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.

Fundraising Types

In Simple Raise, you can create a fundraiser from one of the following types:

Team Oriented/Combined 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.

Individual Oriented/Participant Goal - you set a specific financial goal for EACH participant in your fundraiser. The amount entered in the "Per Participant Money Goal" section will be applied as the individual fundraising target for each student.

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 ‘Using CutTime with Simple Raise’ 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. 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 Fundraiser - 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.