LGL has taken us to a new level of operational maturity.

We took twenty years worth of excel spreadsheets with the names of donors, prospects, event invitees and attendees and consolidated them all into LGL. At long last we have a robust and dynamic system that has helped us learn more about our donorbase and their giving trends. This has been invaluable for our current fundraising efforts and future projections. Not to mention the time we have saved managing our donors and development efforts.

Pros

For a small non-profit, affordability and ease of use are critical requirements and LGL offers both + more features than we could have ever hoped for. I knew from the first moment, after using the Flex Importer to upload a list of donors from a cumbersome old Excell SS, that LGL would forever change the way we organize, track and communicate with our donor base. The ability to easily enter constituents then segment and organize them with mailing lists, categories & tags has helped us achieve a maximum return on our appeals and events. LGL's integration with MailChimp has helped us quickly and inexpensively reach out and stay in touch with our donors. Our Letter and Email templates ensure that we send the right message to the right people at the right time. The Dashboard is a delight, both aesthetically and functionally - easy on the eye with quick access to everything I want to see and do. I am pleased with the reports and the ability to edit or build new ones as needed for specific purposes and audiences. My last top "pro" is LGL's Customer Service - best on the Web! Admittedly there are some features of LGL that I have yet to explore but as all non profits know , there is never enough time. That is why LGL is so perfect. Whatever type of non profit you are, be it large or small, however you might be staffed, be it by a low tech volunteer or a FT development director, LGL offers features and functionality at all levels that will help you grow and thrive

Cons

LGL offers so much more than any comparable program that I am just grateful to have you around! Cannot think of anything that I dislike about a company that is offering such a fantastic service to the non profit community.

GREAT donor database with top-shelf features for small budgets

I've been a fundraiser for 25+ years, primarily with very large organizations (raising $100 million+ annually), and had an opportunity to use a range of nonprofit databases, including home-grown systems and some of the best-known products from large companies. I've been through database conversions on large scales (50+ users, 25,000+ records), and advocated for and managed budgets as a member of the management team. I chose Little Green Light (LGL) after researching options for a small nonprofit where I'm the executive director. (5000 records, 3-5 database users, $350k annual budget)

Pros

As a fundraiser, it's intuitive and has all the features I appreciate and need to support my moves management work. As the database administrator, chief data entry staffer, list- and report-creator and website integration specialist, it's intuitive with great customer service and on-line resources to allow me to meet our organization's needs.

Given the opportunity, I would have selected LGL for my previous organizations. It's got all of the meaningful and useful features to support fundraising and data management needs without requiring us to pay for bells and whistles that sound great to upper management (and those who aren't on the front-lines for fundraising) but keep the majority of users from being able to take full advantage of the system.

Cons

There are a lot of great integrations, but since we don't use the bulk emailing products supported by LGL, we've had to try to create our own.

We LOVE the ability to create web forms that integrate with LGL and the ease of adding them to our website, although sometimes figuring out exactly how to map the data is beyond us without a fair amount of trial and error. On the other hand, these are tasks I never would have attempted with other systems and that we're able to do without paying thousands of dollars to consultants - which is vital with our very limited budget. We've got access to big-budget possibilities and investing the time and energy generally makes them possible for us. That said, without experience working with bigger systems in the past, I'm not sure I would understand the opportunities or be able to figure out how to tap into them.

Little Green Light has transformed my ability to steward my donors and track donations.

It's given me hours of my life back due to all the work it does automatically. It makes me look like a superstar in my job. It gives me the ability to look back on years of data and see trends and improvements. It gives me peace of mind knowing that my data is stored safely on the cloud. It gives me something to say when sales people for Salesforce come calling...and it has healed the psychic damage that was done to me by trying to make Salesforce work for us. It satisfies my love of data and databases and perfection.

Pros

I love the way it integrates online donations into my donor records -- so easy and so professional. I especially appreciate their customer support -- if I have a question, I just send an email and I get a quick reply within hours. The software is very user friendly and adaptable to my way of doing business. Clearly it was created with a great understanding of nonprofits!

