Free Stuff for Nonprofits
Below is a list of free resources that we think are helpful to nonprofits. We’ve tested each of the resources in this list and use most of them. In some cases we’ve chosen not to include resources that have free trials, or if the free version is so limited that it won’t be useful to you. Feel free to leave a comment if you have questions about an item, or if we missed something - we update this page regularly.
Table of Contents
Free Project Management Software
Free Domain Hosting and Website Analytics
Free CRM (Customer Relationship Manager)
Free Training and Continuing Education
Free Money
Venmo Charities Profile
Venmo allows nonprofits to create a charity profile and receive donations from users. This is a free way of increasing visibility to your nonprofit on a platform where they’re already prepared to give. To do this, you’ll have to create a free Venmo business account.
Candid’s Foundation Directory
Formerly Foundation Center and GuideStar, Candid is a capacity building organization that helps nonprofits. They have an extensive foundation and grants database that typically costs money to access. Clicking the above link to the Candid website will let you search to see if a public library near you has access to Candid’s Funding Information Network (FIN). This is a great (free) way of viewing what financial resources might be available to your organization.
Free Tech
TechSoup
TechSoup serves as a hub for free and discounted software and hardware, among other services. It’s a good place to start whenever you have a tech need, like free licenses to Adobe, or discounted computers. TechSoup is also a technology partner with Google for Nonprofits, so setting up a TechSoup account can help get access to certain Google products. TechSoup offers free services, like a digital assessment tool, remote tech support, and website assessments and consultations.
Free Project Management Software
Trello
Trello is a project management tool used for visualizing and managing work. It’s really easy to use, think of it like a much more advanced version of a to do list. It also has options for automation, and integration with other tools like Slack or Teams.
Monday.com
Monday.com is a project management tool (they’re pretty intense about saying they’re more than a project management tool) that lets users visualize work, assign tasks, and to some degree customize the platform to suit their needs. Monday.com has a steeper learning curve than Trello, but it also has more functionality. They offer 10 free licenses to qualified nonprofits.
Free Google Products
Google for Nonprofits
Before getting into specific Google products, we’re going to mention Google for Nonprofits. Google for Nonprofits offers a host of tools after registering your nonprofit and creating an account. The best way to approach getting access to the products below is by starting with a Google for Nonprofits account. Google for Nonprofits uses TechSoup to verify your nonprofit’s status, another reason why creating a TechSoup account is important.
Google Workspace
Google offers free licenses of Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Chat, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and Sites to nonprofits. All of these tools are helpful for many different business operations.
Google Ad Grant
Google gives qualified nonprofits $10,000 per month in free ad credits. This is a huge help in driving traffic to your site. Ads you create will appear above organic search results on Google’s search engine results page. There are some limitations for nonprofits and some upkeep is required, but it’s absolutely worth it.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics tracks metrics about your website visitors behavior to help you understand how people are using your website. Understanding what’s happening on your website from an end user’s perspective is the first step in designing a good experience for them. The tool is relatively easy to use and has dashboards that visualize information for you.
Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager is one step further down the analytics rabbit hole. If the standard tracking from Google Analytics doesn’t provide you enough information about what users are doing on your website, you can use Google Tag Manager to create custom “tags”. Think of these tags as sensors that you’re putting all over your website. Custom tags can be almost anything you’re interested in knowing about user behavior, like how far down a page people scroll, or how many people download a file.
Free Website Builders
For a more detailed review of different nonprofit website options, check out this ranking from Website Planet, or this one from DonorBox. We’re just including the websites we can verify are free and look like they could be worth your time.
Wix
Wix offers a free version of their website builder, but it comes with built in ads and a Wix domain, so branding your website might be more difficult. This is still a viable option if you need to get online with a website fast and for free.
Wordpress
WordPress is the largest content management system on the internet, and they have a free version. If you’re willing to invest the time learning the tool, this can be a great free option for creating your website.
Free Domain Hosting and Website Analytics
DreamHost
DreamHost offers free domain and email hosting for nonprofits. Combining this with one of the free content management systems above could give you a web presence that’s completely free.
Hotjar
Hotjar is another option for understanding user behavior on your website. The free version shows data from 1,050 users per month. One cool feature of Hotjar is heatmaps- it shows at a glance how users interact with a page on your site.
Free CRM (Customer Relationship Manager)
Salesforce
Salesforce is one of the most robust customer relationship managers. Nonprofits might want to use Salesforce to keep track of information about their donors or the clients they serve. Salesforce has a huge amount of functions and variability, which can make learning about the tool daunting. To their credit, Salesforce does a good job of teaching people how to use the tool and has free training resources on a platform called Trailhead. Salesforce offers the Nonprofit Cloud, which includes 10 free licenses to tools geared towards fundraising, marketing, grantseeking, and program management.
Free Backlinks
Backlinks are an important part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). They’re hyperlinks from one website to another. More backlinks to your website typically means your website will rank higher on Google and more people will see it. “Better” backlinks come from websites that have high authority, like news websites. The resources below are intended to help you get more backlinks for your nonprofit’s website.
HARO
HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out. Reporters want expert sources, and you probably want your website and your nonprofit to be featured on a high authority website, improving your SEO. HARO sends out daily email requests seeking expert opinions. If you’re the right fit, just respond to the email and serve as a source, and your nonprofit will earn a valuable backlink.
SourceBottle
SourceBottle is essentially the same resource as HARO; expert sources in exchange for backlinks. If you want to improve your odds of receiving a request that you’re knowledgable Bout, sign up for SourceBottle as well.
