Onboarding guide
How to get started with Fundraise Up, the new standard for online giving.
Congratulations on selecting Fundraise Up as your online donation platform. We’re excited to welcome you to the group of more than 3,000 charities from around the world that optimize their donor experiences using Fundraise Up’s modern giving tools.
This 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 increase donation revenue.
Objectives
By following the steps in this onboarding guide, you will:
- Implement Fundraise Up on your organization’s website
- Enable modern payment methods
- Customize features to meet your fundraising needs
- Integrate Fundraise Up with your existing CRM
- Accept your first live donation
Go-live timeline
A typical deployment of Fundraise Up is completed within 10 days. This timeline enables you to focus on one step of the onboarding guide during each day of the 10-day deployment period, and accounts for time spent creating and customizing content for your account.
Minimum requirements for launch
In some cases, you may wish to expedite your launch of Fundraise Up. To begin accepting donations using Fundraise Up, you should at minimum complete steps 1-3 in the onboarding guide. These steps include tasks for installing Fundraise Up on your website, connecting Stripe to your account, and enabling payment methods. Assuming that you have the appropriate 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. The Organization Administrator role is required to complete most steps.
- 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
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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 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, it is strongly recommended.
Recommendations
To help you achieve a successful implementation of Fundraise Up, consider these recommendations:
- Get expert help if you need it. If you 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 onboarding steps in order. This ensures that dependencies for later steps are addressed before those steps are being 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 Docs articles to learn about more features that you can take advantage of.
Support
Fundraise Up offers free 24/7 email support to all customers. If you have an implementation question during your onboarding, email support@fundraiseup.com.
You can also find helpful resources, how-to guides, and answers to frequently asked questions in the Support section of our website.
Get started with Step 1: Installation →