20% fees - Is Snap-Raise worth it?

What’s Snap! Raise?

Snap! Raise is a 28-day fundraising platform built for youth teams. More than 40,000 teams, groups, and clubs throughout all 50 states have trusted Snap! Raise for their fundraising needs. Snap! Raise’s success is in pairing teams with a Snap! Raise sales rep who takes on the simple logistics of creating an online fundraising campaign. To motivate students and give coaches “back their time,” Snap! Raise also offers incentives such as personalized team gear, participation prizes, sponsored gear, leadership resources, and championship banners.

Before starting a campaign, ask yourself:

• Do I want to run more than one fundraiser a year and have a personalized system that grows with my team over time?
• Does my team want to collect donations year-round?
• Do I want my fundraising system to allow me to sell tickets, collect dues, process other payments, and accept a variety of payment methods?
• Do I want to store and track donor information in a CRM for any future engagement?
• Do I want to communicate with supporters via email or text?

If you answered "YES" to any of these questions, then Snap! Raise is probably not the solution for you, and you would be better off with an end-to-end fundraising platform like Givebutter.

Now, let's breakdown the concerns of fundraising with Snap! Raise.

What are Snap-Raise’s fees?

Simply put, Snap! Raise's fees are costly for most schools, sports teams, and other nonprofits. Fundraisers will only receive 80% of total funds. If they don't meet full team participation goals, the fee increases (the specifics are not publicly available).

Let's break it down:

• If you meet your campaign's participation goal, you get to keep 80% of the total funds raised.
• Participation % = Number of participants receiving one donation, divided by the current roster size.
• If you don't meet your campaign's participation goal, you are charged an additional fee.
  

<div class='rich-text-tip'>On Snap! Raise's website, they say, “No more paying a 3% credit card fee, we have you covered.” They better have you covered when you’re paying them 20% or more of the funds you raise!</div>

Compare that to an alternative like Givebutter, which is completely free and you get to keep all of the funds you raise. Givebutter makes fees transparent to donors when they are making a donation with the option to cover the transaction fee—which over 95% of donors choose to do.

For Snap! Raise to quickly scale its company, it invests in its sales and training program costs, which, frankly, comes out of your pocket. Givebutter takes a more cost-effective digital approach to invest in the product and community so that you pay less an arm and a leg in fees.

So, Snap! Raise may appear to save you time, but it certainly won’t retain your school group’s money.

Snap! Raise Features

Now, you might be wondering, "saving 20% or more in fees with Givebuttter would be great, but  can I achieve the same or better results than with Snap! Raise?

Snap! Raise’s fundraising pages are mostly well-equipped to help you raise funds, which is good. They include trackable team pages, video support, a secure platform, and ways for you to email, text, and share on social media about your fundraiser. However, Snap! Raise is missing a number of key features that drive both short and long-term fundraising success.

While the ‘set it and forget it’ mentality is certainly appealing, in the end, it isn’t effective when it comes to building a sustainable community of support for your team. The same is true in the nonprofit world. A nonprofit can’t set up a fundraising page on its website, and hope donors search them out, click the ‘donate’ button, and make a financial contribution. It’s asking too much, especially in today’s world of constant distraction. Nonprofits have to find the right donors (people who care about the mission and their connection to it) and communicate to engage them. At the very least, to continue the conversation, nonprofits should always follow-up with a ‘thank-you’ to ensure the relationship is strong enough for next year’s ‘ask.’

A key component missing from Snap! Raise is a better all-around user experience. As an alternative, Givebutter fundraising pages include live supporter feeds that allow you to share stories and encouraging messages along with pictures, GIFs, and drawings to draw more attention. Check out this example of a live supporter feed. Live feeds make it fun and interactive for supporters to participate in your campaign because as you’ll see, it looks and feels a lot like social media.

Another feature that’s missing from Snap! Raise’s user experience is a more customized donation form. With Snap! Raise, you can collect one-time donations, but that’s about it. Raise’s fundraising solution is not fully optimized to where you can customize theme colors, donation amounts, automatic receipts, or embed it right into a website. With an alternative like Givebutter, you can do all those things and more! See how. Snap! Raise can securely accept one-time credit card payments, but does not integrate with Apple Pay, Venmo, and digital wallets, or offer Text-to-Donate. Plus, on Snap! Raise, you can’t collect recurring gifts because the campaign disappears in 28-days.

Finally, Snap! Raise is missing event ticketing and event pages from its platform. Events can be a really important aspect of a team’s fundraising strategy. If you use Snap! Raise and want to have an event to boost your campaign, you would need to find another platform altogether and then keep track of both, which is not very efficient.

Long-Term Fundraising Success?

Fundraisers in search of a fundraising platform who are genuinely concerned about fundraising goals will ask: what about next year? If the fundraising platform you used last year can be used again next year, it could save your team hundreds and thousands of dollars for years to come. That’s a good investment! Finding a platform that’s effective to set-up, use, and engage supporters is vital to the overall financial commitment. The key is finding an affordable fundraising platform that is high-quality for garnering more support.

Snap! Raise appears to be built for short-term fundraising success. Unlimited users or not, every time you start a Snap-Raise campaign, you are starting from scratch. All donor data will be lost. Starting from scratch not only costs you the time you thought you were saving but money, as well. It’s crucial that your team keeps track of which individuals raised funds, how much they raised, and which supporters donated last time, like you can in Givebutter's built-in, free CRM Track. Snap! Raise does not make that easy to do in the long-game of raising funds for the sustainability of teams and programs.

Nor does Snap! Raise offer a suite of tools that would be particularly useful for groups and teams. For example, the ability to invite and manage roles for unlimited members, receive paper checks in the mail (as well as bank or debit transfers), and integrate with thousands of third-party apps such as Mailchimp, Venmo, Quickbooks, Google Sheets, and more. These high-quality integrations make fundraising more effective in the long-run for growing teams, but unfortunately, they aren’t available with Snap! Raise.

Lastly, communicating with supporters is critical for the success of any fundraising campaign. Using a fundraising platform that shows supporter feeds, and allows you to connect with donors through email and text all in one place will make your life easier. You can engage your community like never before using Engage, Givebutter's built-in messaging and marketing tool.

Raise Better

So, are the 20% Snap! Raise fees worth it? You tell us: is possibly saving a few hours worth the lack of supporter engagement, donor tracking, fewer dollars saved, and needing to reinvent the wheel next year?

If you are ready to save all of your campaign's funds raised, look no further. Givebutter’s average campaign keeps 99.5% - the highest in the industry.

Get started!