Your charity may give services to people. Advice, housing support, mental health, employment or help with domestic abuse. You then need case management software, and not a fundraising CRM. This article compares the main UK platforms for managing beneficiary casework, covering safeguarding, outcome tracking, GDPR compliance, and funder reporting. It also explains when off-the-shelf tools fall short and a bespoke system makes more sense.
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This is the single biggest source of confusion in charity software. A fundraising CRM (Beacon, Donorfy, Blackbaud Raiser's Edge) manages the donor relationship: who gave what, when, and how to cultivate them for future giving. The "customer" in a fundraising CRM is the donor. If your charity needs a fundraising CRM, see our charity CRM comparison instead.
Case management software manages service delivery to beneficiaries. The "customer" is the person receiving help. The data model is fundamentally different. You are tracking needs assessments, referrals, case notes, safeguarding concerns, and whether someone's circumstances actually improved as a result of your intervention.
The core functions of case management software are:
A fundraising CRM does none of this well. Charities that try to force beneficiary case management into Beacon or Donorfy end up maintaining spreadsheets alongside the CRM, which defeats the purpose. For more on the distinction between donor management and service delivery, see our guide to donor management and Gift Aid.
The table below covers the platforms most commonly used by UK service delivery charities. Pricing is indicative and may have changed since publication. Always check current pricing directly with the provider.
| Platform | Pricing Model | Safeguarding | Outcome Tracking | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Charitylog | Income-based. From £1,995 setup + £400/yr (small charities). Unlimited users on all plans. | Case workflows with audit trails. No dedicated safeguarding module. | Outcome recording with monetary value tracking. Progress interval reporting. | Advice charities, Citizens Advice branches, generalist service delivery |
| Lamplight | Per-user modular. Typically £20-40/user/month plus implementation. ISO 27001 accredited. | Dedicated safeguarding module: concern-raising workflow, escalation, DBS tracking with expiry reminders. | Strong outcomes measurement. Demographic and ward-level reporting. | Charities focused on outcomes measurement and funder compliance |
| In-Form (Homeless Link) | Three tiers. Community tier free for Homeless Link members (up to 5 users). £2,500 bursary available. | Built on Salesforce. Configurable safeguarding workflows. | Outcomes Stars built in as standard. Client progress dashboards. | Housing and homelessness charities |
| Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud | 10 free licences. Paid from $60/user/month. Implementation costs typically £20,000 to £100,000+. | Case management with intake, referrals, case plans, and incident tracking. Requires configuration. | Program Management Module: engagements, service deliveries, cohorts, assessments. | Large charities with budget for implementation and ongoing admin |
| Views | Custom pricing. Typically used by larger charities and housing associations. | Configurable workflows for safeguarding recording and escalation. | Outcome frameworks with pre/post measurement. Funder report generation. | Multi-service charities and housing associations with complex reporting needs |
The longest-running UK charity CRM, used by about 1,000 organisations. Charitylog is strongest in the advice sector, where it dominates among Citizens Advice bureaux, Age UK branches, and generalist advice agencies. Its income-based pricing with unlimited user licences makes it attractive for charities with many staff and volunteers who need system access.
You can set your own work stages. You can send a referral to another organisation electronically. You can record a money value against an outcome. That last one helps an advice charity show the value of the benefit claims it wins. Progress interval reporting lets you measure how long cases take at each stage.
The main limitations are a traditional interface, limited API and integration options compared to newer platforms, and no dedicated safeguarding module. You can record safeguarding concerns within the case management workflow, but it is not a structured, purpose-built process.
Used by over 700 UK nonprofits, Lamplight is the strongest option for charities that prioritise outcomes measurement and safeguarding compliance. It is built in parts, so you add only what you need. The safeguarding part gives you a set order of steps. Raise a concern. Tell the Safeguarding Manager. Assess it. Name a Lead Contact. Record every action. Sign it off. DBS check tracking with automatic expiry reminders is included.
Lamplight is ISO 27001 accredited, which matters for charities handling sensitive beneficiary data. You pay for each user, usually £20 to £40 a month. That gets expensive for a large team. Moving your data in costs £58 an hour, plus VAT. You cannot self-serve pricing; a tailored quote is required.
Built on Salesforce and designed specifically for housing and homelessness charities, In-Form is used by over 300 organisations and 22,000 staff. Its best part is the Outcomes Stars it contains. These are standard measuring tools, such as the Homelessness Star and the Recovery Star. They let the whole sector measure outcomes the same way.
The Community level is free for a Homeless Link member with up to 5 users. A £2,500 bursary helps members who qualify with the set-up cost. The limitation is sector specificity: if your charity does not work in housing or homelessness, In-Form is unlikely to be the right fit.