Cons

While I love having the ability to track and create acknowledgements, there are some features in this area that don't fit my process. I write cards by hand, and sometimes I only get a couple done at a time. I wish I could mark them done individually rather than by batch. I also would like to have the choice of Volunteer Hours under Related Gifts--several companies, like Microsoft, donate to us for volunteer hours put in by their full time employees. And I wish that when a recurring donation fails that the donor would automatically get an emailed notification from LGL Forms.

Little Green Light brought our growing, volunteer-run nonprofit into the 21st century.

Being cloud-based, Little Green Light allows several board members to access, add, and alter donor information. This turns our database into a collaborative crowd-sourced information bank we can all use wherever we may be even on our mobile phones. The sort and search features in the reporting system are as powerful as any I've seen in far more expensive software. We moved to Little Green Light from a Filemaker Pro database maintained by a single board member. She is still our key administrator, but now she feels appreciated and supported instead of isolated. The improvement in morale alone is worth the price of admission!

Pros

Powerful and versatile, Little Green Light has all the features I was accustomed to from software at other nonprofits I've worked at including eTapestry and Bloomerang but at a fraction of the cost. The interface is highly intuitive, and LGL has shown a real commitment to continual improvement over time. I truly enjoyed the data migration process from our old system to LGL in part because we worked one-on-one with a Little Green Light consultant (Carrie Grote) who treated us as if we were her only client.

If you're a startup nonprofit wondering whether or not to take the leap into state-of-the-art donor management, I strongly recommend Little Green Light. It may easily be the only software you'll ever need to track and nourish donor relationships.

Cons

There are some minor tweaks that might improve Little Green Light. For example, when a donor wishes for a gift to be anonymous, there's a checkbox you need to hunt for. But honestly, the folks at LGL are way ahead of me when it comes to finding and fixing flaws. I bet the next LGL upgrade will be light years better than anything I can even imagine.

Best Donor Software Ever!

I have assisted 2 nonprofits in switching to LGL. It was a huge undertaking with the first one, over 40,000 constituents and 350,000 gifts to migrate over. They helped me find a qualified consultant, and we accomplished it in a very timely manner. The end result is Fabulous! I would HIGHLY recommend for anyone looking for a flexible, all-encompassing software!

Pros

The flexibility of LGL to accommodate and streamline multiple softwares, such as volunteer software, grant software, donor software, client software, calendars, tasks, etc. LGL has been so helpful in suggesting solutions, and allowing us to eliminate several costly, single-use software products. Their support and help sections are unheard of! I have NEVER dealt with a company that is so prompt in their responses and so helpful. They have webinars and many video trainings available to do on your own time. And their cost is one-fourth of what we paid previously for our old dinosaur program. Queries and programs are very easy to use. Very modern look, totally customizable for your organization. You will be amazed at everything it is capable of.

Cons

The only thing I wish it would do is have an appeal performance report, and I believe that is in the works now.

The Vermont Italian Club is primarily a membership organization whose purpose and mission is education of Italians and non-Italians in the Italian culture and heritage. We do this by encouraging participation and study of the Italian language, arts, and culture through lectures, presentations, films, study groups, formal classes, celebrations, and other educational events and activities. We are a small group with about 200 memberships and 475 entries in our database. When the group was smaller and before we invigorated the organization in 2009-2010 with new leadership, all membership information lived on spreadsheets. We knew that we needed a system that could grow with us and deliver the kind of information and reporting we needed. We evaluated other systems, but they were either far too expansive and/or too expensive for our meager budget. With no offices or paid staff, a fundamental requirement for our donor/member management system is that it be browser-based and accessible to our volunteers from their PCs in any location. In addition, the system had to be easy to use, reliable and include features that we would utilize as we grew, developed an online presence and added people to our database. Little Green Light seemed just right for us both in capabilities and price. Although it was fairly new at the time, we decided to adopt it because we believed LGL would grow as we did and it more than met our needs at the time. The conversion process from spreadsheets to LGL was far easier than anticipated when we adopted LGL in 2010. Staff was very accommodating and helped us through the transition smoothly. We were up and running within a few days. The ability to administer the various functions, categories, tags for member/constituent data is very flexible and easy to grasp. LGL has continually enhanced the system with new features. We have never looked back and remain enthusiastic that we made the correct choice. LGL continues to evolve and they listen to their customers for new feature development. In recent months they have launched tight integrations with WuFoo (online forms), MailChimp (email management), and PayPal (payment processing). All are useful services that offer a small non-profit like VIC easy and affordable integration with robust third party offerings. Those we have implemented work smoothly to reduce data entry and the inevitable mistakes of manual processing. LGL service has been outstanding, better than I have encountered from any systems vendor, to small and intermediate sized users. Their online knowledge base and responsive voice and email support is well beyond my expectations.

