Getting started with Fundraise Up: A guide for newsrooms

Fundraise Up is a donation platform that helps nonprofit organizations fund their missions or cause. For news- or news-adjacent organizations looking to grow their membership program, fund their community-based reporting, support their advocacy-based journalism and more, the tool offers an abundance of impactful features.

From CRM and marketing integrations, donation “elements” that can be easily embedded into websites and ways to upsell and convert with AI, Fundraise Up helps news organizations solicit and process high-volume donations and analyze them, too.

Fundraise Up also features exceptional customer service support, ownership of donor data, and high security standards. This Getting Started Guide will answer your questions about the platform.

Step 1: Get connected

• Connect Fundraise Up to any one of your CRMs, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Bloomerang, DonorPerfect, Virtuous and more.
• Connect your payment providers, including Stripe, PayPal or Gemini.

Step 2: Make your customizations

• Choose and customize your “elements,” or customizable buttons, links and other displayable features for your website.

Step 3: Set up payments

• Set up payment and upgrade options (donation designations, optional platform fees, upselling for recurring gifts and more).
• (Optional) Configure matching gifts via Fundraise Up’s “Double the Donation” integration.

Step 4: Configure your dashboard

• Set up a dashboard to monitor donation data (i.e., source, payment method, recurring etc.).

Step 5: Set up communications with donors

• Set up donor communications, including sending of tax receipt emails.

Is Fundraise Up a good fit for you organization?

When you should choose Fundraise Up:

• You have a strong membership program trying to convert members into donors
• You’re a news organization heavily reliant on grants and audience contributions
• You’re an outlet with high traffic but low conversion who could benefit from Fundraise Up’s many upgrade and upselling features
• Your content strategy could benefit from more donor behavior information
• You need a robust customer service team to handle complex questions
• You want full ownership of all donor data, in case you move donation platforms in the future

When you should go with an alternative:

• You’re a news organization that needs a CRM platform built into your donation platform. With Fundraise Up, you’ll need a separate CRM platform to store the transactions
• You’re a for-profit newsroom looking to sell paid access or subscriptions
• Your donations come primarily from offline fundraising, such as events, which the Fundraise Up platform is not designed to handle. You’ll need a robust CRM to organize those donations
• You’re a small organization with a limited budget that needs a simple, all-in-one fundraising tools (including light CRM)

Pro tips and important considerations

• Privacy Tip: One Fundraise Up partner, Outlier Media, expressed hesitations about using the platform’s Double the Donation integration — an employer gift matching software — due to some privacy concerns.

According to Ashley Fassett, Outlier Media’s Membership & Events Manager, the service integrates with their CRM for the purpose of finding latent matches. “However, it’s unclear what they do with your data. We had serious reservations about giving a third party access to that first party data without a clear outline of what they were doing with it.” 

While Fundraise Up has some of the highest security and privacy standards across the board amongst its competitors, this is nonetheless an area that could benefit from further research for users who prioritize data privacy.

• Considerations: The best partner fits are ones who already have a great CRM to help them map donor data from Fundraise Up or handle external gifts, as Fundraise Up doesn’t organize donations that are made offline, including checks and event ticket revenue.

Alternatives

• Givebutter: Their core product is advertised as easy-to-use and free, but partners receive limited access and ownership to donor data. Platform fee: 0% if optional donor tips are enabled. Transaction fee: 2.9% + $0.30.
• Donorbox: Comes with more security certificates than other alternatives (but less than Fundraise Up) as well as more features. However, they aren’t as optimized for conversions, and are only available to paid users. Platform fee: Free or a pro $150/month option is available. Transaction fee: 2.2% + $0.30.

• Category: Getting Started Guides
• Tag: Fundraising