What makes Sapling CRM different?

When I started writing this, I thought, “Oh, I’ll just write up something short and sweet. It will be quick.” Boy, was I wrong. I get asked this question often, ever since we started building Sapling: “What makes Sapling different?” From investors. From nonprofit leaders. And I have found it’s actually quite hard to fit into one sentence, or one pitch deck. And you can’t do a full demo for every investor. Nor can every marketing email or LinkedIn post do the answer justice. Because Sapling is so much more than a one-sentence answer.

So I thought to myself, well, I have some things I want to say about how we are different, and if I am going to write it down, I might as well write it all.

I don’t expect anyone to read all 20 pages of how we are different. But I wanted to write it all down for the record, and for the world to digest.

But I think, if nothing else, one thing will be clear. By the sheer volume of my words alone when attempting to answer how we are different: the dedication and belief I have in not only Sapling CRM, but in the nonprofit space. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any nonprofit tech CEO who would be able to write as long and as in-depth a monologue as I have today about their software and the ideas and principles behind each piece. Much less are they actually among the hands designing and coding their systems, either.

And I like to think that means something. That it is something that stands out.

So if I really had to put “what makes Sapling different?” into one sentence: it is that it is a gift to the charity space.

It is my love letter to fundraising. My solution to every problem we face in our very complex space. Down to every pixel, I want it to be the solution. While yes, I want to grow Sapling and have our company be wildly successful (investors wouldn’t invest if they didn’t think that). And I will work night and day to make it so. But at its core, this is my mission more than anything. There are many ways the world wants change. I’ll save that rant for another essay, but software and the user experience are certainly one place people are crying out for better options. And I intend to make Sapling the answer to those prayers. (He says as humbly as humanly possible.)

And may Sapling CRM and Orchid AI be just the first vertical we conquer.

So, you get it. We’re different. Read more below to learn just how different we are.

—Alex

For those who don’t want to read every little bit, here is a navigation bar for you!

What makes Sapling CRM different? (For real this time. This is the actual thing to read.)

By Alexander Russo

Founder, Sapling CRM · September 8, 2026

I wanted to write this, and have it be the first thing people see on our website, to thoroughly explain all the ways that Sapling is different and why I decided to build what we’ve built.

The first reason is something I learned as a Major Gift Officer: our space is exceedingly more complicated than the rest of the world gives us credit for. For example, if I started a bakery, generally, you could buy a cake I made only two ways: cash or card. Now, if that bakery were a 501(c)(3) nonprofit? Well, then you could basically “buy” the cake with almost anything of value. By that I mean, donors can donate anything. A car, stock, crypto, heirlooms, half their estate, donor-advised funds, qualified charitable distributions and other retirement gifts, charitable gift annuities, corporate matching gifts. The list goes on and on. That becomes very complex very fast, especially as you add in receipting and donor relationships, plus everything else that goes into running a company. then, to add to it, using our nonprofit bakery scenario, someone could even go as far as to say, “I’d like to ‘buy’ that cake with my credit card, but I’d actually like to reflect that my best friend gets the credit for ‘buying’ the cake.” (I am referring to soft credits, if that wasn’t clear.) No other industry is this complex just by the sheer mechanics of what payment channels exist and how to accept them.

And the final piece of the equation: the enormous number of different ways to fundraise. Mail, text, calls, voicemail drops, small events, big events, galas, merch sales, grants, sponsorships, CTV, social media. The list, again, goes on and on.

All of this put together — truly an understatement, in my opinion — becomes exceedingly challenging for nonprofits, large ones let alone small and growing ones, to manage. It is hard enough to rely on the charity of others for your income as it is. But then we have added all of this on top.

Now, if you have read this far, you may be asking, “Well, what does Sapling do, then, that is different?” And to that I answer: we actually built a software system that is effective and solves these issues, rather than adding to them. In my career, at one organization, at one singular time, we used 10 or more different expensive software products simultaneously to manage our organization. And almost every single one, we hated.

So we are left with unhelpful, clunky, yet expensive systems that don’t talk to each other well. As the lifeline of our business.

So I thought to myself, there has to be something better.

There wasn’t.

So I set out to build it. Because every nonprofit, or fundraising entity, deserves one system that does it all, and does it all well. That has an answer to every question, a solution to every problem.

Other software and tools will say they are that. But I am telling you, for the majority and in my opinion, their CEOs and their developers were not and are not nonprofit professionals. They were not and are not fundraisers. And they were not and are not activists. So they will say they are the solution.

But I promise you in my opinion: every single one of them is not the solution.

So that is how Sapling is different: we are the solution. To all of it. Built by a fundraiser for fundraising. By hand. Myself and my small team.

It is my sole goal to give it to the world.