We find LGL easy to learn, intuitive and intelligently designed.

Inexpensive, easy to learn and use; great reporting function

Pros

We like best how easy LGL is to use and understand, along with how flexible it is. Our organization had been preparing to migrate our data and begin using LGL for many weeks prior, when Hurricane Harvey hit on August 25th and our organization mounted a huge response, along with a huge fundraising campaign, in the midst of the chaos of a natural disaster. We had expected to completely transfer over to LGL at the end of September. In the first 10 days after the hurricane landed, we had donations pouring in, and our previous donor management system was just not handling the work. It was actually getting in the way of fundraising. So in the middle of a chaotic natural disaster response, during our busiest fundraising days ever in our history, we decided to make the jump early, without having really trained our staff nor fully learned the system. The transfer was nearly seamless. The system was so easy and intuitive to learn and use that we changed over to it without a hitch, and it has been smooth sailing every since. We love everything about it -- the ease of recording data, the power and ease of reporting, the responsive help line -- everything. We would--and have--recommended this software to other nonprofits without reservation. We have only used LGL now for a little over 3 months, and have not yet fully explored its performance in tracking data for major gifts stewardship and corporate sponsorships longer term, but so far we couldn't ask for a better system.

Cons

The dashboard/home page is jam-packed and not visually appealing -- and yet it does give a nice snapshot of lots of data.

Excellent product, exceptional features, outstanding value

I have used a lot of database and donor management products and Little Green Light is the simplest to set up and use of any of them, especially for unsophisticated database users. It still requires a knowledgeable person to lead the implementation, import data, design complicated forms, set up syncing between forms and the database, and train other staff, but staff can easily grow comfortable with using LGL for all their daily data needs. LGL has a clean interface, is responsive, and flexible. Although there are a few things I'd like to work a little easier, especially setting up links between forms and the database, all-in-all, I highly recommend this product. Non-profit database systems don't come any easier, especially with all the features LGL offers.

Pros

It is sophisticated and, yet, easy to use. Support staff is responsive and helpful. It has all the features we want and is able to give us the data and information we need without writing SQL statements, like some other top-name products require. In fact, the dashboard gives us our membership numbers without even having to run a query. Excellent value. I love the comparatively low cost to other similar products. I love Little Green Light so much, I have implemented it in three organizations I'm associated with.

Cons

Linking forms to the Little Green Light database can be complicated. Occasionally, I'd like to talk with a support person to strategize a solution, rather that just communicating by email.

Definitely the best bang for your buck. Lots of functionality and great customer support.

Little Green Light really allows us to bring all our fundraising documentation and communication within one system, manage communications with donors, volunteers and other constituents, and share information with staff and other team members.

Pros

Little Green Light interface is straightforward and intuitive. It is a basic database, but really has everything you need for most small fundraising shops. The on-line forms and payment integration as well as integration with Constant Contact or MailChimp are a big plus. While it may not have the fancy dashboard with graphs, it really has all the basics you need for an incredible price. The big selling points for us were 1) the fact that LGL does not jump price significantly when you cross a 2000 or 5000 contact threshold, and 2) customer service and tech help is included in the very reasonable price. While they do not have phone support or big trainings, the on-line support has been great with a very quick response time.

