6 Tips for Finding a New Fundraising Platform for Your School

This post was originally published in July 2022 and was updated in October 2024. 

The Frankenstein Effect: What Happens When Legacy Platforms Get “Upgrades”

If your team is still relying on old tools that weren’t built by and for educational fundraisers, you’re likely leaving potential dollars on the table. The risk of platform failure rises at critical moments—think Giving Days, fiscal year-end campaigns, or large-scale alumni appeals—when you can least afford it. 

Even if a legacy platform promises to make updates or launch upgrades, it often isn’t enough. Attaching new parts to an old framework rarely produces a seamless solution. In some cases, you can all but see the stitches. More often than not, you end up with a clumsy, unpredictable, monster of a platform that might be okay sometimes, until … the day that it’s not.  Hopefully that day doesn’t fall on your annual giving day or in the midst of fiscal year end when you have other fires to put out.

The Frankenstein approach to innovation often produces a product that’s ugly, unstable, and hard to control. 

Platforms built on patched-together technology tend to:

• Create frustrating user experiences. Clunky forms and awkward navigation frustrate donors and discourage giving.
• Require constant workarounds. Only a handful of tech-savvy administrators may know how to manage these systems, leaving everyone else in the dark.
• Drain time and energy. Complex workflows lead to inefficiencies and lost opportunities to engage with donors.

If any of this feels familiar, it’s time to assess whether your platform is still serving your institution’s future goals—or holding you back. The good news? Modern fundraising platforms are designed to meet today’s demands and scale with your success.

Read on to learn six key considerations to keep in mind when evaluating a new fundraising platform. 

1. Look for a provider that innovates from scratch

When evaluating fundraising platforms for schools, look for a provider that innovates from the ground up. Notice that we said, “ground” and not “dirt.” Some providers may be okay with digging up a nearly dead solution, dusting it off, and attaching new features. Not GiveCampus.

We designed our platform to be modern and future-ready from day one: seamless integrations, intuitive design, and built for scalability without the limitations of legacy frameworks. Best of all, we never have to go back to the drawing board, because we never really leave it. We actually have an entire team focused on innovating. It’s what they do—day in and day out and it’s how we’ve been able to launch at least one major new product each year.

Watch the 2024 GiveCampus Partners Conference Plenary to learn about our latest product releases 

One of our company’s core values is to “talk—and listen—to your users.” That means we cultivate tight feedback loops with our Partners and end users, routinely asking, ‘What do you want?, What do you need?, and How can we make you happier?’ And then, we iterate like crazy based on what we hear. 

2. Ask if the interface uses a mobile-first design

Mobile friendly is an add-on, mobile first is innovative. Rather than simply retrofitting legacy applications to work on a mobile device, we designed our entire online giving experience to be mobile first. It required some tradeoffs, but since more than half of all donors arrive at an online giving form from their smartphone, it was the right call.

And, we’re not done. Our team of engineers continuously iterates, analyzes, and optimizes form performance in an effort to make the online giving process easier and the overall donor experience more delightful. We rigorously A/B test and fine-tune page designs, buttons, checkboxes, and more in an attempt to shave precious seconds off the process and effectively grease the wheels of giving.

3. Make sure the fundraising platform accepts digital wallets

Our mobile-first design also integrates seamlessly with mobile payment services, giving donors more ways to pay while minimizing administrator headaches in the process. GiveCampus has native support for all digital wallets—including PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. We also support more than 80 cryptocurrencies. 

As more of your constituent base is made up of younger donors, the more important it becomes to offer convenient and mobile-friendly payment options. In 2023, more than 45 percent of all gifts made on GiveCampus were made via a digital wallet. 

Read the 2023 Digital Wallets Report

4. Find out if it plays well with other tools in your tech stack

The best fundraising platforms don’t work in isolation—they integrate seamlessly with the other tools you rely on. GiveCampus prioritizes developing integrations that make life easier for advancement teams.

Our comprehensive platform integrates with popular CRMs including Raiser’s Edge NXT, ascend, Affinaquest, and Veracross, and others—ensuring your donor data stays in sync across systems. GiveCampus also plays well with email marketing tools like MyEmma and Constant Contact. 

5. Look for a solution that will streamline workflows

Today, the GiveCampus platform includes capabilities designed to help you spend less time on administrative tasks and more time engaging with donors in authentic, personalized ways.

 For example, we recently integrated AI-powered segmentation and outreach capabilities into GiveCampus to make it easier for admins to build and send effective, on-brand communications from wherever they are in the platform—whether they’re planning a social fundraising campaign, managing volunteers, planning an event, or soliciting major gifts. 

Now advancement teams can send targeted, personalized emails and texts faster and more effectively, without having to toggle between platforms. By automating manual tasks and ensuring flawless alignment with campaigns, events, and donor data, GiveCampus gives you greater autonomy and significantly boosts your team’s ability to engage donors at the right time with the right message.

Learn more about GC Outreach

6. Ask about the science behind the design

We don’t just build, launch, and hope for the best. We take a scientific approach to platform changes and continuously iterate based on what we see in the fundraising data from the more than 1,300 colleges, universities, and K12 schools we serve. That means schools that use the GiveCampus fundraising platform not only get the benefit of continuous innovation within our product, but they also get the learnings that come from the vast pool of data we process and analyze on a regular basis. We learn from every trackable online engagement and apply what we learn to continually improve fundraising outcomes for schools.

We also design our donor interface based on principles of behavioral science that take into account the myriad mental shortcuts that guide human decision-making. That means our Giving Forms are expressly designed to appeal to donors and make it easy and joyful for them to give. Today, we’ve all come to expect a fast and frictionless online checkout experience—and your constituents are no different. 

Learn more about the GiveCampus Platform

If you’re in the process of evaluating online fundraising platforms for schools and are interested in seeing a solution built by and for educational fundraisers, let one of our fundraising experts walk you through the GiveCampus platform.