Please read more below as to why specific pieces of our software are key solutions to the challenges of the fundraising space:

The Basics

We have a lot of cool features that really are beyond helpful. Most of them you can read about on our features page. Here I will touch on most of them, just to give my reasoning and rationale. But before that, I want to talk about the basics. The reasons our hierarchy, our architecture, our fee structure, etc. are, alone and by design, better than the others.

Function before customization

The first thing we focused on when building our platform was function before customization. By that I mean, we wanted each page/module of the CRM to open to an extremely helpful and informative view.

Many CRMs do the opposite: they give you a blank canvas and expect their customization abilities (which are usually confusing and unhelpful, in my opinion) to triumph. The problem? A lot of users, busy in their day-to-day work, never change anything. No dashboard changes. No custom widgets. Only a few custom reports. So the majority of nonprofit team members go through the day without really having a full picture of their fundraising health. That is not good.

We made it the opposite because we believe every person having a better understanding of where their org is at yields a better, more rounded-out development team and fundraising program. So throughout Sapling, you will see KPIs and analytics that are easy to access and easy to understand. But they also don't get in the way. We think this is unique.

And I think there is a larger point here that often gets missed: nonprofit employees' time has value. A lot of value.

Every hour spent fighting a report builder, searching for a donor the system should have found, rebuilding a receipt by hand, or trying to figure out where one piece of information lives is an hour not spent building relationships, raising money, or doing the actual mission.

Bad UX in nonprofit software is not just annoying. It has a mission cost.

That idea sits underneath a lot of the tiny things I obsess over in Sapling. A button should be where you expect it. A number should be easy to find. A page should answer the obvious questions before you have to ask them. Those things may not sound revolutionary in a pitch deck. But over thousands of hours of nonprofit work, they matter. A lot.

The donor record

Beyond the general structure of the CRM, we spent a lot of time designing what we've deemed the perfect donor contact. One, every entity type is already in Sapling. Any vehicle that gives money, you should already have that contact type ready to go. Sponsors, donor households, foundations, governments, etc.

But most importantly, the contact is laid out exactly as you'd want to see it. There are many pieces to fundraising. Giving, research, notes, pledges, legacy giving, etc. Most CRMs have places for these, but they are confusing and cluttered. Ours is efficient, organized, and clear.

The most important piece of the contact, though, is multi-individual/family management. When I was a fundraiser, more times than I could count, a donor wanted their daughter, their assistant, their wealth manager, or, in some random cases, their best friend, to get the same emails and communications they were getting.

If you've spent any time in a CRM, there are a whole host of ways this usually creates a mess. If you add another person, the contact's name rules get messed up and you end up with a blended family rather than an assistant. Then you can't pull proper receipts attributed to the right person or family members.

Maybe you try to add the other person as a contact on its own, connected via a relationship field. Well, you learn you can't quite do that. For starters, you usually get charged for the extra contact (ridiculous), and then, functionality-wise, you likely contact donors based on their giving or some other criteria. Well, an empty contact that is listed in a relationship as “Mary's daughter” will be missed in every single report you make. So you are back at square one.

CRMs usually do have custom name settings, but they are confusing and easily get messed up when you have lots of data.

We solved this entirely. You can add all the individuals you need right on a contact. You set the relation of that individual to the primary individual, and that dictates name settings.

So, for example: Aisha and Steven Kahn want to add their daughter, Olivia Kahn. Their contact shows all individuals separately, with the contact name becoming “The Kahn Family: Aisha and Steven Kahn.” If, for some reason, you need to move any of these individuals around, you can do so without fear of messing it up. The system adapts.

Then they want to add their assistant, Trish Smith. With Sapling, you can mark Trish's relation as “Assistant.” She can be added as a separate individual, and the family name stays The Kahn Family.

So now, in this case, the major donors' request to have their family or other contacts get the same communications as them can officially be honored.

Gifts, receipts & DAFs

Now the kicker, and the best part: receipting.

When donors give, they are often very particular about how their gift is receipted. Sometimes out of preference, other times out of tax-filing necessity. Either way, it is usually a burden when donors have specific requests that don't align with your CRM's capabilities.

But in Sapling, each gift can be attributed to any individual in the contact, either during creation of the record or after. You can attribute it to the whole family, too, if that's what they want. For QCD gift receipts where the donor really needs the sole individual to be represented, no longer do you have to edit the PDF after. Instead, in Sapling, you can do it within your system.

The goal of Sapling is to solve as many of these issues for fundraising organizations in the system rather than outside.

The final piece to the relationship management issues we solved is that you can even attribute a gift to a donor's Donor Advised Fund (DAF)!

DAF management has historically been an issue when trying to figure out how to do it in the CRM. Most systems have a passthrough giving tool, but it's usually confusing or unhelpful. A lot of nonprofits end up making separate contact accounts for each DAF gift they receive, which is also incorrect. Donors do not want a double thank-you letter and set of communications just because they chose a special giving vehicle.

