Onboarding guide
How to get started with Fundraise Up, the new standard for online giving.
Welcome to Fundraise Up, and to the group of more than 3,000 nonprofits from around the world that optimize their donor experience and increase their revenue using Fundraise Up’s modern giving tools.
This ten-step onboarding guide is designed to get you up and running with Fundraise Up. It is optimized to help you launch as quickly as possible, while ensuring that you understand how the platform operates and how its features can help you boost donation revenue.
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What you’ll achieve
By the end of this onboarding guide, you will have:
- added Fundraise Up’s Checkout modal to your organization’s website.
- created a customized fundraising Campaign Page.
- enabled the payment methods relevant to your supporters and your organization.
- created and customized features to meet your fundraising needs.
- integrated Fundraise Up with your existing CRM service and/or marketing analytics service.
- accepted your first live donation.
Go-live timeline
A typical deployment of Fundraise Up is completed within ten days. This timeline enables you to focus on one step of the onboarding guide during each day of the ten-day deployment period, and allows for time spent creating and customizing content for your account.
Speeding up the launch
In some cases, you may wish to expedite your launch of Fundraise Up. To begin accepting donations using Fundraise Up, you should complete at least steps 1-3 in the onboarding guide. These steps include installing Fundraise Up on your website, connecting Stripe to your account, and enabling payment methods. Assuming that you already have the right levels of access to your website and Stripe, these steps can be completed in under an hour.
Prerequisites
Before beginning your implementation of Fundraise Up, there are a few items you should have ready:
- Access to your organization’s Fundraise Up account. You should be added to your organization’s account specifically as an Organization Administrator role to complete most of the steps in this guide.
- Access to your website’s CMS or code editor. To install the Fundraise Up installation script on your organization’s website, you need to have access to the
<head>section of the website. This is typically accomplished with your content management system (CMS) such as WordPress or Squarespace. - Access to an active Stripe account. A connected Stripe account in good standing is required to process donations using Fundraise Up. The Stripe-to-Fundraise Up connection needs to be made by a Stripe user with Administrator or Developer permissions.
- Access to an active PayPal Business account. To accept PayPal and Venmo donations, you need to connect a PayPal Business account using a PayPal user profile that has administrative-level permissions.When PayPal is enabled, it can account for more than 20% of the donations you receive. It also has a nearly 7% positive impact on conversion. While adding PayPal to your Fundraise Up account is not required to accept donations, we strongly recommend it for these reasons.
Recommendations
To achieve a successful implementation of Fundraise Up, consider doing the following:
- Get expert help if you need it. If you are not familiar with modifying your website or connecting apps like Stripe, you can select an agency or consultant from the Partner Marketplace. These Fundraise Up-certified partners will assist you with implementing Fundraise Up. Explore the Partner Marketplace →
- Complete the onboarding steps in order, from one to ten. This ensures that dependencies for later steps are addressed before those steps are reached.
- Collaborate on the implementation. If possible, add multiple team members to your Fundraise Up account who can help complete onboarding tasks.
- Continue learning. Once you have completed the steps in the onboarding guide, we recommend exploring other articles here in our documentation to learn about more key features that you can take advantage of.
Support
Fundraise Up offers free 24/7 personalized email support to all customers, and we have a dedicated team of round-the-clock ultra-knowledgable Support Engineers. If you have any questions during or after your onboarding, email our support team.
You can also find helpful resources, how-to guides, and answers to frequently asked questions in the Support section of our website.
Next, get started with Step 1: Stripe →