Back to school
Membership and annual direct-ask drives
School Fundraising Software
Fundraising software for schools, PTAs, PTOs and education foundations
Your fundraising year already has its dates. The software should fit them.
Most groups run that year across disconnected tools and reconcile by hand. Cloud Donor Manager brings online, in-person and text giving, events, auctions, volunteers, marketing and donor records into one place — with no platform fees and no per-contact charge. See the full feature list.
Fun run or read-a-thon
Student pages and class-versus-class
Fall festival
Trunk-or-treat and family events
Community activity
Book fairs and room-parent sign-ups
Spring gala
Silent auction, live auction and paddle raise
Year-end
Teacher appreciation and giving letters
Fun runs, read-a-thons and class-versus-class pledge drives
This is a fun run in software form: every student gets a page, every class becomes a team, and the leaderboard is the fundraiser.
The student page
A personal fundraiser page to share with grandparents, neighbors and family chats. Parents manage the page and team from the portal.
The leaderboard
Classes, grades and teams roll up with a live leaderboard, while analytics break results out by team and fundraiser.
The push
Campaign reporting, giving-day goal tracking, match challenges and SMS reminders keep the drive moving.
Per-lap and per-page commitments are recorded and tracked as pledges. Families manage recurring pledges in their portal; the system tracks commitments while your drive sets the terms.
The annual drive, recurring family giving, and the matching gifts nobody asks for
The direct-ask drive should have a real giving page, not a personal payment link.
A branded page can be embedded on the school website or shared as a hosted link in the newsletter, Friday folder or flyer QR code. A family can give once or spread support across monthly gifts.
Cards, ACH, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Venmo and Cash App keep checkout familiar. Gifts can be designated to the library, band trip or general fund, and donors can choose to cover the processing fee.
Automatic employer lookup helps uncover matching gifts the community is already eligible to request.
For the gym, assembly and paddle raise, a keyword and short code turn a text into a gift and donor record. The Text-to-Give page explains carrier registration and consent tracking.
The book fair table, the fall festival, and the gala floor
Taking cards where school life happens is part of the platform, not a reader borrowed from a parent’s side business.
- No extra hardware is needed for Tap to Phone.
- Countertop and mobile readers support contactless gifts.
- POS activity shares the same account and deposit.
- Receipts can be texted at the terminal.
Online, in-person, kiosk and point-of-sale activity land in one ledger and one reconciliation.
Ticket the fall festival, run the spring auction, keep one guest list
Event pages sell tickets by type — family, single or table — with online checkout, promo codes and check-in from a phone or tablet. Silent and live auctions run in the same system with online items and real-time bidding.
Gala table sponsors are handled properly too — sponsor records and agreements with attachments, and a dedicated sponsorship report — so next year’s renewal ask doesn’t depend on someone remembering. And if the carnival or the gala runs a raffle, read the rules around raffles and prize draws before selling tickets.
No separate auction vendor, and no separate donor list to merge afterward — the fall festival guest and the gala bidder are already one record.
Volunteer sign-ups and shift reminders, included
Parents can join a public signup page without creating an account. Build shifts from templates for book fairs, festival setup and room-parent rotations.
Volunteers claim, swap or release shifts with approval and an audit trail. Text reminders, announcements and self-service keep the treasurer out of late-night group texts.
Time tracking and time reports are available for groups that log family volunteer hours.
Records that survive the June board handoff
Every June, donor history and fundraising notes risk leaving with the outgoing treasurer’s spreadsheet. Here, the records outlive the board.
01 · FAMILY
One record per family
Profiles, gifts, designations, notes and attachments, with household totals and global search.
02 · CLEANUP
Clean data, on purpose
Duplicate detection and merging with an audit trail,
plus segments and interests.
plus segments and interests.
03 · CONTROL
Volunteer-board controls
Role-based permissions and approval rules for large gifts, refunds and sensitive changes.
04 · MIGRATION
The handoff itself
Guided CSV import with field mapping, migration batches and undo.
For PTA councils and district education foundations, branch-level scoping keeps each school’s numbers separate while org-wide rollups show the total; grants and a major-gift pipeline support foundation work.
Receipts, year-end letters, and the numbers the board asks for
For families and donors
Every completed donation triggers an instant branded receipt with the required “no goods or services were provided” disclosure. Recurring givers are thanked automatically, year-end summaries generate in bulk, and donors access their own history and statements.
For the board and bookkeeper
30+ built-in reports cover teams, campaigns, donations, retention, sponsorships and LYBUNT/SYBUNT. The dashboard and scheduled reports build the board packet, while QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop and Xero sync support the books.
What it costs
No platform fees and no pricing by contact record. Adding families, grandparents and alumni does not raise the software bill. Donors can choose to cover the processing fee at checkout, or the group absorbs a low, volume-based rate. Creating an account is free.
Processing is quoted to actual volume and average gift size. Cloud Donor Manager is built by Host Merchant Services, a payment processor. See the published pricing detail and the case for integrated processing versus a gateway-only form.
Questions event operators ask
Can we use it for a fun run or read-a-thon where sponsors pledge per lap or per page?
Yes — each student gets a personal fundraiser page, classes compete on team leaderboards, and per-lap or per-page commitments are recorded and tracked as pledges that families manage from their portal. The system tracks the commitments; your drive sets the terms.
Do parents need an account to sign up for a volunteer shift?
No. Volunteer opportunities publish on a public page with no login required — parents sign up, get text reminders, and can swap or release a shift with approval if plans change.
Can we run our gala tickets and silent auction in the same place?
Yes. Event pages sell tickets by type with check-in from a phone or tablet, and the auction runs in the same system with online items and real-time bidding.
Do we have to pay a monthly fee or pay more as our parent list grows?
No platform fees and no per-contact pricing. Donors can cover the processing fee at checkout, or the group absorbs a low, volume-based rate.
Can our PTA council or education foundation see each school separately and as a total?
Yes. Branch-level scoping gives each school unit its own numbers, org-wide rollups give the council or foundation the total, and permissions can be scoped by branch.
More answers in the FAQs.
Bring the history across while there is still runway.
Guided CSV migration includes undo. QuickBooks, Xero, Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Slack, Google Calendar and Dropbox connect out of the box, plus a public REST API. One vendor supplies the software and merchant account. Here’s how it works.