Nonprofits

Job board software for nonprofits

A nonprofit job board usually starts because the sector has a hiring problem that the general market does not solve. Mission-driven roles are hard to fill through mainstream boards, where they compete on salary against employers who will always win on salary. A sector board competes on the thing that actually attracts these candidates.

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The complication is that the organisations you most want on the board are the ones least able to pay to be on it. Any pricing model that ignores that ends up with an empty board or an unaffordable one.

How the money works Tiered by who the employer is, not by what they get The question that decides it “We cannot justify software spend against programme budget.” A board of this shape Idealist
How the money works

Tiered by who the employer is, not by what they get

The structure that works is a price that varies by the posting organisation rather than by the listing. Small nonprofits post free or near-free, larger nonprofits pay a modest rate, and corporate or consultancy employers hiring into the sector pay a commercial rate. Everyone gets the same listing; what differs is who they are.
This is easy to justify publicly, which matters more here than in any other use case. A sector board that says plainly "we charge organisations that can pay so that organisations that cannot still get hired" is stating its mission rather than defending its pricing.
The second line is the recruitment agency and consultancy budget. Firms placing into the nonprofit sector have real recruitment budgets and want access to exactly this candidate pool. They are usually the largest single revenue source on a nonprofit board and are almost always underpriced.
The question that decides it

“We cannot justify software spend against programme budget.”

It is the right question to ask, and the honest framing is a payback period rather than a benefit. A board that sells four commercial listings a month at sector rates covers its own subscription several times over, and the fourth month is when the argument stops being theoretical.

The comparison that usually settles it internally is not against other software but against what the sector currently spends. Organisations in your network are already paying mainstream job boards per posting, often several hundred each time, for candidates who are not mission-aligned. A sector board redirects that spend rather than adding to it.

What we will not do is pretend the cost is nothing. Kardow is a paid product on every plan, with no free tier and no nonprofit discount published. If the board cannot pay for itself within a few months, it is worth being honest about that before building it rather than after.

A board of this shape

Idealist

The reference point for the whole category, and useful mainly for what it shows about scale. Note how much of its value comes from being the default rather than from any feature, which is the thing a new sector board cannot copy. A regional or sub-sector board wins by being more specific than Idealist rather than by being better than it.
idealist.org/en/jobs Idealist Opens idealist.org in a new tab Look at Idealist Named as a reference point, not as a Kardow customer. It does not run on Kardow and we have no relationship with it.
What maps to your workflow

The parts of Kardow that do this job

01

Different prices for different kinds of employer

Posting prices are set per account type, so a small charity, a large NGO and a commercial recruiter can check out at three different rates on the same board without discount codes or manual invoicing.
02

Free posting that still goes through checkout

A zero-price tier still creates the employer account, still requires approval and still records the posting, so free listings are managed the same way paid ones are rather than being a separate manual process.
03

Imports to fill the sector view

Scheduled imports pull roles from the careers pages of organisations in your sector, so the board is a useful place to look before anyone has paid to post on it.
04

Approval on every listing

Mission fit is the board's entire value. Every posting can require review before it appears, which is how a sector board stays a sector board.
05

Invoices for organisations that need them

Foundations and larger nonprofits pay on invoice through finance rather than by card. Invoicing and payment links are on the Scale plan.
The honest limit

Where Kardow is the wrong answer here

There is no free plan and no published nonprofit rate, so the board has to pay for itself from month one or come out of a budget somewhere. If you need software that costs nothing until the board earns something, a general platform with a free tier is a more honest fit than we are. Not sure which side you are on? Ask us.
Questions

What people ask before they build one.

Something else? Ask us directly and a person will answer. Contact us
Should posting be free for nonprofits?
Free for small organisations, paid for large ones, is the structure that holds up. Making it free for everyone leaves the largest NGOs and the commercial recruiters, who both have real budgets, paying nothing. Charging everyone excludes exactly the organisations the board exists for. Splitting by organisation size is the version that is both defensible in public and financially viable.
How do we get employers onto a new sector board?
By already having their roles on it. Import listings from the careers pages of organisations in your sector, then approach each one with a link to their own jobs on your board and an offer to make them a proper employer page. That conversation converts far better than a cold pitch to an empty board, and it is the single most reliable pattern for starting any niche board.
Can we run this alongside our existing website?
Yes, either on a subdomain or embedded into a page on your current site with a script tag. The embedded version keeps applications and search inside your existing pages, which matters if your organisation's site is where your audience already goes.

Build it and see whether it works

Every plan includes a 14-day trial and there is no setup fee, so the cost of finding out is one month. Kardow starts at $79 a month.
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All use cases
Associations A career centre as a member benefit, with member and non-member pricing and invoices your finance team will accept. Education A careers service board where students are verified, employers are approved, and the outcome data belongs to the institution. Regional job boards A board covering one place properly, which is the one thing national boards are structurally bad at.