PayBee: The Best Nonprofit Fundraising Software

What features should you look for in nonprofit fundraising software?

That’s an important question to ask yourself before choosing any online charity platform. All nonprofits and charities have their own needs when hosting fundraising events, and you’ll need to be able to evaluate which software solutions work best for you.

To help, this article covers some of the key features to look at in any fundraising platform. We’ll also reveal how PayBee utilizes these online tools in our platform and provides solutions for your fundraising needs.

Donation Pages

All fundraisers, whether in-person, virtual, or hybrid, should have a donation page. At its most basic, a donation page is a landing page where visitors can make online donations. Having the ability to direct your support network to your donation page just makes it easier for your nonprofit to raise money.

PayBee software makes it simple for you to generate your donation page. In addition, QR codes generated by PayBee’s system can be placed all around your event venue, enabling supporters to easily access your donation page using their smartphones. This improved access to your donation page makes donating easier and helps increase the amount of money you can raise at your fundraisers.

Donation Buttons

Just because people have the option of donating online doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll use it — unless you include signs prompting them to donate. Donation Buttons function as a call-to-action for your visitors, reminding them that they can easily visit your donation page and make a contribution.

PayBee’s online fundraising platform ensures you can create donation buttons and place them on your website and in multiple strategic areas in your virtual or hybrid fundraiser. Giving your guests easy access to donation buttons — coupled with calls to donate from your emcee and staff — provide the ideal motivation for regular donations throughout your fundraiser.

Donation Forms

When your guests make the decision to donate, they’ll typically need to fill out a donation form. This requires them to provide their donation amount, donor information, payment details, and more.

PayBee’s donation forms are easy to fill out and customizable. This is important since you may want to include important options, such as the ability to make a recurring donation. This is when the donor agrees to regularly pay a given amount every month on a regular basis. Recurring donations are excellent for nonprofits since they’re usually smaller than one-time donations (encouraging people to make them) and provide your nonprofit with a regular source of funding.

In addition, PayBee’s donor forms include the option for the donor to cover processing fees. This is when a donor agrees to pay the usual credit card or other processing fees attached to their donation. By doing this, your nonprofit will be able to keep more of the money to fund your programs. PayBee has found that most donors will cover processing fees if given the option.

Event Ticketing & Registration Tools

Event registration tools enable your event team to create event landing pages, ticket purchasing forms, and event reports. Having a reliable software like PayBee’s to automate this process just makes it simpler for you to register your guests and help them purchase tickets for your events.

Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Campaign Tools

What’s better than a software that makes it easy for you to create fundraising campaigns? How about a software that allows your supporters to build fundraising campaigns on your behalf? Known as peer-to-peer fundraising, this type of fundraising involves letting individual supporters create online fundraising pages and then sharing them with their family, friends, and support networks. Donors contribute to these multiple fundraising pages, and the proceeds go back to your nonprofit.

PayBee makes it easy for your supporters to not only build these peer-to-peer fundraisers but also link them to your main fundraising platform. This just makes it easier for you to collect and keep track of all donations.  

Crowdfunding

Maybe you’ve heard of popular crowdfunding fundraising software like GoFundMe. Well, crowdfunding campaigns can raise large amounts of money simply by reaching out to multiple social networks. While this is similar in some ways to peer-to-peer fundraisers, crowdfunding involves building a single centralized campaign page to attract contributions.

When building your crowdfunding page, be sure to include features like a donation thermometer to show visitors how close you are to reaching your fundraising goal (which encourages more donations). Make sure to also make your crowdfunding page mobile friendly so people can contribute easily via their smartphones.

Pledges

Having software capable of tracking your donors’ pledges, or their commitments to give to your nonprofit or charity, is important to ensure your supporters make good on their promises. PayBee’s software not only makes it easy for guests to pledge to your organization, it also tracks these pledges and sends out reminders to donors who have not paid what they pledged.

Text-To-Give

As more and more people conduct business via smartphone, making your fundraisers mobile friendly becomes more imperative. Text-to-Give is a fundraising platform feature that enables your nonprofit to collect donations or pledges through text message. It’s a fast process that’s highly effective at raising the amount of donations you can collect at your event.

With PayBee, you can easily text your guests a link to your fundraising page. From there, guests can quickly and easily contribute to your organization.

Payment Processing

The days when people donated primarily through written checks or cash are over. Today, donors have many more ways to donate, including credit card, ACH, or other types of online payment.

Realizing that different support networks are more comfortable with different types of payment processing, PayBee now gives your donors the option of donating via credit card, PayPal, or even Apple Pay. Bear in mind that, based on your donors’ background, they may still prefer donating through more traditional means like checks. Nevertheless, being able to process payments quickly through credit cards and online options does make fundraisers more efficient overall.

Donor Accounts

Donor accounts store your supporters’ relevant information, letting your guests see their giving history, tax receipts, event registrations, recurring donations, and more. PayBee software keeps track of all of this data (see Reporting & Analytics Features below) and also lets you share key information with your supporters. This helps them keep your event on their schedules and reminds them to donate regularly to your cause.

Silent and Live Auction Platforms

Auctions are a staple in fundraising events, and often a big part of where your fundraising revenue comes from. And today, digital technology has expanded the types of auctions you can host, as well as the number of people who can participate in them.

For instance, PayBee now makes it easy to host a silent auction where your auction items are all available for participants to bid on online. This enables you to start your silent auction days or even weeks before your actual fundraising event, allowing you to build buzz for your fundraiser and raise money at the same time. You can include attractive images and descriptions of your items and send text message updates to inform people on the status of their bids, encouraging more active bidding.

Alternatively, you may want to host a live auction where a professional auctioneer introduces each item live so people can bid on them in-person. However, even here, PayBee software can enhance your auction’s fundraising capabilities. People can place bids via their mobile phones, increasing the number of participants in your live auction. PayBee “Magic” Bid Paddles also come equipped with unique QR codes for each bidder, helping you keep track of the bids and making checkout faster and easier.   

Reporting & Analytics Features

Once your fundraising event is over, your team still needs to review all the data that was collected. This not only helps you assess the success of your event but also lets you see actionable insights you can use to make your next fundraiser even better. In addition, you’ll need to keep track of your financials and make sure you collected all outstanding pledges, bids, and donations.

PayBee’s online platform puts all of this information at your fingertips. Our automatically generated reports let you see how much money you raised in each activity and assess audience participation — all at a glance. You’ll also be able to send out automatically generated email reminders to guests who haven’t paid their winning bids or pledges, making keeping on top of your finances much simpler.

Moving Forward

As fundraising evolves from traditional in-person galas to virtual events to currently-popular hybrid fundraisers, choosing the right nonprofit fundraising software becomes more important. A reliable online fundraising platform not only helps you manage your event, it also opens up new avenues for fundraising, ensuring your nonprofit or charity programs have all the resources they need.

To see which fundraising platform is right for you, be sure to test out their features first-hand. Sign up for a free demo of PayBee’s online fundraising platform and see for yourself what it’s like to interact with our intuitive platform and engage in a (simulated) live auction. You’ll also be able to ask all of your questions to our team of experts.

Online fundraising software regularly keeps improving all the time. Sign up for a free PayBee demo to learn about all the fundraising strategies that are currently available to you.

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