Nonprofit · App Starter
Donor CRM Template
A complete donor database — gifts, campaigns, pledges, segments — generated into code your nonprofit owns outright.
Describe your organization and how it raises money, and Dual7 generates the donor CRM around it: six connected entities, a clean giving ledger, and the segment and reminder machinery that retention runs on. No per-record pricing, no contact caps — the database is yours, at any size.
- 6 core entities
- No per-record pricing
- Code you own
- Vibe + Governed modes
01 · Data model
What's inside: the data model
Fundraising is a memory business: who gave, when, to what, and who lapsed quietly. Six entities hold that memory, and every ledger, report, and reminder below reads from them — in a database your organization controls.
| table | what it holds |
|---|---|
donors | People and organizations who give — contact details, giving history, relationships, and communication preferences in one record. |
donations | Every gift with amount, date, campaign, method, and restriction status — the ledger the annual report is built from. |
campaigns | Appeals and initiatives with goals, dates, and progress — so results are compared by campaign, not reconstructed by month. |
pledges | Committed future giving with schedules and balances — the promises that quietly become your most reliable revenue when tracked. |
volunteers | Supporters who give time, with skills, availability, and hours — because your volunteers are your warmest donor prospects. |
segments | Saved donor slices — lapsed, monthly, major-gift prospects — that drive appeals and are always current, never a stale export. |
02 · Screens
Signature modules
Donation ledger
01Every gift recorded once, visible everywhere: on the donor's record, in the campaign's progress, and in the ledger the treasurer reconciles. Restricted and unrestricted gifts are distinguished at entry, which is exactly when it's cheap to get right.
Campaign progress
02Each campaign shows raised-versus-goal, gift count, and average gift as it happens, with donor lists one click deep. Year-end totals stop being a December spreadsheet project — the number is simply there.
Pledge reminders
03Pledges carry schedules, and the system surfaces what's due, what's late, and who needs a gentle note. Organizations routinely lose real money to untracked pledges; this module is the difference between a commitment and a hope.
Donor segments
04Segments are saved queries over your live data — first-time donors this quarter, monthly givers, anyone lapsed twelve months. Pull a mailing list in seconds and it's current by construction, because it's your database answering, not an export aging in a folder.
03 · Process
How it works
- 1You
Describe how you fundraise
Annual appeals or monthly giving, events or grants, one chapter or ten — tell Dual7 how money and volunteers actually arrive. The entities are standard; the emphasis becomes yours.
- 2Vibe mode
Adjust it in Vibe mode
Shape the generated CRM conversationally: add a soft-credit field, an in-kind gift type, a board-member flag on donors. Every adjustment is a readable change to your own code.
- 3Governed mode
Launch through the governed pipeline
Deploy with approvals and an audit trail onto infrastructure you choose. Your donor list — the most valuable file a nonprofit has — lives in your database from the first gift.
04 · Fit
Who the Donor CRM starter is for
Development directors leaving the spreadsheet
The giving spreadsheet works until the second campaign or the first staff transition. This starter keeps the simplicity — rows you can see and query — and adds what the spreadsheet can't: pledges that remind, segments that stay current, and history that survives handovers.
Small nonprofits priced out of donor software
Donor platforms price by contacts, so growing your list — the entire point of fundraising — raises your software bill. Generated code has no meter. A thousand donors or fifty thousand costs the same: whatever your hosting costs.
Grassroots organizations that own their supporter data
For advocacy and community groups, the supporter list is trust made tangible. Holding it in your own database — not a vendor's cloud, subject to a vendor's policies — is both a security posture and a promise kept to the people on it.
Federated organizations with chapters
National-plus-chapters structures strain per-org pricing and per-org databases alike. One codebase with chapter scoping gives each chapter its donors and the national office its rollup — deployed once, owned once.
05 · Yours
Customize it, own it
Make it yours
Make it match how your organization actually raises. Add soft credits so a board member's introductions are visible in the record, in-kind gift types with fair-value fields, tribute and memorial designations, or grant tracking alongside individual giving. Acknowledgment letters can generate from gift data with your templates — receipts that go out the same day the gift lands.
Heavier extensions are ordinary work on a codebase you own: an online donation page writing straight into the ledger, a payment-processor integration for monthly giving, a wealth-screening import for major-gift research. There's no app marketplace and no per-integration fee — and no runtime dependency on Dual7 once you're live.
Why a starter, not a subscription
A nonprofit's donor database is its institutional memory — often the only asset that outlasts staff, board, and strategy. Renting that memory is a strange arrangement: per-record pricing that taxes growth, export limits between you and your own history, and a vendor's roadmap deciding what your fundraising can do. This starter generates the database and every screen over it as source code your organization holds.
Owned code also spends better in front of a board. Software line items become hosting costs; the money saved on subscriptions is program money; and when the auditor or a major funder asks where donor data lives and who can touch it, the answer is specific and short. Dual7's governed pipeline keeps changes disciplined — approvals and an audit trail — which is precisely the control environment stewardship implies.
06 · Industries
Industry versions
Donor CRM template — frequently asked questions
What does the donor CRM template include?
A working fundraising database generated into code you own: donors, donations, campaigns, pledges, volunteers, and segments, with the giving ledger, campaign progress views, pledge reminders, and always-current segment lists built over them.
Is there per-contact or per-record pricing?
No — that model belongs to rented software. You own the generated codebase; the database grows with your list at no additional software cost. The economics finally point the right way: a bigger donor file is purely good news.
Can it send tax receipts and acknowledgment letters?
Gift data carries everything a receipt needs — amount, date, donor, deductibility — and generating acknowledgments from your own templates is a natural Vibe-mode addition. Year-end summary statements per donor are a query over your ledger away.
Does it handle recurring and monthly giving?
Recurring commitments fit the pledge structure — schedule, expected amount, balance — and each processed gift records against it. Wire in your payment processor and monthly giving reconciles itself instead of consuming the first week of the month.
Can we import donors from our current system or spreadsheet?
Yes — the schema is a plain relational model, so donor and gift exports map directly into the donors and donations tables. Messy legacy data is the norm in this migration; owning the schema means the cleanup happens in your code, on your timeline.
Does it track volunteers too?
Volunteers are a core entity, with skills, availability, and hours — and they're linked to donor records, because time-givers are your likeliest next money-givers. For full shift scheduling and program management, pair it with the volunteer management starter.
Related
Dual7 App Starters
Build your Donor CRM on your terms
A complete donor database — gifts, campaigns, pledges, segments — generated into code your nonprofit owns outright. Describe your version to start — the output is a project you own.