TL;DR: Before you sign with any donor platform, check four things you cannot easily undo: who owns your data in the contract, what a self-serve export actually includes, whose name is on the payment account, and how renewal pricing is capped. Get each answer in writing.
If you leave a donor platform, your data should come with you in a format you can open anywhere, your donors' saved payment methods should stay in an account your organization owns, and your contract should already say so. Most platforms can meet some of that. Very few are asked to prove it.
This guide is written to be useful whichever platform you choose, including one that is not ours.
Why is feature comparison the wrong place to start?
Every platform evaluation starts with a feature grid, and it is the least durable part of the decision. Features converge. The thing one vendor demos as unique this year tends to show up everywhere within two or three. Roadmaps move, interfaces get redesigned, and the support team you met in the sales process may not be the one answering your tickets in year three.
What does not move is the agreement. Whose name is on the data, what happens to your donors' payment details, and how much your price can rise at renewal are written down once and then quietly shape every year after.
A development director who picks a platform with a slightly weaker email builder can live with it. A development director who discovers in year three that their export leaves out half their records, or that moving means asking every monthly donor to re-enter a card, has a much bigger problem, and by then the time to negotiate it has passed.
So start with the questions that are hard to change later. Features still matter. They are just easier to fix afterward than the terms are.
What are the three decisions you cannot undo?
Almost everything about a donor platform can be changed after you sign. You can rebuild reports, redesign giving pages, retrain your team and add integrations. Three things are much harder to change, and they compound the longer you stay.
1. Who owns the records. Your donor history, recurring gift tokensrecords, notes and relationship data are the most valuable thing your development office has built. Ownership should be stated in the contract in plain words, not implied by a marketing page. If the contract is silent, you are relying on goodwill.
2. Whether your donors' payment relationships travel with you. Recurring donors are usually the steadiest revenue a nonprofit has. Whether their saved payment methods sit in an account you own, or in an account the platform owns, decides whether a future move is an inconvenience or a fundraising setback.
3. Whether your price is bounded. The first-year price is the one you negotiate. The price in years three, four and five is set by a renewal clause most people never read. An uncapped renewal can end up costing more over the life of the relationship than any difference in headline price.
The rest of this guide takes each of these in turn, then covers what "included" really means, how fees stack up on a single gift, and how to raise all of it in a demo.
What does "export" mean when you want to leave?
Nearly every platform says it supports data export. That sentence covers a wide range of reality, and the gap between "we support export" and "you can leave cleanly" is where organizations get stuck.
Three distinctions matter.
Self-serve or support-mediated. Can someone on your team produce a full export from the settings, today, without emailing anyone? Or is export something you request, wait for and depend on the vendor to fulfil? If you need the vendor's cooperation to get your own records out, you do not fully control them, and that cooperation tends to slow down right when you give notice.
Universal or proprietary format. CSV or a standard spreadsheet format opens in anything and loads into any other system. A proprietary backup file that only the original platform can read is not really an export.
Complete or partial. Contacts and gifts are almost always included. Ask specifically about the categories that are often missed:
- Files and documents attached to records, such as scanned pledge forms, grant letters and donor correspondence
- Soft credits and household relationships
- Custom fields and their full history
- Notes, tasks and activity history
- Recurring donation tokens and ability to move donors from their payment processor
One more thing to confirm: how long you keep access after the contract ends. You want a specific number of days in the agreement, during which you can still log in and pull your data. "We will work with you" is not a number.
For a step-by-step view of moving data between systems, see our nonprofit CRM migration checklist.
Why are payment tokens the cost nobody tells you?
When organizations price a platform move, they count the migration fee, the staff time and the training. The cost that rarely makes it into the proposal is the recurring giving program.
Here is why. When a donor sets up a monthly gift, their card or bank details are saved as a payment method, often called a token, inside a payment processor account. Whoever owns that processor account controls those tokens. There are two common setups:
- The nonprofit owns the account. The organization connects its own payment processor account, in its own name, to the donor platform. The donors' payment methods live in the organization's account.
- The platform owns the account. The platform processes gifts through an account it controls, and the organization receives payouts. The donors' payment methods live with the platform.
In the first setup, leaving the platform does not take the payment methods with it. They are still in your account. In the second, you depend on the platform agreeing to transfer them, and on the transfer working. If it does not, every monthly donor has to be asked to enter their details again, and some of them will not. A monthly donor who quietly drops off during a system change is one of the most avoidable losses in fundraising, and it is the opposite of the steady, relationship-first stewardship a recurring program exists to support.
Even when you own the account, not everything moves automatically. Be precise about what travels:
- Saved payment methods stay in your account. If your next platform can connect to that same account, they are already in place.
- If you switch payment processors entirely, major processors can transfer card data to another compliant processor at the account owner's request. Stripe, for example, will transfer card data to another processor that meets the PCI DSS Level 1 security standard.
