Tools

Calculators that answer a question outright. No email address, no signup, no account, and no partial result with the rest held behind a form.

That is not generosity, it is the point. An answer held back until you identify yourself is not an answer, it is a form. Each tool shows its sources and the date those sources were last checked, exactly like any other page here.

Available now

Donation fee calculator

Enter any gift size and see what each payment route costs and what actually lands in your account, ranked.

The useful part is that the ranking changes with donation size. A route with a lower percentage but a higher flat fee wins on large gifts and loses on small ones, and the crossover is rarely where people assume. If your typical gift is $25, the cheapest option at $500 is irrelevant to you.

Donor retention calculator

Enter donors last year, donors this year, and how many gave in both. Returns your retention rate against the sector average, how many donors you lost and acquired, and what a five point improvement compounds into over five years.

The projection is the part worth having. Retention is the one fundraising number where a small change alters the size of the file rather than a single year’s total, and that is genuinely difficult to see from one year’s figures.

RFM donor scoring tool

Paste or upload a donor export and get every donor scored on recency, frequency and monetary value, sorted into segments, with a scored CSV to download.

It runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and there is no server for your file to reach. A donor export is the most sensitive thing a small nonprofit holds, and every comparable tool asks you to send one to a stranger to try it.

Being built

Cost to start a nonprofit, by state

State incorporation fees plus the federal exemption fee, totalled for all fifty states. The federal half is uniform, $275 for Form 1023-EZ or $600 for the full Form 1023. The state half runs from about $8 in Kentucky to $226 in Maryland, and it is the part nobody publishes in one place.

Which Form 990 do we file?

Three questions about receipts and assets, and a definitive answer with your deadline and what happens if you miss it. The written version covers the same ground now.

What makes a tool worth building

We are not trying to build many of these. A calculator earns its place when it meets all four of these tests.

• The answer is genuinely hard to work out in your head. Anything you could do on paper in a minute does not need a tool.
• The inputs are things you actually know. A calculator demanding six figures you would have to go and find is a form, not a tool.
• The underlying data can be sourced and dated. If we cannot cite where a number came from, we cannot maintain it, and a stale calculator is worse than none.
• The result changes a decision. Interesting is not the standard. Actionable is.

The fee calculator qualifies because the crossover point between payment routes genuinely surprises people, and because it changes which processor you should be on.

How these are maintained

Every rate and figure sits in one place in the code with its source and the date it was checked, rather than being scattered through the page. Processing rates are re-checked quarterly, and anything we learn has changed is corrected immediately.

Each tool states its checked date on the page. If that date is old, treat the numbers with suspicion and tell us.

Something missing?

If you have spent an afternoon in a spreadsheet working something out that a calculator should have answered, tell us what it was. That is where both of the tools above came from.

Where the calculator is useful

The fee question comes up in about eight places on this site. If you arrived here first, these are the pages that raise it.

The free things that are not ours

Two outside resources are worth more to a small organization than anything on this page, and neither is well enough known.

Google Ad Grants gives qualifying nonprofits up to $10,000 a month in search advertising. It is a grant rather than a discount, it needs a few hours of maintenance a month, and an organization not using it is declining the largest free acquisition resource available to it. Covered in nonprofit marketing.

TechSoup distributes donated and heavily discounted software, including QuickBooks Online Plus at an $80 annual admin fee. Covered in best nonprofit accounting software and in the QuickBooks review.