In Sapling, you add the DAF right on their contact as a special field, and each gift gets mirrored to the DAF sponsor's contact too. Then receipts also get corrected automatically to be the typical DAF thank-you rather than a tax receipt.

(In case you didn't know, for DAF gifts you should send the donor a thank you, not a tax receipt, as the DAF sponsor — i.e., Schwab Charitable, etc. — already issues a receipt at the time of contribution to the account.)

That's everything relationship and gift/receipt management solved. In one place. One concise contact where you can easily and clearly see everything, and all of it functions how you actually need it.

In conversations with supporters and investors, they don't understand how important, yet somewhat revolutionary, this is. Because they don't understand the core problem we talked about in the beginning: our nonprofit bakery is very complicated. But it is the simple yet effective solutions that make or break our fundraising programs.

The little things matter

The final two pieces on architecture and general things. One: search bars.

I have had too much frustration in other systems that can't search if you have one typo. Or I have even seen where I typed the name correctly, but it still doesn't come up. Or it puts the major donor you're looking for at the bottom of the list. even if you type their name exactly.

Nope. Done. We fixed that.

I never want a client to have searching issues again!

And then quick views of data.

By that I mean, in other systems it's hard to get an easy view of all the recurring giving, or refunded/bounced/returned gifts, or even to see, “Oh, how much did Aisha Kahn give in 2022?”

In most of these cases, I have always ended up having to whip out my calculator and figure it out myself, rather than the expensive system I bought simply showing me what I need.

Sapling is the opposite.

May you never need to use your calculator again when trying to figure out how much a donor gave or how much monthly giving you have!

And that, really, is what I mean by the basics. Before we even get into all the bigger features, the CRM should already make your day easier. It should understand the weird realities of nonprofit fundraising. It should show you what you need without making you build it first. It should organize donors, families, gifts, receipts, DAFs, and everything around them in a way that actually reflects real life. And it should save you from all the little annoyances that, over time, become hours and hours of wasted work.

None of these things are particularly flashy on their own. Put together, though, they are the foundation. If the basics are bad, it really doesn't matter how many shiny features you build on top of them.

So yes, we obsessed over the basics.

Because the basics matter.

Pricing

Built to grow with you

Another major way Sapling is different is our pricing model. The key here is that we want to incentivize you to grow. And more importantly, not penalize you for growth.

After all, the reason we chose the name Sapling is because we truly believe from one Sapling, a forest grows. And we genuinely want our system to help you do that.

We have decided on a simple, by-revenue pricing model. To my knowledge, none of my competitors do this, or if they do, not in the same way.

Essentially, you'll be given a custom, reasonable price for the entire suite. All that we have to offer, for that one base cost. This price is based on an equation we wrote that factors in the highs and lows of different fundraising seasons and the general costs of each of our CRM components.

But the key is: if you grow, the price grows, but if you dip, so does your price. We don't want you to rise to the next tier and then feel trapped when you pay your bills.

We also don't want to lock you into a contract. I personally believe the days of being captives of tech companies are over. And I hope you'll see we want to lead that charge.

Usage where it makes sense

Beyond the base price, we charge for marketing/fundraising email usage, Orchid AI usage, and storage. If you want to go crazy and use Orchid a ton and email everyone you know a million times, we say have at it! But at this stage of our company, we can't bear all of those costs.

Most users will find they have enough usage built into their plan that they don't even need to think about extras or overages.

With storage, we also made it dynamic. Each client gets 10 GB for free, which gets you pretty far, and after that, there are small tiers starting at $0.99 a month. And you'll be able to see where your storage costs are coming from. If you have a lot of random contacts you don't need anymore, or maybe PDF collateral you don't need to store, you can see that.

We wanted to give you the choice of how you want to manage your storage, rather than charging an arm and a leg for everything.

No punishment for growth

But beyond that, everything else is included. Unlimited seats and users. Unlimited contacts. No features locked out.

My competitors do the opposite: pitch you on one small, low-cost CRM, then you get in, locked into a contract, and you see everywhere you turn that there are upgrades to add your team or to access the feature they showed in the demo. We think that is disingenuous and wrong, so we won't do that.

The worst one — the pricing model that punishes you the most — is constituent-based pricing (the amount of donors/contacts you have). Any of us in fundraising, big org or small, knows that you often need to put every single person you meet or know into your system to manage and cultivate.

After all, you are relying on the giving nature of people around you to keep the lights on.

The general rule is: if you can't give a lot, give something small. And if you can't give something small, you know someone. Statistically, this is true. But if my software charges per record, well, that punishes me for actually wanting to hit the ground running and grow.

