Fundraise Up is a digital fundraising platform that is designed to use AI to empower non-profit organisations. Recently, we worked with UNFPA to help them migrate their campaigns and donation processes over to Fundraise Up – our first time using the platform. So based on that experience, here are five things we like about Fundraise Up (and a couple of things we think could be better).
1. Checkout and Elements
Fundraise Up uses elements to offer a variety of tools to build your fundraising experience. These components are added to your page with just a simple line of code and can be easily customised to match the look and feel of your page. Elements include donation buttons and reminders, goal meters, image cards, top supporters, and peer-to-peer fundraising.
Fundraise Up’s most important element is Checkout – an embeddable form that works within your site. The component allows for an end-to-end donation process without the need to be redirected away to complete the donation.
This can be customised with a multitude of options such as donation amounts, monthly options, donation up-sells, and confirmation emails to create an experience unique to your appeal.
Read more about Elements and Checkout.
2. Payment Options
Fundraise Up offers a number of payment options to give donors flexibility in making a donation. The platform is an official partner of the payment gateway Stripe. This allows payments to be made using a variety of credit cards as well as services such as Apple Pay and Google Pay. Donors are also able to use PayPal and bank transfer.
The platform allows for all worldwide currencies to be used alongside these payment methods and harnesses geolocation to serve the relevant currency, donation amounts and payment methods based on the donor’s location.
Read more about Payment Options.
3. Machine Learning
Perhaps the most powerful feature of Fundraise Up is Machine learning. This uses an algorithm that analyses patterns in donor behaviour to determine the optimal donation amounts to use. This helps to ensure that the amounts don’t ask for too little (risk missing out on potential donations) or too much (risk losing the donation altogether).
The algorithm can analyse donor behaviour through data points such as location, device or previous donor history. From there, it can be grouped based on common behavioural traits and donation amounts can then be personalised. It helps to create a truly unique experience for each user.
Read more about Machine Learning.
4. Analytics and reporting
Fundraise Up also allows for data to be generated to give an overview of how campaigns are performing. These reports can be connected to third party analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Facebook pixel with UTM tag support.
Data can also be filtered and exported so it can be used with a reporting tool of your choice. These reports can be scheduled to export at regular intervals and templates can be set so the same options do not need to be configured every time.
Read more about Data Tracking, Exports and Donation Management.
5. Security and Fraud Prevention
Perhaps the most important feature of all, Fundraise Up uses SSL and 256-bit encryption to securely handle donations without ever storing payment details. Personal data is also managed securely and the platform is regularly backed up to ensure nothing is lost.
Fundraise Up also uses Stripe Radar alongside many other industry standards to ensure Fraud prevention. Analysing user behaviour, reviewing failed transactions and putting measures in place to combat hackers helps to make a secure process.
Read more about Security and Fraud Prevention.
Other
There are many other things we like about Fundraise Up, including the design of the User Interface (UI). It is kept simple and helps to take the donor through every step of the donation process. It also offers peer-to-peer fundraising to super-charge your donation page and allow others to fundraise.
Improvements
Fundraise Up is not without its faults though. From a performance perspective, it can cause pages to run slower due to the excessive javascript required to load the checkout process. It is also guilty of some accessibility issues such as using placeholders instead of labels for form fields or not displaying clear and useful error messages to provide context for the user.
As the platform is designed to be flexible, it can sometimes cause limitations to be placed on areas such as content. This applies to the snippet of text alongside the donation form and the lack of descriptions for what a donation amount corresponds to. Finally, while content can be entered in different languages where editable, some elements are fixed to the process and so don’t work when translated.
Final thoughts
Overall, Fundraise up is a really impressive fundraising platform that can easily be set up, is highly customisable, allows multiple payment gateways, harnesses machine learning, outputs useful data analytics, and provides industry leading security. It allows any non-profit website to quickly accept online donations without the need for extra development costs.
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At THINK Digital, we work directly with clients to improve their online digital fundraising. We have recently worked with UNFPA to help them implement donation pages using Fundraise Up. If you would like to know more, please contact us.
