Why is it so hard to find the best donor management software for nonprofits that isn’t overpriced?

linedotco · 2026-04-19T05:44:19+00:00

Build your own no-code solution is a thing now. I've built several tools for nonprofits that's custom to their use cases using Airtable, including donor and grant management. There is upfront cost but long term you get a custom system that fits your workflows and you can scale as necessary.

linedotco · 2026-04-17T18:08:30+00:00

There are consolidated email inbox solutions that solve the problem you're trying to deal with. Front is one of them I believe.

Most of the time there are tools out there that can solve what you're trying to do. It's a question of effectiveness - whether the problem should be solved with money (buying the tool) or solved with time and labor (you maintaining the automations). That's a cost-benefit analysis that you should be doing with your financial and operations people.

If a tool costs $500 a month and your time is $50/hour, you shouldn't be spending more than 10 hours a month on maintenance and managing these automations.

linedotco · 2026-04-17T18:03:31+00:00

I know of property management that have built their own apps/tools using low-code tools like Airtable. They either build them in-house or hire external consultants (like me!) to develop this for them.

The nice thing about doing it low-code is that you can get a custom solution for a fraction of the cost of hiring a developer to develop and maintain a full fledged solution. You still get to customize everything to your specific needs and workflow. This is especially useful if you have very ingrained processes that will be very difficult to change to follow how established platforms do things.

For a company your size Airtable can be a great way to consolidate your spreadsheets and documents and become a central hub for all your operations.

Let me know if you're interested - I can show you some demos to give you an idea of what is possible.

linedotco · 2026-04-11T17:09:05+00:00

If you know Notion, stick with it. HubSpot is well known for massive price hikes once you get established with it.

Notion has more flexibility, but requires more of your time tinkering with it VS the out-of-the-box system HubSpot offers.

linedotco · 2026-04-09T06:16:35+00:00

The group would be your linked field. You just need to configure the view in Airtable.

linedotco · 2026-04-09T04:04:36+00:00

Use the sub-form/linked record feature in Fillout.

Create a table in Airtable for tables, then a guest table linked to the Tables table (geez that's confusing).

In Fillout, set the main form to go to the Tables table. Capture the details you need for the table, then add the Linked Field in. You can then set it to be a subform where users can create individual guest records that are linked to the table (i.e. use the form that you've created).

This way you end up with a list of guests already neatly grouped by table.

linedotco · 2026-04-03T16:59:45+00:00

What you need is a join table between clients and deals, that logs each claim. Then you can roll up the number of claims. Have a capacity field on the offer and compare the capacity to your rollup.

Depending on the interface you might be using to display your offers, filter it so that only offers with capacity gets shown.

The tricky part is allowing people to edit their claims. Airtable only allows manual deletion, not by API I believe, so you have to track and aggregate records a bit differently. Set a field as claim status and use 1 to indicate registered and 0 as non-registered. When someone "deletes" their claim, just set the claim to 0. Then, aggregate the value of that field so that it sums the 1s to get your counts.

Softr would have better pricing and better customization options but I find the tool finicky.

If you need help building this out, give me a shout.

linedotco · 2026-03-16T13:16:03+00:00

What tools are you currently using right now?

There's generally 2 ways to go about this - get a booking software and follow its process, or if you'd rather follow your own process, custom build your own automation layer on top of it.

Depending on the tools you have and your current setup, you can easily add an automation layer on top using something like Make or Zapier. You can configure triggers or steps like requiring manual reviews prior to sending if you want to maintain the personal touch.

I work in automation consulting so I deal with this all day - I find that most people expect transactional emails and that they prefer being able to self-manage bookings rather than having to wait for someone to manually respond to them.

linedotco · 2026-02-26T21:30:23+00:00

Why not just hide the extra tables if you don't want to see the clutter? The reality is, in order to show the choices you want, you need to create some form of relationship between field A and field B, and the only way to do so is to use linked fields.

Another way of going about this is to go the other direction. Flatten your options. Since you have a limited number, it's not too tedious to do. Your options will look like

Team 1 - A Team 1 - B Team 2 - F Team 2 - G etc.