For fundraising events in particular, everyone you invite or have attend should be in your system getting your cultivation communications. But nonprofits will often delete people or even combine old records (which is bad for historical tracking purposes! Don't do that!) just to save money on their CRM pricing.

This is beyond ineffective. It's just wrong.

I wanted Sapling to be the opposite of this. To help you grow, and simultaneously incentivize growth and build it in a way where you can trust us.

So I will, to the best of my ability, seek to never introduce constituent-based pricing, feature-gated pricing, or seat-based pricing.

If you've read this far, I hope you are starting to see the theme. Sapling is different for very many reasons.

Feature Breakdown

I think, too, it is important to talk about the reason behind each feature. I'll try to be brief, but as you can see, I am quite passionate about what we have built and the reasons we built everything the way we did.

Each feature is the same. Crafted with intent. Designed to be helpful, not hindering.

Importing

Fix it right here

The first one is importing. I personally believe our import tool is the best version you'll find.

We use deterministic layers and AI filtering to preemptively map columns for you and find errors in your data. The best part: you can edit and fix everything right in the import process. Other systems usually kick you out and make you re-import. At every turn, we say, no, don't do that. Instead, fix it right here.

We also standardize data during the import process.

Beyond that, it gets better. Before we have each record go through the process of matching with your existing records or making new ones, there is a round of finding errors to fix and pulling out specialized gifts.

If a donor record is anonymous, or is a DAF gift, or a soft credit, etc., it pulls that out for you. Other CRMs let all that fly right through, resulting in messy, confusing data. (Which they will want you to pay them thousands to clean up.)

This makes importing faster, more effective, and easier all around.

Good data now. Not messy data later.

The final thing we added with importing was the ability to merge ready-to-go records but hold back messy, unfixed records.

I have a friend who works for a large nonprofit. She was importing 100 donors. Their system flagged 99 as good to go; 1 had an issue. She's busy. She has lots going on. She's trying to do the jobs of 4 people at once. So she said, “Eh, add them all as is.”

This is not good.

One error can mess up a lot more down the road, even years later. Then you'll spend hours trying to figure out what happened and when, and, depending on what the error was, you might end up with an angry donor who pulls their giving.

So we decided: we will fix that.

If you need to get data in quickly, but at a certain point in your day find yourself too busy to go through the errors and fix them, you can save those for later but add the correct ones now.

To my knowledge, no other CRMs do this. Again, something that seems small in terms of feature sets, but in actuality, extremely meaningful.

A place for the miscellaneous stuff

Oh, and we also made one master “Miscellaneous and Anonymous” contact record, which is usually not native in CRMs as a feature.

When you have anonymous donors (like where they send in a money order with no name) or random, miscellaneous things to record, you should feel like you have one central place to manage all of that without having tons of empty contacts. That gets disorganized really quickly.

So the import identifies these scenarios and routes them here!

Events

When I was a Major Gifts Officer, we used so many different events tools. We disliked them all. And none of them connected to the CRM. Our CRM events tool couldn't connect to our website. so all around, it was always a mess, and we did a lot of events.

We ended up, almost every time, organizing on Google Sheets or by hand.

So, as you can imagine, I decided Sapling's internal events tool will be much better.

You can do almost everything. Build your registration page, assign attendees, assign tickets and payment levels, check people in. Everything start to finish of a fundraising event.

One of my favorite features: you can even plan table seating and floor layout in the CRM, and assign all of the attendees you want at each table.

No more mapping table seating by hand!

We also wanted it to be a hub for the entire event.

I was notorious for this: whenever we met with the event planner, a week would go by and I would find myself messaging my Director asking, ‘Where is the Run of Show again?’ ‘Where is the invitation PDF again?’ etc.

So, to resolve that issue, we even built a section where you can add all the notes and docs you want for all to see.

Stay organized in your CRM!

You are already paying for a CRM. Why should we have to buy another event tool too?

Reporting

Reporting shouldn't require a data admin

Everyone hates reports. It is always such a confusing tool (or multiple tools, for some systems). I have never understood this.

Being able to visualize your data, sort it and understand it, and easily share it back and forth with your team is the crux of your day-to-day. Almost every operation you perform - bulk receipting, sending invites, finding lapsed donors, sending collateral fulfillment, etc. - requires a report.

Well, if that is the case, why do all the CRMs I have used make it so complicated at every turn?

The first thing we wanted was: 1, folders; 2, an easy ability to change private and public settings and add people to the report.

Other systems make that super difficult for some reason. You'll make a report and realize at the end you made it private and you can't share it with anyone, so you have to start anew.

And why can't we have folders to organize??

Well, with Sapling, that is all fixed. Done.

Beyond that, creating a report is simple and intuitive.

At previous organizations I worked with, all of the gift officers were not tech savvy at all (as to be expected; I want my fundraisers to be good at relationships, not tech). but there is no reason they shouldn't be able to perform basic reporting tasks and pull what they need.

