy is free to your organization with no conditions attached. Separately, anyone paying through a Zeffy checkout is offered the option to add a voluntary contribution, and they're free to skip it. The one thing you can ever pay Zeffy for is postage: if you use Donor Mail to send printed letters, those are $1 each.

How many donor contacts can I store for free?

There's no contact limit, and no paid contact tier, so the size of your list never changes your price. Add every donor, every ticket buyer, every member and every lapsed supporter from ten years ago, and it still costs nothing.

That's the opposite of how most donor CRMs work. Their subscription is calculated from the size of your database, which quietly turns your own growth into a bigger invoice and nudges teams into deleting records to stay in a band. Keep everyone. The history is what makes a lapsed-donor appeal or a year-over-year comparison possible later.

Can I import my existing contacts and donation history?

Yes, both, using two templates: one for contacts and one for payment history. If your list lives in Mailchimp you can connect the account and pull your contacts straight across instead. Contacts bring over first and last name, email, language, full address, phone, notes, lists and company name. The payment import carries each past gift and attaches it to the right contact, creating the contact if they're new. Each file holds up to 15,000 records, so a large database comes over in a few batches.

Email is how Zeffy identifies a contact, so tidying your addresses before you upload prevents most duplicates. If some get through anyway, Zeffy flags the likely ones and you compare them side by side and merge, choosing which details to keep.

One thing to plan before you cancel anything: recurring donations can't be transferred from another platform. Card credentials don't move between providers, so monthly donors and auto-renewing members need to start their recurring gift again on a Zeffy form. Most organizations run both platforms for one cycle and email their recurring donors to move across.

Can I segment donors and email a specific segment?

Yes, and the filters are the useful part. Segment by campaign, lifetime amount given, date of a transaction, whether someone is a recurring donor, membership, a manual list, a note, language, location or company. Stack as many as you like and choose whether a contact has to match all of them or any one of them, then save the result as a list and email it from the same screen.

In practice that looks like: everyone who has given more than $500 lifetime but nothing in the past year, for a lapsed-donor appeal. Monthly donors in one city, for a regional thank-you. Everyone who bought a gala ticket last year and hasn't this year, three weeks before the event. No exporting to a spreadsheet and no reuploading anywhere else.

Can I manage donations, event attendees and members from the same contact record?

Yes, and it happens without anyone entering it. Any donation, ticket, store purchase, membership signup or peer-to-peer page creates that person's profile or updates the one you already have, from what they entered at checkout. Someone who gave in December, bought two gala tickets in April and renewed a family membership in June is one record carrying all of it, alongside every email you've sent them and any notes your team has added.

You can group records too. Households put family members together so you see their combined giving and thank them once, at one address. Companies do the same for everyone giving from the same employer, matched on their email domain. Zeffy will even suggest a grouping when it notices contacts sharing a last name and a state. Offline gifts live in the same place: log a check or a cash donation against the contact and it sits next to their online giving.

How is Zeffy different from Bloomerang or DonorPerfect?

Start with the bill. Bloomerang CRM starts at $125 a month billed annually, and its fundraising tools are another $40 a month that has to be bundled with the CRM; volunteer management is a separate product again. Bloomerang describes its own model as "constituent-based pricing", so the subscription follows the size of your database. DonorPerfect starts at $99 a month across three tiers, with Plus and Pro quoted on request. Zeffy's CRM is $0 at any list size, with no transaction fees on top.

What you give up is less than the price gap suggests. You get contact profiles that populate themselves from every campaign, stacked filters saved as lists, households and companies with combined giving, duplicate detection with side-by-side merging, pledge tracking, offline gift logging and email from the same screen as your data. What you don't get is a field-mapping project before you can use any of it.

"The learning curve was pretty insane for a small nonprofit with no experience in databases."

A development director, on the CRM she moved away from

Current detail on Zeffy vs Bloomerang and Zeffy vs DonorPerfect.

Does Zeffy connect to tools like Mailchimp or QuickBooks?

QuickBooks connects natively and it's free. Map each campaign to an income account once, and every payout arrives already broken down by campaign or fund, with Zeffy emailing you if a sync ever fails. Four things a treasurer should know: the sync is one way, so changes in QuickBooks don't come back to Zeffy; it starts from the day you switch it on rather than backfilling your history; refunds don't sync, so those stay a journal entry on your side; and it posts one deposit per payout rather than individual transactions. Setup is on the QuickBooks integration page.

Mailchimp is a different question, because for most nonprofits Zeffy replaces it rather than connecting to it, though you can connect your Mailchimp account to bring your contacts over when you switch. Your contacts are already here, so you build newsletters from templates, schedule them, send to a saved segment and track opens and clicks without exporting a list or paying for a second tool. Mailchimp's free plan stops at 250 contacts and 500 emails a month and can't accept a donation, and its paid plans start at $13 a month and climb as your list grows. Side by side on Zeffy vs Mailchimp.

Anything else connects through Zapier, Salesforce included, along with around a thousand other tools. There's also a Zeffy API with read access to payments, contacts and campaigns that you switch on from your dashboard, plus outbound webhooks that fire when a payment completes.

Can I add custom fields for things like a birthday or how someone prefers to be contacted?

Yes. Custom contact properties let you store what matters to your organization beyond name and email, in a format that fits: text, number, phone, email, date, yes or no, or a single or multi-select list. Create one under Manage contact properties and it appears on every contact in your database. You can also reuse it as a question on your fundraising forms, so it fills itself in when someone checks out instead of being typed in later.

Two practical notes. Custom properties are still rolling out, so if you don't see them on your contacts yet they're on the way. And you can't report on custom answers yet: they show on the contact record and come through on a contact export, but they can't be filtered or grouped inside a report. If you need to segment on something today, a contact's Notes or a list will both do it, since both are filter types.