Qwoted
Qwoted is yet another free “sources for backlinks” platform. If you’re really aggressively working to improve your SEO, be sure to sign up for all three options. Your inbox might not love you for it, but you’ll be increasing your odds of finding journalists that want to feature someone with your knowledge
Free Training and Continuing Education
NonprofitReady
NonprofitReady is a learning portal that has a wide variety of topics for all levels of nonprofit employee. If you’re interested in learning about boards and governance, marketing, budgeting, or other topics this is a great place to start. Content ranges from short form videos to seminars to templates. They’re also really encouraging.
Candid Learning
Candid offers a balance between free resources and more comprehensive paid courses and seminars. Current topics they’re highlighting include proposal writing, fundraising, governance, and management. Also, you should probably create a free Candid profile for your nonprofit. More on that later.
YouTube
We’re including this because YouTube gets overlooked as a continuing education tool. Ask any college student - YouTube can be a better teacher than some professors. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of any of these resources (for example, Google Tag Manager), give YouTube a try before paying for a course. We use it for training volunteers and creating frameworks and training resources for our partners.
edX
edX offers free online courses from prestigious universities like Harvard, Berkley, and Stanford. Courses are structured and will take longer to complete. Certifications and credit are available for a fee.
Google Skillshop
Google offers free online courses for their products. You can learn about tools like Google Ads and Google Analytics for free. They also emphasize learning these skills as career development.
SCORE
Disclaimer - we haven’t personally used this service, but it looks like it could be useful. SCORE provides business mentorship for free. They also have a knowledge base with a wide variety of topics, and workshops.
Free Accreditation
Charity Navigator
Creating a profile with Charity Navigator and providing them with information about your nonprofit will help some percentage of the people interested in your nonprofit feel more comfortable donating or volunteering. We checked on how they rate nonprofits, and 50% of their scoring criteria is based on impact and results, the rest is made up of accountability and finance, leadership, and culture.
Candid Profile
Candid really wants you to claim your nonprofit profile. There are benefits to doing this, namely credibility and visibility to potential donors.
CharityWatch
We’re not a fan of how CharityWatch rates nonprofits. This is actually the opposite of an endorsement, surprise! The metrics they use to rate a charities’ effectiveness are the percentage of funds spent on programs versus overhead, and how much it costs a nonprofit to raise $100. You could figure out both of these things with a calculator, and it doesn’t tell you much about how effective a nonprofit actually is. This is basically the overhead myth to a T, and one of the reasons workers in our sector are underpaid (hence why free money was the very first item we included). We didn’t include a link to CharityWatch’s website above, here’s a link to a recipe for salsa instead.
Free Graphic Design and Wireframe Tools
Figma
Figma is an amazing tool for collaborating on designs with a team. We use it for creating wireframes, which we use to build websites. It’s a great way to put together a quick idea of how a website, app, or design will look and flow, as there are interactive elements to the tool.
Canva
Canva is a free graphic design tool.
Unsplash
Unsplash is a library of photos that are royalty free. They’re higher quality than a lot of other stock photos, and their library is extensive.
Undraw
Undraw is a library of illustrations that can be used for your website or for creating graphics. The colors of the illustration are customizable, and they’re generally pretty neat and inoffensive.
Free Communication Tools
Slack
Slack offers a free plan with unlimited users, and most of the important functionalities of the full tool such as unlimited channels and archived messages. Slack also allows integration with other apps.
Teams
Microsoft 365 comes with Teams, but if you don’t want the rest of the tools that come with 365 you can just get Teams. The free version is comprehensive and allows for calling, messaging, and file sharing.
Google Chat
Google chat is a simple and free chat tool. It integrates well with the rest of Google’s products.
Free Email Tools
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is an email marketing platform. The free version of the tool lets you send emails to 2500 people and make use of templates.
Constant Contact
This is another email marketing tool. Constant Contact focuses on sending huge volumes of emails. They also have templates.
Free Social Media Tools
Buffer
Schedule social media posts across multiple platforms with buffer. The free version offers scheduling for up to three platforms, but it doesn’t offer analytics.
Later
Later is another social media management platform, you can use it to schedule posts and create content in their tool. There is a free version with a limited feature set, and there’s a 50% discount on paid plans for nonprofits. There’s also a 100% discount on a paid plan for nonprofits that focus on racial justice.
Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck can be used to manage Twitter accounts. Visualizing multiple accounts and scheduling tweets are features.
Linktree
Linktree lets you create a free page to list all of your social media profiles. You can insert this link in the bio of your social media platforms to cross promote your website or your other social media accounts. We did it at the top of this article and linked our social media accounts.
Free Data Tools
Tableau Public
Tableau is a powerful data visualization tool, but it’s regular license costs $840. Tableau Public offers some of the features of Tableau such as managing huge amounts of data and creating custom visuals. Visualizations on Tableau Public are public by default, and there are some feature limitations.
Not Free, but Worth it
Squarespace
Yet another content management system. We use Squarespace for this website. We like the integrations, the security, collaboration tools, and layouts. It’s not perfect but it works for us. It’s also easy to learn in case Emery gets squished by a meteorite and someone else has to take over. We pay $35.72/month.
Udemy
Udemy is an online learning platform. Courses on Udemy are usually comprehensive and helpful for learning tech skills, though their content is varied. Prices for courses also vary. Udemy typically offers a discount on the first course you take when you create a new account. They also offer sales on courses periodically.
Power BI
Power BI is another data visualization tool, and it’s a Microsoft product. Power BI can be used to manage large amounts of data and create custom visualizations. Fair warning, it can be difficult and limiting to try and use Power BI on a Mac. Microsoft offers a discounted version of Power BI Pro for nonprofits that’s $3 per user per month.