Well, they couldn't.

For our entire team, I was always the one doing it for everyone. (And mind you, I was a gift officer too!)

This becomes even more of a problem when you have activists running a charity but they cannot afford a data admin. So they are left trying to spend hours reading FAQ pages, trying to figure out how the heck to build a report.

Prepared Reports

Beyond building your own, we wanted to build a series of reports that are already provisioned to help you with what you need. I like to call it "the Grid of Nine" (because there are nine).

Each of them shows you exactly what you need. All ready to go. So for lots of standard reporting you usually need to build, we have it displayed for you, with lots of helpful visualization.

My two favorites are our geographic report and our donor lifecycle report. You can view both of these on our features page, mind you.

Finding the diamonds in your data

The geography report starts with a map breakdown showing fundraising totals and donor counts for any given time you select, displayed on the U.S. map. Then, in each state, you can show by county as well.

You'd think other CRMs let you see by state, but in my experience, no. Instead, I had to regularly make a report one state at a time to see the info I wanted per state. And if you wanted per county, basically forget about it.

As a gift officer, I often wanted to know high-income or high-real-estate-value ZIP codes in my region. But that, again, we had to research and pull by hand. In Sapling, you can click on the map and see the donors in each ZIP code.

Then it flags for you, "Oh, this donor - you see they live in Palm Beach and their house is worth $25M, they just randomly gave you $100 - you should call them right now."

This is really helpful because nonprofits spend a lot of time and money trying to acquire new high-value donors. More often than you'd think, there are already high-value donors in your dataset waiting for you to call. But your current CRM doesn't help you find them.

(If you are reading this and take nothing else away, please know there are diamonds in your dataset. You just need to find them.)

This is one report, but when asking, "How is Sapling different?" I think it is quite a big differentiator.

Watching donors move

Then the lifecycle report is a living diagram of where donors are moving between any given time. How many moved from prospect to donor, from donor to repeat donor, from donor to lapsed.

Historically, these movements are always hard to figure out and usually require Excel or putting your data somewhere else to analyze. But even when you do that, it is basically impossible to visualize.

So, in Sapling, you can instead see, "Ah, these donors from 2025 to 2026 lapsed. Let me send them a specific email right now."

I would have killed to have this when I was a gift officer.

Communications

One donor, one communications picture

Our goal is for every fundraising channel to have a means of managing that specific channel in our system. From email to phone drops to texts to mail, etc.

At orgs I have worked at in the past, I found it especially difficult to know all the fundraising messaging my donor was getting. We, like most organizations, were using so many different channels and vendors that it felt like a firehose aimed at the donors I was managing.

And it was almost impossible to turn any of the channels off entirely. The stray fundraising email or text still made its way through to my major giving caseload.

Right now, much of this section is still in the planning phase, but we have built the first two pieces: our email suite and our internal communications tool.

Email lists without wrecking your donor file

Most CRMs have a built-in email tool, but they are often ineffective or clunky. I have seen time and time again users spend thousands on an extra email tool that often doesn't plug into their existing system. To solve that, I made sure our email suite had everything you could need.

More importantly, we needed to solve the massive email list problem.

And by that I mean, various organizations we worked with, big or small, had large email lists separate from their main donor file. Whether they bought that list or it grew over years, most times they added all of them right in as contacts in their CRM.

Picture a giant list of 12,000 empty contacts with just an email in there, and your 1,000 actual donors buried somewhere inside it. That becomes very hard to routinely see, find, and manage your actual donors.

So we decided to have a tool where you can add your big email list into the email section, and we will regularly scan for matches or engagement to determine if an email should be promoted to a full contact. This keeps you really organized: both your housefile list and your email lists.

Keep internal communication inside the CRM

We also decided to build internal communications: our own messaging system in the CRM. Most nonprofits end up making text chats, often having confidential donor data and company data leave their CRM and end up in a channel the organization may not centrally control or govern.

This is dangerous!

So we built it so you can create communication messages and channels right in the CRM. No need to buy an external communication tool!

Templates

This one is simple: we added templates throughout the CRM for your free use. Receipt templates for almost every gift type and scenario. Email drafts and folders mapped out for you, if you want. Sample events and contacts.

As many as I can think to add for your use, I have, and I will continue to add.

For anything tax-related, always consult your tax attorney and CPA, but what we have included, I really hope, helps people right off the bat.

Other systems charge for these. Other systems give them for free, but only if you sign up for their marketing emails.

I hate that. You can just use them!

Workspaces

A home for every role

One of my favorite features is our Workspaces section, and it is one of the truest answers to 'how is Sapling different?'

Every nonprofit employee role will have a home here. Researchers will have their own queue. Foundation and grant managers, a dedicated space to track and find all of their grants. Executives will have a 990 prep section. Etc.

