Please note that this blog post was originally published on 12/31/2018 and may contain outdated information. For the latest information on what Givebutter offers, please visit Givebutter's feature directory and pricing page.

‍

A lot happened in 2018. Bitcoin. Backpack Kid. A royal wedding. But perhaps none more exciting than the ten things you're about to read below...

Well, at least, we're pretty darn excited about them. Here are our 2018 highlights:

We scrapped our entire website 😱

After two years and many thousands of lines of code, our website began ripping at the seams. We were growing fast, and as a team we became increasingly frustrated by the gap between our grand vision for Givebutter and the reality of our current tech. So, instead of making incremental changes to a legacy solution, early on in 2018 we made the incredibly difficult decision to start over with a renewed focus.

We rebuilt Givebutter from scratch 😅

Everything from our marketing site to the product itself was built on new technology, code, servers... the works. Most importantly, hitting the reset button allowed us to lay a new and improved foundation for the future.

We launched three new products 🆕

Since its inception, Givebutter functioned primarily as a crowdfunding platform. Over the years, however, people started using the platform for so much more than that. Taking this into consideration, we decided to split out Givebutter into three main products: Collect (simple donations), Fundraise (social fundraising), and Events (ticketing). We also launched a completely overhauled dashboard, which is the backbone of all three new products, and named it the Givebutter Platform (CRM).

We dropped our fees even lower ⬇️💰

Our vision for Givebutter has always been to provide the most transparent, affordable, and cost-effective service we can. When we launched the new products, we decided that for them to be as effective as possible, they also needed to be as affordable as possible. As a result, our platform fees now range from just 1% to 2%, plus 39¢ / ticket (if applicable). Donors can still cover 100% of these fees, and the average campaign is now keeping ~99.7% of all funds raised. Learn more about our new pricing and how our fees work.

We built and began piloting Pro versions of our new products 🚀

If you're thinking "wait, 1 to 2% is really low, how are you gonna make money?" – well, we asked ourselves the same thing at first. The conclusion we came to was that there was still a tremendous amount of value we could add for users who require more advanced solutions, such as embeddable widgets and recurring donations (Collect Pro), multi-team and chapter fundraising (Fundraise Pro), mobile ticket scanning (Events Pro), and more. The "Pro" versions of our three main products have custom pricing with higher transaction rates and/or subscription fees, and they've already become a quickly-growing segment for Givebutter as a company. Sound like something you might be interested in? Schedule a demo with us.

We became the first fundraising platform to partner and integrate with Venmo 📱💸

To help make the giving process as seamless as possible for our users, we built a custom integration with Venmo. It's been one of our most popular features since its implementation, accounting for ~15% of all donations on Givebutter.

We launched a ton of new content initiatives 📰

Receive an email from Givebutter about good news happening all around the world every Friday (or read about it on our new Good News site); get inspired by Changemaker stories highlighting members of Givebutter community; read the latest news and insights from the Givebutter team on the Butter Blog; and get all of your technical questions answered by heading to our full-service Help Center.

We shattered our own records 🏅

CMU Greek Week became the largest single student-led fundraiser in Givebutter history, and Brawl for a Cause became the largest overall.

We bragged about ourselves 💁‍♀

Just in case our excellent use of emojis isn't persuasive enough, we made a Compare page for anyone to stack Givebutter up feature-by-feature against some of the most popular fundraising sites. We also made dedicated pages for Givebutter vs. GoFundMe, Givebutter vs. PayPal, and Givebutter vs. Eventbrite, and we plan to add more soon.

We doubled-down on groups and made 10,000 new friends 💛

Givebutter will always be an amazing tool for individual fundraising, but in 2018 we realized that the place where we added the most value was with groups, teams, and organizations. We broke that down into four main segments and created dedicated landing pages for each: nonprofits, student organizations, sports teams, and companies. And by the end of 2018, we had over 10,000 accounts on our platform.

—

Looking back, we're honestly floored by what our small, yet passionate team has been able to accomplish in a single year. But nothing amazes us more than the incredible community propelling Givebutter forward — everything on this list is all thanks to your feedback, support, and our shared mission for building a better way to give.

If you're curious about what we've got in store for 2019, you'll definitely want to check this out.