Bloomerang: donor retention software, and the four hours it never sees

That makes it serious software, and a strange thing to be handed six weeks before a gala. The question people ring me about is one evening in November with a target on it, and retention is a twelve-month measure.

I read the pricing page, the subscription terms, the retention calculator and HMRC’s supplier list in October 2026. The figures below come from those, not from a review site.

What is Bloomerang, and what does it sell?

Bloomerang sells relationships with donors over years, described on its own homepage as intelligent fundraising software built for purpose. Three products sit inside the Giving Platform: Bloomerang CRM for donor management, Bloomerang Fundraising for donation forms, events and auctions, and Bloomerang Volunteer.

It has grown by buying. Qgiv, the event and auction platform, was acquired in 2024, and the Qgiv site now carries a banner saying it is now Bloomerang Fundraising. Kindful, another CRM, describes itself as a Bloomerang product.

So the auction capability is real, and it is Qgiv’s: app and web bidding with outbid alerts, guest registration, check-in, checkout and fund-a-need appeals. Nobody should tell you Bloomerang cannot run a silent auction.

What does Bloomerang cost in October 2026?

Three published starting prices, in dollars, all billed annually. The pricing page lists Bloomerang CRM from $125 a month, Bloomerang Fundraising from $40, and Bloomerang Volunteer from $119.

Read the asterisk. Fundraising is not sold alone, so the event tools arrive on top of the CRM rather than instead of it, and auctions sit above that with no figure attached.

The subscription terms fill in the rest. Fees are arranged into tiers by the range of records in your database, with extra fees possible for going over on constituents, emails or storage. The initial term is two years, renewing automatically in one-year blocks unless you give written notice at least 45 days before the end.

None of that is sharp practice. It is a normal American software contract. It is still a two-year commitment made on behalf of an events team whose plan may change by spring.

Will Bloomerang work for a UK charity, and what about Gift Aid?

It will hold your donors. It will not file your Gift Aid. HMRC’s supplier list for Charities Online, updated on 13 October 2026, names neither Bloomerang nor Qgiv, so the claim stays a job for your finance volunteer or another tool.

The rest of the UK picture follows from the pricing page: dollars, billed by ACH or card, with the agreement governed by the laws of Indiana and disputes heard in Indianapolis. The FAQ names no currencies and no countries. Data protection is handled: the GDPR page says that if you have constituents in the EU the regulation applies to you wherever you are, and consent preferences are built in.

For a British gala that matters, because the 25% is not a feature. HMRC lets you claim on gifts but not on a payment for goods or services, and auctions carry their own special rules. That is why a £100 pledge reaches the charity as £125 while the lot next to it reaches £100, and why auction Gift Aid is worth getting right months before the night.

Where does the retention number come from?

From the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, and it depends which figure you are shown. Bloomerang’s retention calculator measures your result against a 42% industry average, while the same page says rates have hovered around 45% for a decade, and its own FEP analysis reports retention holding at around 18% in the first quarter of 2026.

Those are different populations rather than contradictions, but a calculator does not say so. The pricing page offers a fourth: 47% first-time donor retention among the top 20% of Bloomerang customers against an industry average of 19%.

That is a top-quintile result, and it is the thing I would ask a salesperson about. Not because anyone is being dishonest, but because the number justifying the subscription should describe the typical customer rather than the best fifth.

What retention cannot do in four hours

Bloomerang’s own data makes the point better than I can.

Its analysis of the FEP figures puts year-to-date retention at 7.4% for a one-time donor and 88.1% for somebody who has given seven times or more. The whole value of retention software is in moving somebody from the first bar to the second.

Now count what your gala produces. Ten lots in a room of two hundred means ten winners, and a winner is a purchaser: no Gift Aid, no declaration, and in retention terms not a donor at all. The hundred and ninety who were willing and had nothing left to bid on produce no record at all.

A tiered pledge in the same room produces dozens of gifts in three minutes, each with a name, an amount and a declaration attached. That is what a CRM can work on in February.

So the retention machine is downstream of a decision made months earlier: whether the evening was designed to create buyers or donors. No software makes that choice for you, and pledge design is where it gets made.

What Bloomerang does well

The thesis, first. Fundraisers chase new donors because new donors feel like progress, and the gift-frequency ladder says the money is in the second gift. Bloomerang has argued that for years, and the sector is better for it.

The housekeeping is strong too: nightly data stewardship, duplicate matching, deceased suppression, unlimited users on the CRM, and an answer on data ownership that says you can export at any time with no migration hurdles.

And the auction half is genuinely built, which plenty of CRMs cannot say.

Where does the Generosity Works platform fit?

In the four hours, next to whatever you keep for the other 361 days.

I built the platform myself around one night working properly: ticketing and check-in, cards taken at registration and charged when the hammer falls, lots on a schedule somebody holds, the gala screen, an offline event server for when the hotel basement lets you down, and Gift Aid capture on the pledge as it is given rather than on a clipboard afterwards. Payments run through the charity’s own Stripe account, so nothing is added to Stripe’s standard rate and no percentage is taken.

It is free when a charity books me as auctioneer and host, and my fee is the only money Generosity Works takes. The platform is not sold on its own; our pricing page explains why. One fee agreed up front, whatever the room gives. The hire itself lives on my charity auctioneer site.

The database is the easy half. What goes into it is decided in four hours.

If you have a number to hit this year, book a discovery call. Let’s talk about your number.