Much of this is still pending development, but we hope to release them in stages soon.

Actually managing a caseload

The first two are our Development Officer/Gift Officer workspace and our Data Admin space.

The entire workspace idea stemmed from the fact that, in CRMs I have used, there wasn't ever a true place to 'manage my caseload.' I could look at it in a report. Some systems have a pipeline to manage gift pledges and asks. But that still isn't really a caseload. No sorting. No visualization. No real moves management.

We decided to build a tool where you can assemble a caseload and actually do things with it. See everything in one place. Get suggestions on who to contact next. Make quick notes. Email them all or a select few, etc.

Really anything you'd actually do as a gift officer, you can do in your caseload.

In Sapling, your caseload isn't just a list. It's a usable, living expression of the donors under your care.

Ahh, sweet organization

The Data Admin workspace is more cut-and-dry, as most of the CRM is effectively their workspace. But there are a few things we added to be extra helpful.

One of the biggest headaches I had was keeping track of duplicate donors we needed to merge. We would make lists in Slack, ClickUp, or Google Sheets.

No, don't do that. Why doesn't our expensive CRM help manage that?

Instead, in Sapling, you can mark each contact as needing to be merged as a duplicate, or mark any other kind of data error or request you need, and it will get sent to the Data Admin workspace as a trackable queue.

Ahh, sweet organization.

Beyond that, we built it so you can manage your entire master suppression file in one place. We used to have one giant file in Google Sheets: a tab for email, a tab for address, a tab for phone, etc.

Your suppression file gets out of hand really fast as you grow, and as a charity, it is your duty to honor donors' and individuals' requests not to receive the messaging they're referring to.

In CRMs I have used in the past, I had donors ask many times for X type of communication to be turned off, but then it didn't work or got lost somehow. Then the next month they would be screaming at me and calling me a liar.

No joke, this happened often.

Well, in Sapling, it's much easier: one simple and smart master suppression file for you to use.

Orchid AI

More than a chat box

Sapling helps you grow, Orchid helps you blossom.

Most CRMs have added a chat box that works half the time. We have added an integrated assistant. Armed with knowledge about how to use our system and also an expert on all things nonprofit fundraising.

A donor approaches you about setting up a Charitable Gift Annuity (CGA). You don't know where to begin or what that is. Orchid is there to help and tell you what you should do. Both within CRM navigation and fundraising education.

Do the work, not just talk about it

Beyond the knowledge base, Orchid can help you perform CRM functions.

Much of this is under development, but over the next several months, we intend to get Orchid to the point where you can say, 'Hey Orchid, I am throwing this fundraising gala. Can you draft the event, make an invitation, and invite my top 100 donors?' And it will execute the workflow end to end.

Beyond that, we want to help you by allowing Orchid to fill in for entire development roles. Orchid will be able to reach out to donors as if it were the 'Legacy Society Manager,' or whatever role you need.

Again, this is far off, but this is how we intend to make Orchid truly dynamic.

So far, Orchid can help build donation pages and segments, and help with reports and events.

Keep your data yours

Finally, I have heard lots of reports that nonprofit leaders are regularly dropping their entire caseloads or housefiles into ChatGPT and Claude. As much as possible, I think it is important to fight to keep your data your own, not immediately surrender it all to big tech companies.

But then the problem is: nonprofit fundraisers need the analytics and the help to do more at once.

So Orchid is the solution.

Orchid uses deterministic layers and controlled API calls so users can work with AI through Sapling rather than exporting entire housefiles into standalone consumer AI tools. Over time, more and more of Orchid's requests will land on systems we have built ourselves, reducing the need for external model calls.

It is our goal, too, to train up our own Orchid model when time and funding allow.

But for now, Orchid works as intended and performs extremely well while keeping the AI workflow governed through Sapling.

Payments

One place for more ways to give

The last piece of my long tirade of why Sapling is different is our Payments module, hosted by Sapling Pay Inc.

Like we talked about in the beginning, you can donate almost anything. As much as possible, it is my goal to align vendors for nonprofits to use, all in one place. When you need to accept stock, vehicles, credit cards, corporate matches, DAF gifts, etc., there are far too many logins and segmented products. And too many of them don't feed into your CRM — and often they are an added cost.

We will add as many as we can in one place. We have started with credit and debit cards, and are rolling out DAFpay and ACH soon.

This is helpful beyond just having a centralized place to manage everything. One, it makes for easy deployment into your donation pages, which you can build as many of as you need right in Sapling CRM — limitless hosted pages or iFrame insertions/embeds into your website.

And two, it allows more and more of your data to flow through a centralized, repeatable import process. Meaning, more duplicates are caught right at the get-go rather than later. This saves so much headache and so many problems down the road. Instead, other CRMs would rather charge you to clean up the data later.

