In school, sports club or community organizations, fundraising is generally not a problem once there is a sufficient number of supporters and enough volunteers to run the campaigns. It is then the machinery of money, the reconciling of payments, chasing late paid forms, and a single person being able to manage all of this in a spreadsheet that creates problems for an organization.
Online fundraising money management software allows you to manage your online fundraising campaigns. Most importantly it allows you to manage the money raised by your online fundraising campaigns. When choosing online fundraising money management software to manage your online fundraising money, the main thing to consider is which administrative burden do you want to keep? Below are the main criteria for choosing online fundraising software for managing fundraising money and they have been grouped into two categories, tools that reduce your workload and tools that simply relocate your workload.
Payment coverage decides your conversion rate
Payment options are not a technical detail to consider when selecting a fundraising platform. Instead, they are a set of features that your supporters expect to find on your website. Each option that you list for your supporters to use online to make payments of donations will result in some of your supporters not being able to complete online payments of donations. However, the greater number of supporters who are prevented from making online payments of donations will be casual online donors of money, who would have given in any case.
While card acceptance is a basic function of any fundraising software, having the ability to process digital wallet payments on mobile devices is becoming an increasingly important feature. Supporters can make payments using their digital wallets such as Apple Pay or Google Pay, on their mobiles, removing the need for manual entry of card details on a small screen. This is particularly important for school communities where supporters are parents and may only have a couple of minutes to make a payment during the day.
Fee structures and who absorbs them
A comparison of costs needs to take into account the total cost of a transaction, rather than just the percentage that the provider takes. For example, 2.9% + 30p per transaction plus a £10 per month fixed fee would likely cost more than a service that charged 2.5% + 25p per transaction.
Can supporters be asked to pay for processing fees for donations on your behalf? Supporters may agree to cover processing charges as part of their donation to your cause and therefore allow you to continue fundraising for your school or cause.
Administration features that remove volunteer hours
The hours that are returned to the fundraisers of your school fundraising campaigns are the strongest argument for paid online fundraising tools. Map out the current process of your school fundraising campaigns and show how many steps would disappear entirely.
- Automatic receipting, including tax-deductible receipts issued at the moment of payment rather than in a batch weeks later
- Reconciliation reports that match your accounting software’s import format without manual reformatting
- Order and participant tracking for drives, raffles and event registrations in one place
- Refund handling that a coordinator can perform without contacting support
- Permission levels so a volunteer can enter data without seeing full donor records
The handover test
Note that volunteer turnover is inevitable, therefore look for a system where an incoming coordinator can take over a live campaign after an hour of instruction. Does the current way of running your campaigns rely on the institutional knowledge of one person? If so, then the platform is not doing enough work for you.
Comparing the main platform categories
There are many solutions for fundraising administration and each solution is best suited for particular organizations. Below we have summarized the main solutions to fundraising administration and compared them on the main factors.
| Type | Best suited to | Typical strength | Common limitation |
| General donation page tools | Groups running one-off appeals | Fast setup, low commitment | Little support for product sales or events |
| School and community payment systems | Schools with recurring collections | Parent records, permissions, term-based billing | Less flexible for public campaigns |
| Peer-to-peer platforms | Sponsored events and challenges | Participant pages, social sharing | Weaker back-office reporting |
| Full nonprofit CRM suites | Organizations with paid staff | Donor history, segmentation, grant tracking | Cost and configuration overhead |
Avoiding the overbuy
Purchase online fundraising software capability sized for the organization you actually are, not the organization you wish you were. For most volunteer-run groups, the best online fundraising platform is the one that covers collections, sales and events without weeks of configuration, rather than the enterprise suite a far larger organization would choose and never finish setting up.
Supporter experience and repeat giving
Retaining supporters is better than acquiring new ones. Therefore solutions that enable supporters to store their credit / debit card details and complete repeat donations with a single click are more suitable than those that only allow for one-off donations.
Branding of the payment pages is more important than it seems. The payment pages of your online fundraising platform should be clearly recognizable with your school’s name and colors. We test the payment pages of the online fundraising platforms on real mobiles and tablets. Most of your supporters will access the payment pages on their mobiles.
Making the decision defensible
Make sure the process for evaluation of potential solutions is clear to the committee so they can see the reasoning behind any decisions that are made.
- List your three highest-volume fundraising activities and confirm each is directly supported
- Calculate net proceeds on a realistic transaction volume, not a best case
- Test data export before signing, so a future migration is not a hostage situation
- Check settlement timing against your cash flow needs
- Confirm support is available during your campaign windows, including evenings and weekends
The application of the process to a group can lead to a quick decision of the best online fundraising platform for the group. The most important factor for the application of the process to a group is how the group is active and the number of people that are involved in the fundraising activities.
Also Read | Wefunder: A Complete Guide to Startup Investing and Equity Crowdfunding
