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Charity management software for Jewish charities
Donor records, appeals, pledges, Gift Aid, Achisomoch giving and your accounts in one system, built around how this community actually raises money rather than adapted from a CRM that has never heard of a matched-funding day.
The problem
The CRM knows the donor. The spreadsheet knows the appeal.
Most Jewish charities of any size end up with a donor database that is technically fine and practically half-used, because the parts of the year that matter most happen outside it. The matched-funding day runs on a spreadsheet, because the CRM cannot do matchers. Achisomoch giving is keyed in by hand, because the CRM has never heard of it. Pledges live in someone's inbox.
By the time the year is reported on, the database holds a partial picture and the real answers are assembled from four places by the one person who knows where they all are.
What it covers
One system for the whole giving cycle
Donor CRM
One record per donor and household: every gift, every appeal they have supported, pledges outstanding, and which member of staff looks after them. The giving history is the profile, not an attachment to it.
Appeals and campaigns
Targets, live totals, matched giving with named matchers, and a public appeal page that updates itself. Run the matched-funding day without a spreadsheet behind it.
Pledges
A pledge is tracked from the moment it is made to the moment it is paid, with what is outstanding visible rather than remembered. The gap between pledged and collected is usually the largest number nobody can produce on demand.
Gift Aid
Declarations captured once and applied to every eligible gift, with the claim schedule produced for HMRC, and Achisomoch giving correctly excluded, because AAC already claimed it.
Achisomoch payments
Donors give straight from their AAC account online, with the payment attached to their record automatically instead of a voucher being keyed in by hand.
Income import and reconciliation
Import bank, Stripe and Achisomoch statements from CSV or Excel. Re-importing the same file does not create duplicates, and repeat gifts are flagged rather than silently doubled.
Departments
Run several appeals, funds or arms of the organisation under one roof, with income filed to each and reportable separately.
Accounts and communications
Expenses and income categories, Xero sync, and bulk email to donor segments, so the finance picture and the donor conversation come out of the same data.
Why not a general CRM
What the big charity platforms cannot do
Donorfy, Beacon, ThankQ and Salesforce NPSP are good products. If your giving looks like a mainstream UK charity's, use one of them. The reason charities in this community end up with spreadsheets alongside them is that four things never fit:
- Achisomoch. A large share of giving arrives from AAC accounts, and no general platform can take it online or knows that its Gift Aid has already been claimed. See how Achisomoch payments work in Kehilla.
- Matched appeals. Named matchers, a live pool, and a public total that has to be right in front of thousands of people for twenty-four hours.
- The Jewish year. Giving spikes at Purim, before Pesach and around Yom Tov, and communications must not land on Shabbat or Yom Tov. A system that treats the year as twelve equal months is wrong about the two weeks that fund you.
- Households, not individuals. Giving is a family act here far more often than the mainstream model assumes.
Questions
Common questions
- Is Kehilla only for synagogues?
- No. Kehilla runs for Jewish charities as well as shuls. A charity account uses the language a charity uses: contacts rather than members, transactions rather than invoices, appeals rather than campaigns. The modules that do not apply, such as davening times and yahrzeits, are simply not there.
- How is this different from Donorfy, Beacon or Salesforce?
- Those are strong general-purpose charity CRMs. What none of them handle is the specifically Jewish part of how this community gives: Achisomoch accounts, the giving spikes around Purim, Pesach and Yom Tov, matched-funding appeal days, and Gift Aid that has to know which giving has already been claimed by AAC. Those gaps get filled with spreadsheets, which is where the CRM stops being the single source of truth.
- Can donors give through Achisomoch?
- Yes, directly on your donate or appeal page. The gift is authorised against your own AAC campaign, attached to the donor's record automatically, and correctly excluded from your Gift Aid claim because Achisomoch already claimed it when the donor funded their account.
- Can we run more than one appeal or fund at once?
- Yes. Appeals run in parallel with their own targets, matched-giving pools and public pages, and income can be filed to separate departments so each arm of the organisation reports on its own figures.
- Can we import our existing donor data?
- Yes, from CSV or Excel, with your columns mapped to Kehilla's fields, including household links and giving history. Bank, Stripe and Achisomoch statements import the same way, and re-importing a file you have already loaded will not duplicate what is in it.
- Does it sync with our accounts?
- Kehilla syncs invoices and payments to Xero, so the fundraising system and the accounts stop being two separate versions of the same year.
Read next
See it with your own donor data
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