Choosing the Right Type of Fundraiser

Picking the wrong type is the easiest mistake to make at the start, and switching later means rebuilding. Here is what each one is for.

Product fundraiser

You sell something physical. Supporters order online, you collect the orders, the goods arrive in bulk, and you distribute them.

Choose this if you are selling pies, cheese, baking mixes, snack bars, gift cards or anything else with a product behind it, whether from one of our wholesalers or a supplier you have arranged yourself.

Supporters can pay by card, bank transfer or cash. (Australian organisations that pass fees on to supporters are card only. See Australian pricing.)

Crowdfund campaign

Supporters donate towards a goal. A progress bar shows how close you are. There is nothing to deliver.

Choose this for a school project, a club goal, a community cause, a medical or personal fundraiser, or a sponsored event.

Card payments only. See Which Payment Methods You Can Offer.

Donation page

A donation page runs continuously with no end date, and accepts both one-off and monthly recurring giving from the same page, with the supporter choosing the amount and the frequency.

Choose this if you are a charity, club or community group that wants a permanent "donate" page rather than a time-limited campaign with a target.

You will find it as the third option when you start a crowdfund campaign, alongside General crowdfunding and Colour Run. Picking it takes you into its own short setup flow.

Two things to know:

Donation pages are only available to organisation accounts. If you signed up as an individual, the option will not appear. Individuals can still run crowdfunding and product fundraisers.

A donation page is its own campaign type, not a crowdfunding campaign with the end date left blank. You cannot convert a dated crowdfunding campaign into one by clearing its end date, and an existing donation page will not accept an end date.

See Ongoing Donation Pages and Recurring Giving.

Colour run

A crowdfunding campaign with styling built for a colour run event. See Colour Run Fundraising.

Can I combine a product sale and a donation drive?

Not in one campaign. Product and crowdfunding are separate campaign types and have to be set up separately.

Running both is common and works well. Share the product link with your local community and the donation link with supporters who are too far away to collect goods.

Sponsored events and per-unit pledges

Read-a-thons, math-a-thons, skate-a-thons and similar events run as crowdfunding campaigns.

One thing to know: supporters give a set amount rather than pledging per lap, per book or per trick. There is no mechanism to bill someone a multiple of an unknown final tally. Most organisers handle this by asking supporters to estimate and give up front, and the results are much the same.

Teams mode is worth turning on for these, so each participant gets their own page and tally. See P2P / Teams Mode.

Entry Draw (Giveaway)

Raised does not run raffles or lotteries, and you cannot sell raffle tickets through a campaign. What you can do is add an Entry Draw to a product fundraiser. Supporters buy your products at their normal price, and every item they buy gives them free entries into a prize draw that your organisation runs. You can run one draw across the whole fundraiser or a separate draw per item. Your dashboard shows the entries issued and lets you look up who holds a given entry number.

This works because it is a sales promotion, not a raffle. That only holds if:

• Every item is a genuine product sold at its normal price.
• Entries are a free bonus of the purchase. No entry fee, no entries sold on their own, and no price increase to cover the draw.
• Your organisation runs the draw, supplies the prize, and tells supporters that entries are a free bonus.

Anything that does not meet those conditions, such as a "ticket" product in your catalogue, is not permitted and will be removed.

An Entry Draw accepts card payments only. Cash and bank transfer are turned off while it is on, because entries are issued the moment a payment is confirmed.

It is not part of the campaign setup flow. Once your campaign exists, open Campaign Settings, choose Ordering, and use Set up an Entry Draw under Checkout Questions. You will be asked to confirm each of the conditions above before it turns on, and it cannot be changed or switched off afterwards. Orders placed before you enable it do not receive entries, so set it up before you start promoting.

Other restrictions

Age-restricted goods have their own rules, covered in Age-Restricted Items.

Still not sure?

Contact us with a sentence about what you are raising money for and how, and we will tell you which type fits.