Jotform for nonprofits: tickets and waivers

Nonprofits and community organizers work under real financial constraints. Every dollar spent on software is a dollar not going toward the mission, and yet running donor relationships, ticketed galas, and volunteer rosters off paper or scattered spreadsheets tends to cost money too, just less visibly, in missed donations and chaotic event days.

Jotform gets recommended a lot in the nonprofit world, largely because of the permanent 50% discount it offers qualified charitable organizations across every paid tier.

No cut taken on donations

Plenty of dedicated fundraising platforms take 3% to 5% off the top of every donation, on top of the card processing fees that get charged regardless of which platform is used. Over a $100,000 annual campaign, that 3% to 5% platform cut alone works out to $3,000 to $5,000 walking out the door every single year, not a one-time setup cost.

Jotform takes nothing. You connect your own processor, Stripe, PayPal, or Square, and pay only the standard processing rate, which often comes with a nonprofit discount of its own. Donors can give once or set up a recurring monthly pledge right through the form. Factor in the nonprofit discount and a Bronze plan, normally $34 a month, runs about $17, call it $200 a year, for an organization that would otherwise be handing several thousand dollars a year to a platform fee on the donations alone.

Tax receipts that don't eat a week of admin time

Manually mailing tax substantiation letters to hundreds of donors every December is a slog, and getting the required IRS language wrong or leaving it out entirely is the kind of mistake that only surfaces months later when a donor's accountant asks where the receipt is. With Jotform's PDF Editor, each donation formats automatically into a branded receipt with the organization's tax ID, the donation amount, the date, and the required "no goods or services were provided in exchange for this contribution" language (or an accurate description of what was provided, for a gala ticket or auction item), then attaches to a confirmation email that goes out within seconds of the gift.

That immediacy matters for the donor relationship as much as for compliance. A receipt that lands in someone's inbox before they've even closed the donation tab reinforces that the gift went through and was appreciated, instead of a form letter arriving eight weeks later that reads as an afterthought. For a volunteer-run development team without a dedicated bookkeeper, automating that single task is often worth more than any other feature on this list.

Worth being clear about what this doesn't cover: the ongoing donor newsletter, the year-end giving push, the automated thank-you sequence that goes out weeks after a gift lands. Jotform's own notification emails are built for transactional receipts, not for that kind of campaign. A dedicated email platform like AWeber still does more on that front, list segmentation by giving history, scheduled sends, and deliverability tooling built specifically for recurring sends, none of which Jotform tries to replace. The two tools end up covering different halves of the same donor relationship rather than competing for the same job.

Kiosk Mode for event day

During a gala, a 5K, or a volunteer day, onsite registration is where things tend to go sideways. The Jotform Mobile app's Kiosk Mode turns any iPad or Android tablet into a self-service check-in station:

• The screen locks to the form, so nobody wanders off into the browser or another app.
• It resets itself: once a volunteer signs their waiver through Jotform Sign, the screen clears for the next person immediately.
• It works offline: if the event's in a park with no signal, submissions save locally and sync once Wi-Fi comes back.

What a charity actually pays

Registered nonprofits get 50% off Bronze, Silver and Gold, and 30% off Enterprise. That makes Silver — 2,500 submissions a month across 50 forms — roughly the price of a couple of coffees a week, which is below the level most boards need to discuss.

Size it from your event, not your average month. A gala with 300 ticket sales, 40 volunteer sign-ups and a raffle entry form is a thousand submissions in a fortnight and nothing for the rest of the quarter. If your year has two big events in it, the monthly reset works in your favour — pay for the peak months and drop back afterwards.

The quota that does not reset is storage, and it is the one that catches charities with a photo consent form or scanned documents attached to volunteer records. Export each year's paperwork and clear it rather than letting five years accumulate against a 1 GB allowance.

Where it falls short for fundraising

Being clear about this matters, because the gap is wider than the ticketing side suggests. A form collects a donation. It does not manage a donor.

There is no donor record that accumulates a giving history, so the question "who gave last year and has not given this year" is a spreadsheet exercise rather than a report. There is no recurring-giving management — you can take a recurring payment through Stripe, but nothing is watching for a lapsed card or flagging a monthly donor who quietly stopped. There is no peer-to-peer fundraising, so a supporter cannot run their own sponsored-run page under your campaign. And in the UK there is no Gift Aid handling: you can collect the declaration on the form, and claiming it is still a separate job in a spreadsheet.

Donorbox, Givebutter and the rest do all of that, and most take a platform percentage on top of card processing — which is exactly the cost Jotform avoids by taking nothing. For a small charity running two events a year, keeping the whole platform fee is worth more than a donor CRM nobody has time to maintain. For one running a sustained individual-giving programme, the CRM is the product and the percentage is the price of it.

Check eligibility and apply for the reduced rate directly on Jotform's pricing page.