Cons

I would like for there to be more pre-formatted standard fundraising impact reports available. I also have had some challenges integrating with MailChimp and Constant Contact. But granted, I am new to the software and have not fully versed myself in these features.

LGL has made my life so much easier!!!

I converted my organization's database from FundRaiser in July and have not once regretted my decision. We previously tried to convert to a different database and after 2 days of on-site training with that company, I couldn't even locate a sample record. On the other hand, not only did I (and I'm not a tech person) migrate our entire database myself and merge additional Excel documents in, after only a couple of hours of reading instructions and playing around, I already understood not only how to locate a record but how to enter, report, send an acknowledgement, etc. I occasionally run into things that I can't figure out on my own or by reading the LGL blog but when I reach out to customer service, they respond so quickly and always are able to resolve my issue. I really can't think of anything that can't be done through LGL. We're so happy with it that we're now looking at integrating our payment processing and e-newsletter system so that we have the best data on our constituents possible. I cannot say enough good things about this product. For a small organization like ours with no tech support, this has been a blessing since it is so easy to use and so reasonably priced.

Pros

Ease of use, built-in reports, customer service

Cons

It takes awhile to figure out which fields to use for what but I think that would be the case for any software and depends on a lot on how you approach development

Great software for donor management and so much more

I LOVE Little Green Light and would highly recommend it to any non-profit organization. I have already referred another organization who is using it

Pros

The ability to customize and add fields; tech support can add more complex fields that you need
Multiple users can access it
Easy to generate customized acknowledgements and mailings
Great to have all our data in our place
Can attach documents and keep track of contact with constituents
Tech support is amazing! I've gotten answers on a Sunday morning 10 minutes after I asked the question
I research other options and all others were too complicated, cost a lot more, and didn't offer a 30-day free trial
First year subscription through Techsoup makes it even more affordable for small organizations

Cons

I would like more intuitive handling of ticket sales for concerts, but that is all.
I can't think of anything else.

Best donor software for the price!

We are a small nonprofit that didn't have a large donor base and didn't have a lot of money to spend on a database. We stumbled upon LGL and it was the best choice! It is very easy to use and modify to create fields specific to your needs. No setup fee, all cloud based, you can have as many users as you'd like and it starts at a monthly rate. It's awesome. We are a school, so we use it to track prospective students all the way through alumnae, families, donors, etc. It does it all for us. I highly recommend this to any small organization that wants to transition away from using excel docs to track clients & donors.

Pros

It's very user-friendly and is the best price you can get for donor software.

Cons

I don't really have any!

We are a small non-profit & LGL has been excellent for our needs. Great functionality.

Too many to list! Ease of use, particularly for my Executive Director. Customization abilities are fantastic.

Pros

Customer service is TOP NOTCH. They are also always improving & seem to appreciate feedback on expanding functionality for users. Even if they never improved anything else, I would be very happy with using this product. I have been using databases for decades and this is the best I've used so far.

Cons

A few minor items missing from functionality that I personally consider necessary; for instance: marking a communication tag of "Do not email" doesn't prevent someone from emailing that individual. Some query/search parameters could use a little work.

This is an outstanding fundraising database. Functionality is A+. Support is excellent. Great value.

Very helpful online donor management software.

Pros

Originally created for schools, Little Green Light works for all kinds of nonprofits. It syncs up beautifully with PayPal to accept donations. It is super easy to create templates for thank you letters and thank donors quickly. I have worked with several fundraising software platforms, this is the most straight forward. It make using a database fun. Allows you to customize fields, and it is so easy to navigate. Price is far better than other fundraising databases.

Cons

Pulling a list of donors can be a tad complicated. It just takes multiple steps, but still very doable.

Unbelievably powerful online database at an affordable price!

