Environmental Nonprofit Donation Software
Donation Software for Environmental Nonprofits and Land Trusts
Built for land trusts, watershed and river associations, friends-of-the-preserve groups, nature centers, conservancies, and environmental education nonprofits. Cloud Donor Manager brings online and in-person giving, events and auctions, peer-to-peer, grants, volunteers, marketing automation, and a donor CRM into one platform.
$0
Per month — one plan, every feature
0%
Platform fee — never a percentage of donations
Unlimited
Donors, users, records, campaigns, and reports
Track the people you serve, not just the people who fund you
This sector runs on annual member support and monthly sustainers, not one-off appeals — and the metric your board asks about is renewal rate. So the platform is built around keeping supporters, not just acquiring them. Recurring support renews automatically. Giving tier sets recognize your Friend, Steward, and Guardian levels and steward supporters by level. Households mean a couple who joined together counts once and gets one appeal. Segments and interest tags record who cares about the river, who cares about the trails, and who cares about one specific preserve.
The follow-up runs itself: multi-step journeys handle the welcome series, lapsed-donor win-backs, and recurring-gift upgrade asks, and the report library includes LYBUNT and SYBUNT (last-year-but-unfortunately-not-this-year and some-year-but-not-this-year), donor retention, and recurring-donor reports — the acronyms this audience already uses, on demand instead of on request.
The quiet killer is the expired card on a $10/month sustainer that nobody notices for four months. Declined recurring gifts retry automatically, with failed-recurring-payment reporting — and members update their own card or switch to ACH in a donor portal, without emailing the office.
Stewardship funds, acquisition funds, and the grant calendar
Money that arrives restricted
The stewardship endowment, the legal defence fund, the land acquisition campaign, the trail fund, the education program. Donors direct their gift to a specific fund, program, or campaign at the point of giving, against a managed fund list — so a designated gift stays designated. An acquisition campaign gets its own themed page with its own performance reporting.
Grants with deadlines
State open-space money, federal pass-throughs, private foundations — each with an interim and a final report date currently living in someone’s Outlook calendar. Grants are tracked end to end, application through award, reporting, and renewal, with grant reports and automated report reminders so deadlines never slip.
The board-facing layer sits on top of both: an executive dashboard, a custom report builder for the exact fund and campaign cuts you need, and scheduled reports emailed on a cadence — so the quarterly packet assembles itself. QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, and Xero sync, and a built-in general ledger view is the bridge to your bookkeeper.
Volunteer workdays, monitoring visits, and trail crews
A spring invasive-species pull. A trail crew. A tree planting, a river cleanup, a water-quality sampling round, docent shifts, a preserve open house. Conservation organizations run on workdays — and this is where most donor platforms have nothing.
- Public sign-up with no login required — the retiree who will never create an account still signs up
- Shifts built from templates, open shifts published, rosters managed, coverage auto-scheduled
- Volunteers claim, swap, and release shifts with staff approval and a full audit trail
- SMS confirmations and shift reminders — the Saturday workday cancelled for weather at 6am reaches everyone
- Geofence and GPS check-in verifies on-site presence; a time clock, time entries, and time reports capture the hours
- A live dispatch board re-assigns field staff and volunteers, and in-app announcements reach everyone at once
- Volunteers see their shifts, claim open ones, and request time off in the same portal donors use
Most donor databases charge by contact record, so organizations keep 800 volunteer records out of the system to avoid crossing a tier. Cloud Donor Manager doesn’t price your database by the record — a volunteer costs nothing to keep.
Taking gifts at the trailhead, the plant sale, and the preserve
Your revenue moments happen where the Wi-Fi doesn’t reach: a native plant sale in a parking lot, a festival booth in a park, a preserve open house, a nature-center front desk, a trailhead table.
Card readers & tap to phone
Countertop and mobile readers work in the field with tap-to-pay, and tap to phone turns a staff or volunteer phone into a giving device — you can’t hand ten terminals to weekend volunteers, but they already have phones.
Kiosks for the visitor center
Self-serve giving with a customer-facing display and preset amounts for the lobby.
Point of sale, same deposit
Plants, trail maps, admission, and merchandise sell alongside gifts on the same account and the same deposit — the plant-sale day stops splitting across a card reader, a cash box, and the donation page.
Offline capture
When the signal drops, gifts keep coming — transactions are held on the device and complete when you’re back online. Receipts can be texted to the donor on the spot.
Everything — online, in-person, kiosk, and point of sale — lands in one ledger, so there is nothing to manually match up between systems afterward. Text-to-Give works the same moments: publish a keyword and short code, supporters text to give, and the gift and the donor record are captured automatically — the ask at the end of a guided bird walk, from a festival stage, or on a trailhead sign, with carrier registration handled for you. See our Text-to-Give page for the full picture, including consent and opt-in tracking.
The December play: matching gifts, challenges, and giving days
A large share of environmental donors work for employers with matching-gift programs, and most of that money is never claimed because nobody asks. Here, employer matching-gift requests are captured with automatic employer lookup from a catalog, and donors submit and track their own match requests from the portal — the follow-up stops depending on your memory.