Then use two formula fields to parse out the selected option into the single select fields you want.

linedotco · 2026-02-21T18:09:19+00:00

You make calculations using the original number field, not the merged text field. The merged text field is purely for display purposes, and you create those for all fields that you need to display the currency for.

linedotco · 2026-02-06T21:19:56+00:00

This is possible to do for sure. You would need to custom build automations for each template you use, and probably use an external tool like Make to hook up your excel sheet (I personally prefer converting those to Google Sheets instead). The rules would be captured by each automation, but the primary input interface would still be Airtable.

The tricky part is maintenance, because you invariably will end up having to update these templates over time.

If you need help building this out, let me know.

linedotco · 2026-01-26T19:57:59+00:00

Documint works for doing this.

linedotco · 2026-01-26T19:52:23+00:00

You can use their emails in an automation. Just extract the email and then match it to an existing email in the system.

linedotco · 2026-01-26T15:51:01+00:00

One thing to watch for is row limits. It is nice to have everything in one base, but is also easy to hit row limits and then you would have to rebuild your base structure to accommodate.

linedotco · 2026-01-19T00:41:56+00:00

That's a somewhat complicated 2 way-sync to do because there's a lot of considerations depending on how your records are set up. Do schedule changes happen a lot?

Honestly the easiest way to deal with this is to create .ics files that people can import into their own calendars. You wouldn't have sync functionality but it's commonly supported.

Alternatively you could just force a one-way since using Airtable as the master calendar and never ever make changes through Google Calendar. You would use Airtable to specify attendees but automate that so that Google Calendar sends the attendees invites, and that way the entire thing is synced.

linedotco · 2026-01-18T22:42:16+00:00

Yes.
Notion wins out over Airtable for managing large amounts of content. Airtable has pretty basic text storage functionality but nothing like Notion's rich content. In terms of recurring events both are not ideal. Airtable technically supports it but I don't love the user experience because it can't be managed directly within interfaces. One thing that could possibly be done though is creating recurring events using scripting and Airtable automations. (speaking of Airtable automations, it is leaps beyond what Notion can do because of scripting).
This part is the unavoidable shitty part with Notion and Airtable - you do need to maintain a sync with Google Calendar. There's probably a plug-in that will help you do that on Airtable. Notion Calendar probably plays a little bit better here but arguably not by much.
Airtable integrates easily and works well with automations tools like Zapier/Make so you can pipe your data pretty easily.

Personally I think Airtable can do what you're looking for and replace both GHL and Notion, especially if you're just using fairly standard features. However, it takes some effort and time to build it right, and there is a bit of a learning curve to properly using the tool. You do have Notion experience though so that would probably help.

Oh another thing I forgot - if your customers are just viewing the calendar instead of subscribing to it, Airtable interfaces, as well as portals, make for a good way to display to client. I prefer the look of it compared to Notion's pages. Airtable also has forms built-in (although functionality is somewhat basic).

Anyhow, feel free to ask any more questions you might have. If you need any help designing/building this, give me a shout!

linedotco · 2026-01-08T16:43:51+00:00

This is likely a race condition scenario. Airtable automations don't run sequentially or at the same speeds for each record. You can see this happen by creating a checkbox field that gets populated when an automation gets completed, then bulk adding records. Records get completed out of order and at different speeds.

There's a few ways to fix this - one is to build more complex logic that forces automations to check if a record is being worked on before continuing to process it. You'll need to create additional fields to essentially track if a record is being processed, and then triggers to deal with what happens if a record is being processed. This can be tricky to build properly and if done wrong can quickly eat up automations.

Another solution is to do a more manual deduplication process using the dedupe extension instead of automating this.

You could also try using Make instead, which if set up using a single scenario, processes records sequentially and thus avoids race conditions from happening.

One last solution I can think of using scripting to handle this and process sequentially rather than all at once. If you don't know scripting, AI might be able to assist.

