Tips for Choosing a Great Fundraising Platform

Most schools depend on fundraising to support their budgets. School fundraisers provide much-needed funds to support students’ education and extracurriculars, not to mention opportunities for fun and community bonding.

In this blog, you’ll learn more about: 

• What a Fundraising Platform Is
• What to Look For in a Fundraising Platform
• How Booster Can Help With Your Fundraiser

But school fundraising also requires work, traditionally involving hundreds of volunteer hours to create and manage successful campaigns. That’s why PTAs/PTOs turn to school fundraising platforms to help make fundraising more efficient and effective.

What is a fundraising platform?

Fundraising platforms help schools plan and manage fundraisers. While there are several fundraising platforms designed to meet widely varying needs, the best fundraising platforms help streamline the following processes:

• Campaign creation – setting up a campaign page or donation portal
• Campaign management – managing the stages of the campaign once it’s set in motion
• Goal and progress tracking – reporting on how close you are to reaching your donation goals
• Donor management – facilitating online donations, automating communication and acknowledgments, fostering donor engagement, etc.
• Event planning – automated task reminders
• Event promotion - an easily shareable link to your donation page

Some fundraising platforms are designed for specific types of fundraisers such as crowdfunding or silent auctions. The may be intended only for one specific use such as planning, donation tracking, or during the event itself.

Others are more comprehensive. They allow you to customize a campaign tailored to your specific goals and plan, track and analyze results from start to finish.

That’s why it’s crucial to identify your fundraising goals, including the types of fundraisers you’re interested in running, before making a purchase.

No matter what type of fundraisers you pursue, any good fundraising platform should be highly functional, efficient, and user-friendly. Keep reading to learn how to choose a school fundraising platform that checks these boxes.

What to look for in a school fundraising platform

1. Comprehensive support

A 2015 survey by Software Advice revealed the top feature buyers looked for in a fundraising platform was more functionality. One of the most important factors in the functionality of your fundraising software is the level of support you get.

At the very least, a fundraising platform should have a comprehensive tech support team available to resolve issues with how the software works from the administrative and donor side. Communication with the support team should be quick and easy so issues are resolved in a timely fashion.

Booster goes above and beyond by offering a highly responsive tech support team to answer any questions you or your donors may have. 

2. Visibility and reporting

Another crucial aspect of a fundraising platform is the level of visibility it provides you. Administrators should have a clear view of donors, donations, campaign tasks, and more.

Make sure any fundraising platform you’re considering features user-friendly dashboards and easy-to-pull reports so you can stay plugged into your campaign’s progress every step of the way. This also helps you feel confident donations are properly recorded and acknowledged.

The Booster fundraising platform provides industry-leading reports that allow you to easily see information by donor type and manage incentives and prize delivery. You also have a nice dashboard to manage campaign tasks in one simple place.

3. Goal and progress tracking

It’s important your fundraising platform track the progress of your fundraising campaign. Not only does this keep the fundraiser on track, but it also allows for an element of gamification that can boost donor engagement.

Booster's fundraising platform enables fun contests to help students and donors get excited to participate. Plus, your school can see their achievements in real-time, which is a huge motivator for students, volunteers and other members of the school community who are working hard to make the fundraiser a success.

4. Useful Integrations

Most schools use a combination of many fundraising campaigns throughout the year to maximize their profits. It’s ideal to have a fundraising platform that can support as many campaigns as possible.

One feature to look for is whether the fundraising platform has built-in integrations with other software or programs. For example, Booster fundraising platform is integrated with Double the Donation, enabling users to run corporate gift matching campaigns from the same place where they manage all their other fundraisers.

5. Communication capabilities

School fundraisers can only succeed when people know about them. When looking for a fundraising platform, make sure it enables easy, efficient communication not only among administrators and organizers but also with donors, participants, and the public.

Integration with email platforms, popular social media outlets, text, and more can really multiply your school fundraiser's success. For example, with Booster Tech, families can create unique videos about their students by simply uploading a picture. Then they can share it across social media to promote their school fundraiser.

6. Donor management

No matter how hard your team works, it’s the donors who make or break your fundraiser. For that reason, donation tracking is a fundamental part of any fundraising campaign.

The right software will allow you to ditch old-school spreadsheets and manage donors and donations right within your fundraising platform. Ultimately, you should be able to track donations and donor types as well as communicate with and thank donors within your fundraising platform.

The Booster's fundraising platform has a super user-friendly donation tracking system that makes it easy to keep track of and collect your funds. It also makes people feel great about supporting your fundraiser through exceptional features like the Student Star Video, which lets the students star in their own video that can be shared with donors.

An all-in-one fundraising platform

At Booster, we've optimized a user-friendly platform with personalized tech support so schools across America can raise the money they need. Learn more about the MyBooster fundraising platform today.