The year-end push has its tools in the same place: match challenges run the “your gift doubled until midnight” pattern with searchable challenge management, and giving days run a time-boxed push with a public page and live goal tracking — Earth Day, a state giving day, Giving Tuesday. Corporate partners are handled properly too: sponsor records and sponsorship agreements with attachments, a dedicated sponsorship report, and e-signature for contracts.
The annual dinner, the auction, and the bird-a-thon
The annual meeting and hike, the harvest dinner, the birding festival, the paddle event, the preserve dedication — event pages sell tickets by type with the full checkout online, check-in and rosters run from a phone or tablet at a venue with no counter, and promo codes handle member pricing and early-bird. The auction of guided trips, cabin stays, local art, and native plants runs in the same system, with online items and real-time bidding.
No separate auction vendor, and no separate donor list to merge afterward — the bidder is already in the CRM.
And the events this sector invented — the bird-a-thon, hike-a-thon, and paddle-a-thon — run on peer-to-peer: personal fundraiser pages, team fundraising, and team leaderboards, with teams competing all season.
Receipts, year-end summaries, and the donors who want no publicity
Every completed donation triggers an instant, branded receipt with the required “no goods or services were provided” disclosure language included automatically. Recurring supporters are thanked automatically each time their gift processes, and year-end giving summaries generate in bulk.
Two things this sector needs that generic tools treat as edge cases: anonymous giving, for the landowner or easement donor who wants no public acknowledgement — the gift stays private on receipts and public records; and tribute and memorial gifts with a personal message and optional notification to a loved one, for the memorial grove, the bench, the tree planting.
For the meaningful share of your donor base that will never give online, branded direct-mail letters generate and print for the mailbox — and the reporting layer (the donor report library, ROI by campaign, the executive dashboard) covers what the board asks for at the annual meeting.
What it costs, and why there is no catch
The grant calendar usually lives in a spreadsheet and one person’s phone reminders — and it leaves when that person leaves.
$0
Per month — one plan, every feature
0%
Platform fee — no percentage of donations
Unlimited
Donors, users, records, campaigns, receipts, and reports
$0 per month — one plan, every feature, for every nonprofit. 0% platform fee — no percentage of donations is ever taken. Donors, users, records, campaigns, receipts, and reports stay unlimited, with no premium modules, hidden thresholds, or enterprise-only tools. And the free plan is unconditional — it is free for all organizations, not just Host Merchant Services merchants.
The catch you are looking for: payment processing sustains the platform, so we do not need to charge nonprofits a subscription or take a cut of gifts. Donors can opt in to cover the processing cost of their own gift with a single checkbox; when a donor doesn’t, only the standard card processing cost applies to that gift — there is still no platform fee and no monthly charge. The full pricing detail is published.
Bringing your member and gift history across
Guided CSV import with automatic field mapping, managed migration batches, an import history — and an undo if something looks wrong afterward. The undo is the point: starting doesn’t have to be a leap.
1
Guided CSV import
Bring the member and gift history you already rely on.
2
Automatic field mapping
Match imported information to its right destination.
3
Managed batches
Move records in controlled stages with import history.
4
Undo if needed
Step back when something does not look right afterward.
QuickBooks Online
QuickBooks Desktop
Xero
Salesforce
HubSpot
Mailchimp
Slack
Google Calendar
Dropbox
A full REST API, signed webhooks, and embeddable widgets support anything else — including a connection your own IT can build to whatever system already holds your parcel or stewardship records.
What Cloud Donor Manager is not
Your fundraising, supporter, and volunteer system
Not a Records System
It does not hold conservation easement records, baseline documentation, parcel boundaries, or GIS mapping.
Not Accounting
It is not your accounting system, though it syncs with QuickBooks and Xero.
Not Impact Tracking
It does not track conservation outcomes or acreage.
Organizations keep those systems — and connect them by API where they want to.
Your Questions, Answered
Is it really free for a land trust of our size?
Yes. $0 per month, one plan, every feature, for every nonprofit — free permanently, not free-for-now or free-until-you-grow. Donors, users, records, campaigns, receipts, and reports stay unlimited.
Can we track membership renewals?
Yes — through recurring gifts that renew automatically, giving tiers, retention and LYBUNT/SYBUNT reports, and lapsed-member win-back journeys. There is no separate membership module; renewal work runs on the recurring-giving and reporting tools.
Can we manage volunteer workdays in the same system?
Yes. Public sign-up with no login, shifts from templates, claim-swap-release with staff approval and an audit trail, SMS reminders, GPS check-in, time reports, and a live dispatch board all ship with the platform.
Does it handle restricted gifts like a stewardship fund?
Donors designate gifts to a specific fund, program, or campaign against a managed fund list, and reporting follows the designation. It is not a fund-accounting system — it syncs with QuickBooks and Xero, where your books live.
Will our donor list size ever increase the price?
No. Cloud Donor Manager doesn’t price your database by the record — we don’t charge more as your donor list grows, which is also why your volunteers belong in the database, not outside it.
One system for the members, the workdays, the funds, and the gala
Consolidate the donor CRM, the volunteer scheduler, the event ticketing, and the auction tool into one platform — before the next renewal invoice, not after.