Salesforce offers 10 free licences to eligible nonprofits through the Power of Us Program. The platform has a Program Management Module. It follows contacts, services given, and groups of people. The case management part covers intake, referrals, case plans, notes, incidents and assessments.
The platform is enormously flexible. It is also enormously complex. Implementation costs routinely dwarf licence costs, with first-year total cost of ownership typically ranging from £20,000 to over £100,000. Research consistently shows that around 40% of Salesforce features go unused in nonprofit deployments. For small to mid-sized service delivery charities, this is usually overkill.
All charities working with children or adults at risk must have safeguarding policies in place. Trustees are personally responsible for ensuring those policies are applied and that staff and volunteers are aware of them. This is not optional.
The Charity Commission's requirements for record keeping are specific:
Of the platforms compared above, Lamplight has the most purpose-built safeguarding module. Charitylog can record safeguarding within its case workflow but lacks a structured, dedicated process. Salesforce can be configured for safeguarding, but this is custom work requiring consultant time.
Beneficiary data is higher-risk than donor data. Service delivery charities routinely process special category data under UK GDPR: health conditions, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and other sensitive personal information. This creates obligations that go beyond what a fundraising CRM handles.
Charities must identify a lawful basis under Article 6 of UK GDPR before processing beneficiary data. Legitimate interests (with a documented Legitimate Interests Assessment) is the most common basis for day-to-day service delivery records. For special category data, you also need a condition under Article 9(2). For charities providing social care or support services, DPA 2018 Schedule 1, condition 2 typically applies.
There is no single prescribed retention period. Charities must define retention schedules per data category. A children's service normally keeps a record until the person is 25. It keeps it until 26 if they were 17 when the referral ended. Your software needs to support configurable retention periods and, ideally, flag records approaching their deletion date.
You may refer a person to a partner organisation. You need a data sharing agreement, and a lawful basis, before any data moves. Your case management software should log exactly what data was shared, with which organisation, when, and on what legal basis. This is not a nice-to-have feature. It is a regulatory requirement.
For charities still managing beneficiary data in spreadsheets, these requirements alone should prompt a move to proper case management software. See our guide on moving from spreadsheets to systems for a practical migration path.
Funders do not give you money and hope for the best. They expect evidence of impact, and your case management software needs to produce it.
The National Lottery Community Fund is the largest UK funder, and it gives more than £600 million a year. It expects three things. Data about the people you help. Progress against 3 to 5 agreed outcomes for each programme. Your own evaluation. For grants under £50,000, the requirements are simpler: basic outputs, a simple outcome measure, and one or two case studies. Larger grants demand more rigorous evidence.
Most funders want a combination of:
A Theory of Change maps how your activities are expected to produce intended outcomes. It makes assumptions explicit: inputs lead to activities, which lead to outputs, which lead to outcomes. Both NPC (New Philanthropy Capital) and NCVO promote this as standard practice for UK charities.
Outcomes Stars are standardised measurement tools used across multiple organisations. The Homelessness Star, Recovery Star, and similar frameworks allow consistent outcome measurement within a sector. In-Form includes Outcomes Stars as standard. Other platforms can record the same data, but you will need to set up the indicators manually.
Your platform should let you set your own outcome measures, to match what each funder asks for. It should measure before and after against them. It should break the figures down by group. It should then make the report in the format the funder expects. If your software cannot produce a funder report without hours of manual data manipulation, it is not fit for purpose.
Almost every case in this work moves between organisations. An advice charity refers to a housing service. A housing service refers to a mental health team. The referral is where the case is most likely to fail.
The reason is not a lack of care. Each organisation runs a different system, and each one holds its own idea of a person, a case and a consent. Nothing can match one record to the other, so the referral becomes an email, a form, or a telephone call. The receiving service then types it again.
A shared foundation removes that. Every system built on engage.re holds a person, a case, a consent and an outcome in the same declared form, with a permanent identifier. One charity can then give another a narrow view of one case, for a set time, and the system records every use of it. Neither charity gives up its data, and neither gives up its own system.
Each charity still gets a system built for its own work. We explain how a whole sector shares one foundation in bespoke software for a whole sector. We describe the market it creates in what does an interoperable software market look like.
The platforms above work well for charities with relatively straightforward service delivery models. The problems start when your organisation's reality does not fit neatly into any single platform's assumptions.
Common scenarios where off-the-shelf case management software struggles:
A bespoke system is not the right approach for every charity. A small advice service with 10 staff will be well served by Charitylog at a fraction of the cost. Some charities do both fundraising and service delivery. Others work in a way no ready-made template fits. Those charities now keep several platforms, several ways round the gaps, and several spreadsheets. A system of their own can cost less than all of that over five years.
For a fuller exploration of when bespoke makes sense and when it does not, see our charity software guide.
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