Creating a Fundraising Website Just Got Easy – BlackbaudNow

Over the years I have done my share of volunteer work by making several fundraising websites. Well now, I might just get a little lazy, and start referring people to BlackbaudNow. BlackbaudNow is an easy to use point-and-click website builder designed specifically with fundraising in mind. Their fee? Just a small cut of the pie. There are no up front fees, and no service fees.

Getting Started with BBNow

Setting up a site is quick and painless. The first step is picking one of the 24 templates they have. Once you click one, a preview of it shows below.

The next step is to click the green Edit My Website button, seen in screenshot above (top right). This is where the point-and-click website design kicks in, and simply put, really easy to use. Forget Mom, Grandma could run this!

Each template comes with six pages by default, but if you don’t need one you can hide it from the menu. To edit a page you simply use your templates menu to get to it as if the site was already live. Edit your content, change pictures, whatever. When you are done with that, it’s time to register.

The registration is fairly simple, six mandatory fields, and within five minutes I had a site up: BWI ORG. Please don’t donate anything to me there. I just created it to test out BBNow.

Features of BBNow

So you created your basic site asking for donations. Now What? BBNow comes with three special services help your campaign be a successful one. The Dashboard, Donor Now, and Email Now. If you look at their menu after you create an account you will also see the Web Now tab. This is simply for editing your web page.

The dashboard helps you find constituents that have donated to you already, and also comes with a graph to show you how things are going. The Donor Now feature allows you to quickly add donations manually in case you received donations from a source other than your BBNow page. The Donor now feature also allows you to run reports on your constituents.

The final feature is Email Now, where you can email just one or all of your constituents.

Transactions

Transactions are fairly simple. Payments initially go to BBNow, where they initially charge you 30 cents per donation. Twice a month they then send the funds to your Paypal account. Their fee for this is 4.95% of the donations. That may sound like a lot at first, but consider this. Imagine getting $1,000 donated to your organization through your website. Could you get a website built and hosted for $49.95? I say, CHEAP! Even if the transaction fees of 30 cents piled up, getting a site for under $100 is a bargain.

This site is super easy to use. I saw a lot of things that I liked as well. Online instant chat for one. I tried, and got a quick response. It has a easy to use refund system in case someone changes their mind about the donation. It was completely clutter free/very focused. Great FAQ and help page. These guys are ready to go.