Our story

Built for the people who do the work.

Tongba is patient, hand-crafted automation for non-profits — software that gives small teams their evenings back, so their hours go to the donors and the mission, not the busywork.

Our story

A warm drink, sipped slowly — and software built with the same patience.

The meaning of the name

A warm drink, sipped slowly.

Tongba is a hot millet drink from the eastern hills of Nepal. You pour boiling water into a wooden vessel packed with fermented millet, let it steep, and sip slowly through a thin bamboo straw. You can't rush it. You top it up, you sit, you talk. It's warm, communal, and made by hand — usually by someone who learned it from their grandmother.

That is the opposite of cold, blast-it-out technology — and exactly the spirit we wanted in the software. Non-profits run on the same things tongba does: patience, community, warmth, and craft. The work doesn't scale by force; it scales through people who care, given tools that respect their time.

— The Tongba team

Patience

Steeped slowly, never rushed.

Place

The hills the name comes from.

Community

Warmth, kept alight by hand.

The problem we saw

The donors you already have are quietly leaving — because no one on a team of six has the hours to follow up.

The data tells one story over and over: total giving keeps growing, but the number of donors keeps falling — four years running. The people best placed to bring them back are buried in busywork on tiny teams. The problem was never desire. It was capacity.

0 yrs

of consecutive decline in the number of donors

Fundraising Effectiveness Project, 2025

0

people on the average non-profit's digital team

M+R Benchmarks 2026

0%

of prior donors give again when reached — vs 24% of new donors

M+R Benchmarks 2026

What we believe

The principles we won't trade away.

A few commitments are baked into the product, not bolted on. These are the ones we'd rather lose a customer than break.

Human-in-the-loop, always

Nothing sends without you. Every draft waits in your approval inbox — you read it, you decide. That's the spine of the product, not a setting you can toggle off.

0% of donations. Ever.

Bring your own Stripe; every cent your donors give goes to your cause. We make money from software, never from your generosity.

Works with what you have

CRM-agnostic by design. Salesforce, Bloomerang, DonorPerfect, or a spreadsheet — Tongba runs alongside your tools. There's nothing to rip out.

Your voice, not a robot's

Tongba learns your tone from a few real examples and writes like your team would on a good day — specific, warm, human. No mail-merge tokens.

Start from the messy CSV

No migration project, no clean-up shame, no "donors_final_v3." Drop in the export you already have. Tongba dedupes it and gets to work.

Your data stays yours

We never sell, share, or train models on your donor data. Export everything, anytime. The trust your donors gave you is not ours to spend.

How Tongba helps

Three steps. You stay in charge of all of them.

1

Bring your list

Export a CSV from any CRM — or a plain spreadsheet. Tongba dedupes it and works out who's slipped away.

2

We draft, in your voice

A short, specific note for each donor, written from their real history — last gift, date, and what it funded.

3

You approve, it sends

Skim the inbox, approve the good ones in a click, skip the rest. Only what you bless ever leaves the building.

Who it's for

For the small team that wears every hat.

Tongba is built for small-to-mid-sized non-profits — the Executive Directors and Development Directors who write the grant in the morning, run the event at noon, and try to thank donors before midnight. If your "fundraising department" is one or two people, this is for you.

  • Executive Directors doing the fundraising themselves
  • Development Directors with no time for follow-up
  • Teams of roughly six, wearing every hat at once
  • Anyone who'd rather talk to donors than wrangle a CRM

Dev Director, team of 6

Tuesday, 4:58 pm

Grant report due
Board deck
Thank 47 lapsed donors drafted for you

The one that always slid to tomorrow — already waiting in the approval inbox.

An honest word

What Tongba is not.

We'd rather be clear about the edges than oversell. Here's what we deliberately chose not to build.

Not a CRM rip-and-replace

We're not asking you to migrate your donor records or abandon the system your board already paid for. Tongba sits beside it.

Not an auto-send machine

There is no "blast 5,000 emails" button. Approval-before-send means a human reads every message before a donor does.

Not a content mill

Tongba doesn't churn out generic AI filler. One real, four-sentence note per donor, grounded in their actual history — quality over volume.