recommended services
Below are some of our recommended services and tools for finding funding opportunities, organizing information, and managing proposals.
If you work for a nonprofit, look for information about discounted plans. Most of the services we recommend offer discounts on their premium plans to nonprofits and educational institutions.
Website & Course Builders
Podia is an all-in-one service that you can use to create a website; sell digital products, such as training manuals and courses; and conduct and share webinars, including online volunteer orientations. Podia also has a built-in email tool that is convenient and easy to use. In addition to courses and trainings, you can also use Podia as a member site to share information with your supporters. If you are seeking an affordable tool to reach potential supporters, train volunteers, and generate revenue through sales of digital products, Podia may be perfect for you!
Learn More:
Podia offers a weekly live demo of Podia’s features every Tuesday at 2 pm ET. Learn more at: https://www.podia.com/demo. To see what a Podia site looks like, we invite you to visit the Peak Proposals course site at https://peakproposals.podia.com/.
www.godaddy.com/websites/website-builder
GoDaddy’s website builder has several advantages. First, it is easy to use, so it is perfect for those who need to develop a website on their own without any technical support. Second, GoDaddy has some attractive website templates (or “themes”) that can be quickly populated with content, customized with an organization’s branding, and launched. GoDaddy even has several templates designed specifically for nonprofits. Third, as long as you are okay with not having your own domain name, you can launch as website for free using GoDaddy. If you want to use your own domain name (e.g., www.myorganization.org) you will need to purchase one of their plans, which are reasonably priced. After comparing GoDaddy’s pricing to several other website builders, we found GoDaddy almost always emerged as the most affordable plan.
Learn More:
To learn more about the GoDaddy website builder’s features and pricing, visit www.godaddy.com/websites/website-builder/plans-and-pricing. If you are interested in giving GoDaddy a try, you may want to take our free course Create & Launch!, which shows how to use GoDaddy’s website builder to create and launch a nonprofit website.
Squarespace is a website builder, and it’s what we use for Peak Proposals. We chose Squarespace for several reasons, including the quality of its templates, its ease of use, and its selection of features, which includes the ability to have an online store. For an additional fee, you can add an email service to your Squarespace plan, which allows you to design, send, and track email campaigns from your website’s dashboard. In terms of cost, based on our research, Squarespace is priced competitively with other services. If you add an online store to your site, you might find that Squarespace is more affordable than the plans offered by other website builders.
Learn More:
You can learn more about Squarespace’s pricing plans at www.squarespace.com/pricing. Squarespace does not offer a nonprofit discount, but they do offer student discounts (www.squarespace.com/students) and a free trial period.
Project & Knowledge Management
EVERNOTE
Evernote’s tagline is “remember everything,” and you really can if you use Evernote on a regular basis. We store final drafts of blog posts in Evernote, templates for developing and managing proposals, as well as more mundane things like receipts. While we like many things about Evernote, one of its features that we appreciate the most is its web clipper, which is excellent for saving articles and webpages. Evernote has recently added several features that have expanded its usefulness, including a way to generate and easily track tasks across notes (did we mention that Evernote is a note-taking app?). Another new feature that we like and use all the time is the ability to connect Evernote to your calendar and attach meeting notes to appointments.
Learn More:
Evernote offers a limited free plan plus several paid plans. Visit www.evernote.com to learn more about their pricing. To learn about their discounts for nonprofits, please visit https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208314258-NGO-and-non-profit-discounts-for-Evernote-Teams
Notion is an all-in-one tool for managing tasks and projects, creating a database, writing notes, and more. It can take a while to master all of Notion’s features, but once you do, you may find that this one tool will meet all your information management, project management, and collaboration needs. Best yet, Notion offers a discount for US-based nonprofits (see below for details).
Learn More:
Notion offers US-based 501c3s 50% off their Teams plan. To apply for the discount, visit: https://www.notion.so/pages/nonprofits
Slab is a knowledge wiki. It’s a browser-based knowledge management tool that companies, nonprofits, and educational institutions can use to create, organize, store, and share information. You can use Slab to collaborate on notes with colleagues, share company-wide policies and procedures, and store reference material for use either by a team or the company at large. If you want to share content beyond your organization, you can also make individual posts public. What we love about Slab is how intuitive it is to use. We also really like its clean, minimalist design, which makes it a pleasure to use. We have used Slab to store and share everything from policies and templates to descriptions of products from our online shop. Slab would be a great choice for less tech-savvy teams that want a tool that works well and does not require extensive training to use. To get a sense of what it looks like to use Slab, follow this link to see an email template we created in Slab.
Learn More:
To set up your own account, visit www.slab.com. You can read about Slab’s features and use cases at https://slab.com/library/. Slab is free for teams up to 10 people. Slab is also free for nonprofits and educational use. You can learn more about Slab’s pricing at https://slab.com/pricing/.
Trello is a digital tool that can help you track ideas, events, and tasks. It uses a kanban format where you create virtual “boards” for your projects, with each project made up of cards (individual tasks or notes) and lists (vertical collection of related cards). We use Trello to track funder research, with one funder equaling one card, the lists equal to a phase of the research process. To view a Trello board example, click here to view a funder research board we created. You can read about how to use Trello specifically for funder research and grant writing in our blog post “How to Use Trello for Grant Research and Writing.”
Learn More:
Trello has lots of information on its website to help people master Trello, including an excellent blog and short video tutorials. Trello offers both a non-profit community discount and an education discount.
Grantmaker Databases
GrantStation is a grantmaker database that includes profiles of grantmakers located around the world, with an emphasis on grantmakers located in the United States and Canada. The database includes private foundations, government funders, and corporate giving programs. Some of the funder profiles include information about open funding opportunities. GrantStation also publishes lists of active funding opportunities for the United States and Canada on a weekly basis and a list of international opportunities on a monthly basis.
Learn More:
GrantStation’s main product is its grantmaker database. However, it also offers webinars throughout the year on various topics of interest to the nonprofit community. Through a partnership with GrantStation, Peak Proposals is able to offer our community a significant discount on GrantStation’s annual subscription price. To learn more, join our new member site (it’s free!) at https://www.peakproposals.com/member-area. After you confirm your account (check your junk folder!), log into the member area and click “discounts” on the menu that appears on the right-hand side to see the description and link to access the GrantStation discount (which will allow you to purchase an annual subscription for $95).*
Grantmakers.io is a wonderful free resource for nonprofits. Grantmakers.io makes the machine-readable IRS 990 dataset usable for nonprofit professionals. The person behind the database is Chad Kruse, who originally created it for a friend. When he saw how useful it could be, he opened the database up to the public. Grantmakers.io is an example of Free and Open Source Software. Using this database, which allows you to explore 4.8 million grants contained in the public IRS 990-PF dataset, you can see the names of the organizations foundations are funding, what they are giving money for (e.g., general support), and grant amounts.
Learn More:
To learn more about Grantmakers.io and look up grantmakers or grants, visit www.grantmakers.io and read the site’s FAQs. As we mentioned above, Grantmakers.io is free to access for everyone, so no discounts for nonprofits are needed! However, if you’re feeling generous, we hope you’ll consider making a donation to Chad for his good work.