Discover the Best Free Proposal Management Software for Organizations

Best free proposal management software for organizations

as a business owner I know that software can be really expensive but one thing I found that a lot of pastors and church leaders don't know is that software in many cases for nonprofits can be totally free or deeply discounted today I'm going to break down for you 10 softwares and services that churches can get for free or at an incredibly Deep Discount let's do this hey guys I'm Thomas here from reach right we put out new content like this every single week so if this is the kind of content that you're into hit that subscribe button and if you know of any software that your church uses that you're not spending any money on let us know down in the comments now in my experience many pastors are totally unaware of the fact that software companies actually give away their software in many cases to nonprofit organizations and in almost every one of those cases churches are also eligible so in this video I wanted to break down the 10 that I thought were of the most value to churches 10 softwares that are either deeply discounted or totally free for churches now the list isn't in any kind of particular order and in fact I think number nine is probably the one that'll get most churches the most value but if there is one that your church is taking advantage of that I don't talk about in this video I would love to hear about it in the comments and I'm sure the entire reach right Community would appreciate that too but let's dig in the first one is Microsoft Office we've been using using Microsoft Office for years I'm sure you have to products like Word and Excel and if you don't know they actually pivoted not too long ago to a subscription model used to be that you would buy it year in and year out and you'd pay maybe about $100 for each one of those but they actually switched over to a model where you pay a monthly subscription to access the entire Suite of services that Microsoft gives this includes software like word excel PowerPoint Microsoft teams and a whole host of other software really this is their entire work suite and for a company like mine it costs $6 per user per month for even their basic program so even a small Church would normally pay a lot of money for this but for nonprofits and churches are included this is totally free now the one exclusion is you can't be one of the largest churches in the country because there's a limit of only 300 seats but for the vast vast majority of churches and nonprofits this is a totally scot-free software that you're probably already paying for anyway the second one is kind of like the first but I think it's even more valuable it's the Google workspace Suite now Google has an entire Google for nonprofit section on their website you can check that out and we have links to all of these down in the description below but the Google workspace value is enormous first and foremost you get access to their entire Gmail suite and maybe you're wondering well I thought Gmail was free well this is actually the professional version of Gmail so you can use your own Church's email address so you can be pastor at firstbaptist.org and not have to use a gmail.com address so huge value there you also get access to the entire Google drive with lots of storage and all of their apps that come with it as well as Google meet and a host of other software you just need to apply for Google for nonprofits and this can be yours the third software is QuickBooks now for a long time churches have been using QuickBooks especially their nonprofit specific software back when I first got started in Ministry QuickBooks is what we use to handle all of our accounting and the fact that they have discounts for nonprofits is a huge value they pivoted to a fully online monthly subscription model and it is not cheap the online plus Edition which is what most churches would probably use is $85 every single month and get this for a nonprofit the price is actually only $75 for a whole year so that's over 90% off of the normal price that I would pay as a business owner that you don't have to pay when you're pastoring a church huge discount you can actually also get some of the older desktop versions I think the last one was 2020 and you can buy that for $65 outright as a nonprofit so enormous discounts there for churches now here's number four and I think this one is probably one of the most valuable ones for churches it's the Adobe Creative Cloud yes I'm talking about the full Adobe suite that includes Photoshop that includes illustrator premier Pro if you do audio still audition that's all of the Adobe software that for an individual usually costs about $55 every single month and if you're part of a business they actually charge you even more we pay $85 a month per person so that can obviously add up really fast for businesses but for churches you can actually get the entire Creative Cloud for only $19.95 a month they say that that's for one year but I've seen that that's been going on year after year and I don't see any sign of that changing but they guarantee they'll give you at least a 40% discount for every following year so if you're like most churches and you have lots of creative needs or you want to be editing your sermons with the best software possible which we believe Premiere still probably is you definitely want to get on this discount number five is really a great one it's HootSuite if you're not familiar with it hoot site is a social media posting software similar to something like buffer or what we use here at re right Vista Social what you can do is you can set up all of your Social profiles on Facebook and Tik Tok and Instagram and YouTube and any other social media platform you can think of you can set them up on hoot site so that you can write one post or write all of your posts within the hoot site software and it'll automatically post that content to your desired social platforms it really takes your social media management time and it can probably cut it into about a third hoot is not cheap in fact for one user you're talking about $100 a month and it's closer to$ 250 if you have a team of three us users at your church there now compare that with the nonprofit price it's only $24.50 for an individual per month and only $64 for a team of three people per month now that's a huge discount and if it were up to me I probably would go with HootSuite if I could get it for that price but because I'm not set up as a 501c3 I'm not eligible but if you're a church you most likely are so you should definitely take advantage of that here's number six slack now if you don't know what slack is it is a communication tool that you can use mostly for team members and staff members at your church to make sure everybody is in constant contact and manage all of your Communications in one place we use it here at reach Rite and it's great because we can always go back and search everything that we've ever said to