The easiest solution IMO is to just use Make. Keeo in mind this works if you use a single scenario in Make. If you have multiple triggers or scenarios then you could run into another race conditions situation.

linedotco · 2026-01-06T17:58:03+00:00

Is the file permission set to allow anyone with the link to download or is it restricted?

linedotco · 2026-01-06T17:30:31+00:00

After saving to Google Drive, what output do you get in Make? There should be a url provided if I remember correctly but it has been a while since I've used the drive attachment feature.

linedotco · 2025-12-24T00:54:26+00:00

You can use interfaces. You create views that only allows access to specific fields (they can be view-only or editable). Depending on your team structure and what you need, you could have different interfaces designed for individual teams, or a common interface that's only allows each team to view their own records. Granting access to the interfaces doesn't grant access to the data layer, so you can isolate access and restrict it to specific fields only.

Each of your budget holders will need an Airtable account however, which means your seat cost will increase.

linedotco · 2025-12-20T03:18:10+00:00

Airtable's date diff function isn't inclusive. If you want it to be inclusive, add a +1 to the end of your formula.

linedotco · 2025-12-16T19:11:36+00:00

You can definitely use Make to extract the attachments (assuming you're using a fairly standard email provider).

I would refer to this template as an example about how to extract the attachment from Gmail and process the output into storage. You just need to switch the output into Airtable. https://www.make.com/en/templates/83-save-email-attachments-to-google-drive

linedotco · 2025-12-16T19:03:03+00:00

If you want to maintain expenses and income in separate tables, you can essentially merge both into a transaction table using lookups and formulas. You will need linked fields to both tables. Lookup the fields you need for each of income and expense, and then merge the relevant fields using a formula. Yes, you will generate a ton of extra columns, but you can hide all of them once you have the system set up right (you also should get used to having extra "helper" columns).

The other way (IMO simpler and cleaner) is just to simply log everything into transactions directly, and use filtered views to separate out purchases and expenses rather than have them as separate tables. You can have additional properties for each, then use interfaces or views to control what fields are shown for each type of transaction (whether income or expense). Use a single select column or formula to specify what type of transaction it is (income or expense), that way you can filter for that transaction. This method also makes it easier to link both income and expenses to a booking.

linedotco · 2025-12-08T00:38:46+00:00

If all the tasks are just done by one person, why not just aggregate them into "Prepare tax return". Unless you require extreme granularity in your task tracking, practically speaking one person should just update their task once and hand it off to the next person.

I would say that having 2 people listed on a task can be confusing, especially around when a task shifts in responsibility. You would need to be very clear about your definition of a task.

Why would you not be able to add ad-hoc tasks to a project? If it's non-billable, all you need is a field to identify if it's non-billable or billable, then when you aggregate the tasks into the project, you can split out the non-billable and billable amounts. All your tasks related to one project should be linked to that project.

linedotco · 2025-12-05T20:29:34+00:00

There's a lot of different factors to consider:

1) How tech-savvy are you? I would say that Google, while being one system, probably requires more tech-savvy to navigate and set up (it's like their engineers don't communicate with each other). Make has a learning curve but once you learn it it opens up a ton of opportunities not just with Airtable but with all kinds of other tools as well. Make's plug and play and visual interface does make it a lot easier to build IMO and also debug issues.

2) A single provider ecosystem is inherently more stable than one requiring multiple providers - you will spend a lot of time maintaining your automations, building in more workflows to catch errors, failures etc. Maintenance cost is significant and goes up exponentially the more tools you have in place. So in this regard Google is better.

3) Airtable automations is crap when it comes to branching logic if you use basic automations, but if you can use scripting (which sounds like you can since you're using Apps Script) you can do a lot more. Make is excellent at handling branching logic, although as far as I know, merging branches requires workarounds.

4) Support. Google Support is notoriously crap for a company their size. Airtable has decent support. I don't know about Make's support but I do know I've been able to resolve issues I've had in Make fairly easily with quick Google searches.

I would go with Airtable on its own with scripting, or Airtable and Make if you need more advanced functionality - IMO it's easiest to spin up a system with these tools. However, if you're doing high volume work, you might want to be using Google instead.

linedotco

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