After years of keeping our member/donor database in an Excel spreadsheet that was passed along from volunteer to volunteer, we wanted to find an online database that would maintain contact/donor info while allowing multiple users and also being affordable. Little Green Light has exceeded our expectations. We were able to sign up for a 1-year trial for the cost of one month, through a special offer from TechSoup. It has been a fantastic way to become familiar with LGL and begin to explore its many capabilities. I will be recommending to our board that we sign up permanently, as it will help to move our nonprofit to a higher level of sophistication and strengthen our fundraising capabilities. Compared to similar products we've looked at, LGL is the best bet for the buck, hands down. Given its affordable price and powerful features -- not to mention its various tutorials and options for tech support -- LGL is the perfect choice for many small to medium nonprofits. This last spring, for the first time, we were able to zero in on a highly specialized list for our annual fundraiser invitation list, using LGL's powerful search tool, helping us to achieve one of our most successful fundraising events in recent years.

Pros

Robust capability for managing basic member data and donation records, powerful search function, convenient generating of acknowledgment letters and emails, web-based forms, and terrific tech support.

Cons

The member records are so robust and complex, sometimes it can be a bit challenging to navigate the various levels and options.

Easy to use and intuitive program that is purposely affordable.

We switched to this database software when our previous database upped the prices beyond what is affordable for our small nonprofit. The switchover was easy once we cleaned up our date and labelled it all correctly. Since then, it is very easy to enter donations, either individually or through importing spreadsheets. A terrific feature is that I can write a thank you letter in Word and upload it, and it will automatically populate for each donation. It is super easy to generate these letters, personalize them in Word, and then print them out. It is also easy to generate reports and lists of donors.

Pros

This software is extremely easy to use. For my purposes, I can figure it out without needing a tutorial. They also keeping adding features that make database management even easier. I also love that they keep the price low. They understand that we are a nonprofit and we can't afford to allocate too much of the budget to an administrative task.

Cons

I haven't figured out yet how to integrate LGL with Constant Contact. I probably need a tutorial on that.

Love Little Green Light

I've brought LGL to two independent schools in my capacity as an Advancement Director and it's made a world of difference in both places. Customer service is fantastic -- I've received quick feedback even on holidays. The team has also added new options at our request when needed (e.g. adding an employment title field for spouses). Can't say enough good things about it.

Pros

Easy to use and to quickly find the data you need, responsive customer service, always improving as customer needs change and grow.

Cons

There are no "cons" that I can think of. My experience at two schools with LGL has always been positive, which isn't something I can say about other donor databases I used.

Best donor management software ever!

Time saver for a one-person part-time office. Communication via email with the mail chimp integration is awesome and a life saver. It is easy to use, intuitive, provides customized reports, and the dashboard gives you everything you need at a glance. LGL allows me to spend more time fundraising and less time record keeping. I love it!

Pros

It is intuitive, easy to learn and use, affordable, powerful, time-saving and updated often. It integrates beautifully with Mail Chimp and makes communication easy.
If the excellent tutorials do not help, there is a helpful person who answers your call and walks you through things.

I highly recommend Little Green Light as a simple data management solution. Very pleased.

Pros

Because of our organizational structure, ease of use is critical. We rely heavily on our dedicated volunteers to assist with administrative tasks. With Little Green Light, our volunteers are able to complete their donor management tasks simply and accurately with little oversight. We are also very satisfied with the donor acknowledgement features. We can produce professional looking acknowledgements simply and in a timely manner. The process of creating year end acknowledgments is the best of any software program I have used. We also use the report generation and data extraction features. It is simple and straightforward. We went from Excel spreadsheets to Little Green Light and couldn't be more pleased. We highly recommend Little Green Light.

Cons

It would be great if there was a mobile app for those times when I'm on the go and need data. Other than that, no complaints.

Functional and easy to utilize!

The benefit of being able to easily access our constituents from one database. As well as the ability to pull reports.

Pros

Our Foundation likes mostly that this software provides an easy report and review of our constituents. We are able to communicate and track donations in various ways. Through giving campaigns, appeal year, or constituent searches we are able to manage a database of close to 5,000 donors at a minimal cost. Other systems were triple the price.

Cons

The only difficulty we were faced with in this system was during our database import. Import configuration did take some time doing this on our own. It may be beneficial to have someone organize your database for you than to map your fields on your own.