one another because every single message we've ever sent is saved we use it every day as our primary communication tool here at reach right and everybody on our team is on it and we pay a lot of money for that the normal price for slack is $7.25 per user per month at least for the level that we're on and the one that most nonprofits will want to use for churches that same Pro Plan that I'm paying all that money for cost nothing absolutely free they give it to you so long as you have under 250 seats in slack it'll cost you nothing now number seven is zoom now we all use zoom and in fact Zoom I have kind of a LoveHate relationship with whenever I think of Zoom it reminds me of the pandemic and all of those times that I spent on Zoom calls that frankly I'm really not cut out for and don't really like them very much maybe you have better feelings about Zoom but the fact remains it is the best video conferencing software out there and if that's something that your church does you probably are using Zoom because that's what everybody seems to use and if you're a church you can use it at a deep discount here at rri we use it for all of our sales and all of our support staff and we pay $15.99 for every single user in our company for Zoom so we're actually paying zoom over $10000 every single month just to handle this video conferencing within our company here for churches you actually get a 50% discount so that $15.99 actually turns into about $8 every single month if this is something your church will use it's a really good value and you should definitely look into it number eight is Constant Contact now if you're not familiar with it Constant Contact is a broadcast email service similar to a MailChimp and other softwares like it it's a tool that you would use to send out your weekly or regular emails within your church as well as to build sequences that you would send out to new people when they're taking new steps at your church someone comes for the first time you'd use Constant Contact to send out a series of emails over a period of time that would help someone take that next step within your church it's really a great piece of software they actually have nonprofit pricing that is a really great value so let's say you have a thousand people on your list with constant contact the normal pricing would be about $30 a month for that kind of a package well for nonprofits you get that cut in half it's only $15 a month and that's as long as you're a client of Constant Contact so really a great value for churches it's something you should probably look into if you don't have another mail service that you absolutely love let me say this we've done a whole bunch of episodes about how to do email for churches right if you're just using your Gmail account to do it that's doing it wrong now number nine I told you this is the one that I thought was the best value for churches and it's not technically a piece of software and it's actually tied to another one but it is the Google Grant we already mentioned Google workspace and part of Google for nonprofits is also this Google Grant and what is the Google Grant well it is $10,000 every single month in free ads on the Google search Network whenever you go into Google and you do a search usually the first thing you will see is a few different ads so when people are looking for churches in my area well your church can come up there and you can direct them to your website and they can learn more about your services if you do marriage counseling at your church you can do ads for marriage counseling if you do a vacation bible school and have lots of children's programming you can do ads that'll Target moms looking for things to do with their kids now is the Google grant for everybody well maybe maybe not now almost every church is eligible as long as you have a 501c3 but I will say it can be a little bit hard to manage and for most churches if you don't really know what you're doing spending all $10,000 can be a real challenge that's why here at reach right we're actually the leading provider for churches in helping them manage Google Grant we'll have a link below if you're looking for some help in managing the Google Grant but you have no excuse to not get this it is $110,000 a month in free ads you just have to get out there and take it now lastly and this might not be for every church but as a nonprofit you get a big discount on a SAA well what is a sauna it's actually a project management software that we have used here at reach right it's a great way to manage all of those things that are bigger than maybe your week to week items but bigger term projects and for churches this this is really a great tool for things like sermon series planning event planning just because there's so many steps and often so many people involved you want to have a record of who's doing what and when are those things du by and ASA is a great tool for that for organizations like mine we pay about $13.50 every single month for every user within our Organization for churches you actually get a flat 50% off and that's really a great value you can save a ton of money doing that now there's one exclusion I do want to mention but I don't think it's going to be an issue for you religious organizations that exist to solely propagate a belief in a specific Faith or do not provide services to people outside of a specific Faith are not eligible for the discount now for churches let's be honest if we're doing our things and will only serve people that are within our faith we're probably not doing what Jesus called us to do so I think it's pretty clear that we should be eligible for this but maybe you've run into issues applying with Assa and they've rejected you for some reason I'd love to hear about that let me know down in the comments now like I said before we've left links down in the description below to all of these discounts so you can learn more but one of the common denominators is that in most cases you're going to have to go through Tech soup in order to apply and receive each one of these discounts here what is Tech soup well it's a company that just verifies your nonprofit status we've done a lot of partnership with tech soup here at reite it's a great company we've been helping churches get approved with Tech soup for years especially for the Google Grant process it's usually pretty painless but they actually get you approved for each one of these discounts and prove to the company that you are who you say you are and that you're a legitimate nonprofit you should be able to handle those things easily but here's what I want to know does your church have a software that you use or some other service that you get a big discount for for being a nonprofit I'd love to hear about what it is let everybody else know and maybe we can get the word out there and save some other churches some money just like you've been saving let us know down in the comments also hit that subscribe button hit the like button and we'll see you next time