Sponsored Fees

Finally, we are introducing a new concept we are calling Sponsored Fees. The thought originally came from a simple question: how could we eliminate the burden of processing fees for nonprofits?

Roughly nine out of ten nonprofit leaders I have talked to tell me credit card fees frustrate them, and they avoid them as much as possible. Likewise, they frustrate donors. (Although donors often don't understand the mechanics — the reason there are fees to begin with largely starts with the interchange their chosen cards generate!)

The key here, though, is balancing ease of access — cards are certainly one of the easiest ways to give — with getting the maximum amount of each gift to the actual mission. So I envisioned a solution that makes the fee go away while still letting the donor use their chosen card.

Why I don't like the tipping model

Also, I thought to myself, ‘How do we combat competitor so-called “free” CRMs/processors?’ The truth is, those services are not free. They largely pass the burden to the donor. You get to choose, of course, but if you don't want that... well, then you pay a fee.

The problem with this is that nonprofits are convinced this is good because they get the whole gift, but I don't believe it is. I think it harms your relationship with your donors. Donors are already giving. In the checkout process, asking them to give more to cover the fee then also asking them to tip is two additional asks they weren't prepared to give. And they realize that money goes straight to the processor, not to your organization.

Do donors do it? Of course. But it is my opinion — and I have talked to enough donors to know — that many do it begrudgingly. And it has also been my experience that it can negatively affect repeat giving.

These companies then also slap on slow, not-so-helpful software and call it a CRM. But I truly believe this model can become little more than a scheme to get donor money flowing to the processor. Because truly, I do not believe this model stimulates growth beyond a certain point.

It also convinces nonprofits that all their tools should be free. But donors and career nonprofit leaders alike know and deeply understand that sometimes, to be effective and to grow, you need to invest in the right tools.

Now I want to be clear here: I am not calling out any specific company, really in any of my comments in this narrative. Instead, I want to present the logic behind my dislike of the tipping model.

Who benefits?

Now our sponsor model. To find this middle ground, we will open up small marketing slots in the checkout process of your payment page. We find potential for-profit companies that want high-value marketing and present them to you. (Or you can connect your own sponsors if you like.) You can deny or accept them.

The reasons this is beneficial are multifold, and I want to touch on all of them.

For the nonprofit. Obviously, the main benefit is no fee. Beyond that, though, you have happy donors and new access to corporate sponsors. Potential to expand what they sponsor of yours in the future. And you get to present to the world with the added credibility that can come from recognizable corporate sponsors.

For the donor. Again, obviously, the benefit is no fee and no being asked to tip nonstop. But beyond that, the donor is presented with an opportunity to engage with a company they would not necessarily have been presented otherwise. The curated nature of the ad placement allows for a more positive advertising experience rather than the negative experience most ads create.

I know, for me personally, I would much rather see strategic marketing in various parts of my life than only when I am trying to watch something. Donors also get to use their card of choice and get the credit card points. I have seen donors switch their donation method just to avoid a fee.

For the card networks and issuers. Amex, Mastercard, or whatever card the donor uses can benefit too. The pass-through fee model can push donors toward other payment methods when they are trying to avoid the fee. And if fewer gifts happen on cards, that means fewer card transactions.

So in our model, the donor can keep using the card they actually want to use, while someone other than the donor or nonprofit absorbs the fee. In that sense, the card side of the ecosystem can benefit too.

For the processor. The processor being us, Sapling Pay, and vendors we use like Stripe. We can also apply this model to whatever channels we build, such as if we use Chariot for DAF Pay.

In this case, a vendor like Stripe benefits simply because it is processing revenue. But for us at Sapling Pay, we are able to move more of our revenue stream to the sponsor rather than to the nonprofit. This keeps our fees lower all around.

If this model truly proves effective, we'd much rather charge a company than charge the nonprofit. After all, we want you to grow. Think of it like this: a major car insurance company (you know, the ones we are all subjugated to ads from for our entire lives) spends so much on marketing and sales. If they divert just a small percentage of that budget to this high-touch marketing through Sapling, we are able to charge a platform margin to them rather than to the nonprofit.

So that makes me certainly happy!

Then finally, the sponsors themselves. There are several reasons I think this is a great opportunity for them.

One, they receive a highly engaged audience with an interactive ad. Most other advertising channels you can easily ignore or skip. This is an active ad.

Two, we have the ability to curate high-value placement. There is synergy between something like The Farmer's Dog sponsoring an SPCA.

Three, this is a positive-experience ad placement. By that I mean, most ads we see today are negative placement. They purposely disrupt the viewing experience to show the ad. And, more often than not, the same ad is played to the same viewer over and over again. It is my belief that ad vendors do this on purpose to annoy the user enough to push them to pay extra for no ads. This hurts the viewer and the advertiser, as both would like a better connection between consumer and advertiser. (I love ads when they aren't cutting off my video! Especially if they are products or services that interest me!)

