Simple Raise Overview

Simple Raise is a donation-based platform designed to provide organizations—such as music, theatre, dance, cheer, sports, and debate programs—with a more efficient and accessible way to raise funds for their initiatives. Our platform enables programs to enhance their brand visibility and engage with donors through a variety of customizable features.

Simple Raise offers powerful tools to increase awareness for your cause, monitor fundraising performance, and facilitate online donations—all with no platform or credit card processing fees.

Helping you maximize donations for your program is our goal. We cover the 3.5% convenience fee applied by our payment processor to donations, product purchases, and event ticket sales. Instead, donors will have the option to add a voluntary tip at checkout to help support the maintenance and operation of our platform while contributing to your program.

Your Organization's Online Store

Every organization receives its own personalized online store, giving you a central hub to engage supporters and boost fundraising. Easily showcase and sell event tickets, offer exclusive products, and collect donations for your fundraisers—all in one convenient platform.

Fundraisers, events, and products are managed as “campaign” items. Each campaign item can be a good or service, an event ticket, or a fundraiser. Additionally, you have the option to set fundraising goals for each campaign item to track your progress.

Campaign Goal Tracking

Goal tracking is optional for every campaign item. To turn it on, simply select the “Enable Goal Setting” checkbox while adding the item.

Once goal setting is enabled, you can choose how your goal will be tracked:

• Individual Goal:  set a specific financial goal for EACH participant in your fundraiser. The amount entered in the "goal amount" section will be applied as the individual fundraising target for each student.
• Collective Goal: you set one singular goal for the fundraiser that is collectively shared by ALL of your fundraising participants. Everyone is working towards a common financial objective.

Fundraising Methods

Simple Raise offers two methods of fundraising that you can select for your fundraiser:

Online Cash Donation - your participants will solicit cash only monetary donations from their donors.

Product Based Donation - Your participants will encourage their donors to buy a product, where a portion of the sale proceeds will go towards your program’s cause. Products can be any physical items that are delivered/shipped to a donor such as cookie dough, wrapping paper, poinsettias, OR a service item like a car wash or spaghetti dinner taking place on a particular date.

Integration with CutTime

CutTime is a cloud-based, mobile responsive platform for fine arts programs to manage their communication with members, financials, and inventory such as musical instruments, attire & uniforms, library, and equipment assets.

Thanks to an integration with Simple Raise, existing CutTime customers will be able to instantly sync their existing group members as fundraising participants, with goals, and apply their Simple Raise fundraising results to individual student account balances as well as the program's Angel Fund within CutTime.

Learn more and see how the CutTime integration works via this ‘Fundraising With Simple Raise and CutTime’ article.

What You’ll Need to Get Started

In order to bring your fundraiser to life, you will need to do the following:

1. Sign Up for an Account - create a user id with password that you’ll use to sign in to  Simple Raise. PLEASE NOTE: If you are a current CutTime customer, you do NOT need to do this step.
2. Set Up Your Organization - establish your program, it’s branding, and who will be the main administrators for your Simple Raise account.
3. Create Your Campaign - capture the financial goals, type, method, participants, and promotional information to create a donation page for your fundraiser. We recommend defining all of these items, identifying your participants, and preparing the graphic and media files so they are ready when you go to create the actual fundraiser in Simple Raise.