It's brilliant, it's radical, it saves money: the benefits of income-based pricing

Let’s say you run a medium-sized charity with an annual turnover of around £320,000, and you want to buy a new CRM system.

The CRM will be used by ten full-time employees.

But you also have 45 volunteers on your books, each of whom will need to view, input and extract information about their clients. Ideally, you’d like them to be able to use the CRM too.

That way, they can update client records and log their work so it’s automatically included in the reports you run. If they can’t do this themselves, then someone else will have to do it for them.

But most of your volunteers only work for a few hours each week, some even fewer. Paying for an individual user licence for each person would be expensive – and an inefficient use of funding.

Companies who provide CRMs price them in various different ways. Some almost seem designed to discourage you from having your volunteers log into your CRM. Which is odd, because it’s obviously more convenient and time-efficient for you if they do.

It’s also more secure: you haven’t got some people adding data to spreadsheets or paper files, then asking others to log it into the CRM on their behalf.

1. Traditional per-user cost

Many CRM providers will charge per user licence. Once you multiply this across all your volunteers it could easily mean your charity ends up spending 2–3% of your entire annual budget on CRM licence fees. This is illogical and wasteful, given that most of the volunteers will probably only need to use the system sporadically.

2. Limited number of free licences – or read-only licences for volunteers

Some of the bigger software companies, like Salesforce, offer a limited number of free licences which you can use for volunteers. But this is a fixed number and usually quite low – what about your other volunteers, or additional volunteers you may take on in the future? Someone will have to do the data entry on their behalf.

Other companies offer free read-only licences, so volunteers can look up information themselves. But as soon as they need to enter or update any client records, we're back to a member of paid staff having to do this for them instead of getting on with their own work.

Suddenly, your CRM – something you bought to free up time – is doing the exact opposite.

4. Pricing per contact

This is where you pay a fee based on the number of people your charity supports – in other words, the number of clients, or service users, on your books.

This type of pricing model is designed with private companies in mind, where someone is either a regular, paying customer of a product or service, or they’re not. But for charities, where clients often come and go as needs change, it doesn’t make sense. A person might be on your system for months or years, but not requiring an active intervention on a regular basis. Why should you pay just for having their details in your CRM?

Let's face it: none of these options is ideal.

But what if you didn’t have to choose any of them?

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At Charitylog, we offer a different, more radical approach. On our two main plans, you pay a single yearly fee, based on the income of your charity. That fee allows you to have unlimited users. 

We charge based on income to keep our pricing proportional, and ensure that our CRM is affordable for charities of all sizes.

No other UK charity CRM provider does this, to our knowledge. 

We’ve developed this pricing model after talking with our charity clients about the fairest, most sensible pricing approach that would allow their volunteers to use the CRM too – no matter how many they have on their books.

Having your volunteers using your charity’s CRM is far more efficient and secure.  But this shouldn’t mean having to pay a fortune for user licences – or ask busy staff to input data on your volunteers’ behalf.  That defeats the purpose of having a CRM in the first place. 

Why not liberate your volunteer workforce by choosing a CRM with income-based pricing? 

Check out our plans and pricing page or get in touch – there’s no obligation to buy, and no hard-sell.