Sapling Sponsorship is the opposite. It is not disruptive; it is additive to the experience. On top of that, donors are in the process of making a gift, which is generally a positive experience. It is a joyful transaction to make. Therefore — some psychology here — I think some of that positive experience can rub off onto the sponsor, affecting the customer's view of them. (And likewise with negative ads: my sister and I joke there are some brands I will swear never to buy from just because their ads are shoved in our faces so much!)

Finally, and this is the biggest piece I think nonprofits should understand as they work with their own sponsors: the tax treatment of corporate sponsorships and advertising can differ depending on the structure. This is not tax advice; all parties should consult their CPA and attorney. A marketing placement may, depending on the facts and applicable tax rules, be treated differently from a charitable contribution. So beyond the brand and donor experience, there can also be a meaningful business reason for a sponsor to prefer a true marketing arrangement.

All around, I think what we have devised is quite a unique opportunity for all parties.

Where Sponsored Fees are today

I must end by saying: until we have more clients transacting, this program remains invite-only and, effectively, while supplies last. Meaning, transaction fees persist when a sponsorship runs out.

As we grow, though, we anticipate more sponsors filling in the gaps so that it can become a more consistent stream.

Sapling Pay is one of the most unique things in the space and certainly makes us different.

Yes, you can actually use Sapling today

At this point, after however many pages I just wrote, I should probably clarify something important: while not everything I described above is finished, Sapling is not a someday idea.

Today, you can import your data, get into Sapling, and get to work.

There is a real product here. Real nonprofit teams can bring in their data and start operating in the system today. Some of the bigger things I talked about above are still being built - and I have tried to be clear about that throughout this page - but we are not asking you to wait around for some theoretical future version of Sapling. We are building fast, and what is live today is useful today.

And if the thought of moving all your data makes you want to close this tab immediately, I get it. Switching CRMs can be awful. It should not be. Migration itself is part of the problem we are trying to solve. We built the importer to make that transition easier, and our team can help with the mapping, cleanup, import, and onboarding so you are not left alone with a giant CSV and a help article.

That matters to me because I do not want Sapling's answer to bad software to be, 'Good luck getting here.' The transition should be part of the experience too.

And this is just the beginning. I have so many more ideas for Sapling - more features, more tools, more workflows, and entirely new projects we intend to build. Some are already mapped out. Some are still living in my head. And I am sure more will come as we keep listening to nonprofit teams and learning where the next problem is.

What you see today is the foundation. We are nowhere near done. Not even close.

So explore the website. Look at the features. See what is live and what is coming. And if you want to actually see it, schedule a demo. I would love to show you.

Conclusion

If you read this far, first, let me say thank you. Please feel free to email me at alex@thesaplinggroup.com. I genuinely would love to know your thoughts and feedback. Both on how we can make our system better and what you might have experienced in the fundraising space or with other tech vendors.

If nothing else shines through, I hope the core question of ‘How is Sapling different?’ is answered. I get the question often, and the answer is, well, absolutely all of this. There is too much for one sentence.

A CRM — or, more accurately, a full fundraising operating system — is a big product. And it has been my goal to execute the entire suite as the answer to how we are different.

How I got here

As many of us like to say in fundraising, we all find ourselves falling into the space. I was thrown into it rather quickly, with little to no knowledge about any of it. I could hardly define what a 501(c)(3) nonprofit was, let alone a 501(c)(4) or a PAC. Or the many ways you could give, or the channels of fundraising, or any of it.

I was so naive that, in my first week as a mid-level gift officer, I sent a thank-you letter to an estate giver who had just recently passed and left a small gift in her will. What a generous legacy gift it was, but whoops — I had no idea ‘Estate of Jane Doe’ meant what it meant.

So you see what I mean. I was freshly thrown into the fundraising fray. And thank goodness, because it has been the most rewarding experience of my life. I learned it all very fast, and that's how we ended up here.

But throughout it all, there was one consistent issue.

The tech products. The software.

Expensive. Yet awful.

A love letter to the charity space

So this system, Sapling, is my love letter to the charity space. And while I hope to be a successful entrepreneur, and to grow our company, I hope it is clear that my paramount intention is to provide our space — and the dedicated activists in it — with a system that actually works.

Every button. Every page. Every little pixel.

Maybe you're a fundraising professional. Maybe you're a new activist starting an organization. Or maybe you are like me: you found yourself at a large charity, struggling to learn the first bit of what charity and fundraising really are.

(Which, if you haven't figured it out yet, the answer is — and always should be — relationship. Relationship always comes first.)

So whoever you are, Sapling is for you.

It will help you grow.

It's different.

-Alex