I’m in the process of building a website for a non-profit that supports local youth athletics. We’re going to sell merch, camp sign-ups, and sponsorships on the site. Ideally, we would be able to keep track of parents, players, and sponsors, as well as collect logos from sponsors that could be used in various places depending on the type of sponsorship that they’ve purchased. Sponsorships will likely be done through some kind of membership plugin on the site like MemberPress or through a combination of a product and some custom fields tied to their user account, depending on what works the best. Haven’t decided on that yet, but I know it needs to be updatable by the user through the site.

So far, I have the design built through Breakdance Builder and have the store started in WooCommerce. I’ve also connected our existing Square account to WooCommerce (But the main store/inventory will be WooCommerce). I’m looking to bridge the gap between WooCommerce and WorkSpace, as well as having all of the relationship notes and such that a CRM offers. We will likely be handling a lot of communications through Workspace and Workspace groups, as well as storing files in Google Drive, mainly because Google is more familiar and Workspace is free for non-profits. The majority of people in our non-profit aren’t the most tech savvy, and the CRM will only be given to the few who have more know-how, with everyone else piggybacking off of the contacts we collect. It would be nice if everything could sync up with Workspace, though I’m sure that can also be acheived through Zappier on a lot of CRMs. It doesn’t need to do it all, I’m also good with something that gets us close enough that I can bridge the gap with other tools.

I did see the suggestion for Salesforce for non-profits on an earlier post and have started looking into that. 10 free licenses is really generous, and I was wondering are there any caveats that I should be aware of? I’ve also started looking at Copper since their whole thing seems to be integrating with Workspace, though they cost more due to Salesforce giving 10 free licenses. I really do like Copper’s interface better though, and they seem easier to use. I’ve seen GiveWP as well, though I’m not sure if that goes far enough, but it does do recurring donations and is on the cheaper end which is nice. I’ve also thought about the possibility of just using Zappier + Sheets + Contacts + Appsheet, though I’m not sure how well that would work, and it would take a lot more time to get going even if it’s cheap. It’s hard to find pricing advice since a lot of it doesn’t apply the same to non-profits due to the discounts so many CRMs kindly offer, and the free versions often don’t have the integrations we need. Our non-profit currently only makes ~$5,000/yr total, so it can’t cost too much, though part of the point of the CRM is to get more sponsors to raise more money.

I guess I’m mainly looking for opinions, and I’m fully open to suggestions. I have a lot of general ideas on how everything should work, but not enough experience to know what CRMs will work the most cohesively and be easy to use for a low price. I don’t want to inadvertently start some kind of frankenstein setup.