- Recurring schedules usually do not transfer as-is. The record that says "charge this card $50 on the 15th of every month" often has to be recreated on the new platform, even when the card itself moves cleanly. Ask how the new platform handles that step.
- Donor-facing tools, such as a portal where donors update their own card, belong to the platform and do not come with you.
The questions to ask are simple. Whose name is on the payment processing account? If I leave, do my recurring donors have to do anything? Who does the work of recreating the schedules?
Moving in the other direction, into a new platform, raises the same questions. See how recurring gifts move into DonorDock, and what a well-run recurring giving program looks like once they arrive.
Which contract clauses set your price over time?
The pricing page shows what you pay this year. Three clauses in the agreement decide what you pay after that.
The renewal increase cap. Does the agreement limit how much the price can rise at renewal? Many agreements have no cap at all, which means your renewal price is whatever the vendor decides it is that year. A written cap, even a generous one, turns an open question into a known ceiling. Read the wording closely. Some caps are a flat percentage. Others are tied to inflation, or to "the greater of" a percentage and inflation, which means the ceiling can rise in a high-inflation year.
The auto-renewal notice window. Most subscription agreements renew automatically unless one side gives notice. The key detail is how far ahead you have to give it. Thirty, sixty and ninety days are all common. Put the date in your calendar on the day you sign, because the most common way to end up in a contract you meant to leave is missing a notice window you forgot existed.
What meters. Find out which parts of the bill grow as you do. Contact records, users, emails sent, text messages, automations and storage are all metered by some platforms and not others. Ask for the per-unit price of each and do the arithmetic for where you expect to be in three years, not where you are today.
Put together, these three clauses usually say more about the total cost of a platform than the headline monthly price does. A lower sticker price with no renewal cap and heavy metering can end up costing more over five years than a higher price with a written ceiling. For a wider view of evaluating total cost, the twelve questions in our nonprofit CRM buyer's guide cover partnership and fit alongside price.
How much of a $100 gift reaches your mission?
Fees are where transparency gets tested, so it is worth walking through a single gift. Online donations usually carry two layers of cost.
Payment processing. The payment processor charges a percentage plus a fixed amount per transaction. Stripe's standard US card rate is 2.9% plus 30 cents, and eligible nonprofits can apply for a discounted rate, typically 2.2% plus 30 cents.
A platform fee. Many donor platforms add their own percentage on top of processing. Some charge none and price the subscription higher instead. Others charge a platform fee and a subscription.
Here is how a $100 online gift works out on a platform with a 2% platform fee and nonprofit-discounted processing:
- Gift: $100.00
- Processing (2.2% + $0.30): $2.50
- Platform fee (2%): $2.00
- Reaches your organization: $95.50
When you compare platforms, ask each one to fill in this breakdown for a $100 gift and a $1,000 gift, including whether donors can choose to cover the fees, what changes at higher volume, and whether any fee applies to gifts made outside online giving, such as checks you enter by hand.
The numbers above are DonorDock's: a 2% platform fee on online donations, plus standard processing. We have written them out here because a guide about transparency that is coy about its own publisher's fee would not be worth reading.
What does evaluating three platforms on these terms look like?
To show the method in practice, here is an evaluation of three platforms. These are examples, not real vendors. Each one combines answers we have seen across the market, so you can see how responses differ and what a strong answer sounds like. None describes any specific company.
- Platform A (example): data ownership stated in one clear sentence in the terms; self-serve export from settings as spreadsheets; the nonprofit owns the payment account; no renewal cap in writing.
- Platform B (example): ownership claimed on a marketing page but the terms are silent; export by support request in 5 to 10 business days; the platform owns the payment account; renewal capped in writing at a flat 5%.
- Platform C (example): ownership stated, but export after cancellation is “at our discretion”; self-serve export in a proprietary backup format; the platform owns the payment account; no renewal cap and a 90-day non-renewal notice.
Read across the three and a pattern appears. Platform A is strong on data and payments. Platform B has the best renewal terms and the weakest exit: support-mediated export plus a platform-owned payment account means leaving would depend on the vendor's cooperation at every step. Platform C looks open on the surface, but a discretionary post-cancellation window and a proprietary format make its export much less useful than it sounds, and the long notice window is easy to miss.
The point of asking is to know exactly which risks you are accepting, and to negotiate the ones that matter most to you before you sign, while you still can.
Where does DonorDock stand?
- Data ownership: our Terms say DonorDock does not own any of your data in Section 11.
- Export: self-serve backup from Organization Settings, as spreadsheets. Files attached to individual records are not included in the bulk export, but can be requested through support.
- After you leave: your data stays available for export in CSV for at least thirty days, and we delete it within ninety days, with notice first, for security.
- Payments: every organization connects its own Stripe account, in its own name.
- Renewal: increases are capped at 7% or inflation, whichever is greater, with sixty days' notice of any change. Subscriptions renew automatically unless either side gives sixty days' notice.
- Fees: a 2% platform fee on online donations, plus standard processing.
The full list, with links to each source, is on our Open Platform page.
