Raklet vs Fundraise Up: Which is a better fit?

Dave: Hi, I'm Dave. I'm the founder and principal at Watermark Business Partners, and I'm using Raklet to put together a community for my clients and partners. I give these guys five stars, because the functionality is really, really strong for such a cost-effective and reasonable entry-level platform. I'm excited to get this in place and really impressed and encouraged by what I've seen so far. So as far as other alternatives, I think the one piece that I'm using elsewhere is the learning and online course digital content component. So for that right now, I am looking at Easy Course. Also, I use sessions for my online meetings and bookings, webinars, all that kind of stuff. So I think there's an opportunity here to maybe bring some of these tools together into one place, but for me right now, from a directories and community component, I think Raklet's a really good, easy to implement, robustly solutioned starting point, and I like what I see. So for me, I chose Raklet because I'm new to this. I've never built something like this before. I'm not someone with a tech background. I come from a big corporate, a former banker who is new at the entrepreneurship thing and is even worse at technology. So as a newbie, I couldn't justify a big investment, but at the same time, I didn't want to go with something half-baked to the market. So I thought their pricing approach and value proposition was really reasonable. I don't mind commission payment on payment processing. I think that's fair. But some of the other bigger guys out there, like Brilliant Directories is another example that I considered, some of them are quite expensive, and I need to get comfortable before I can justify that investment. And right now with Raklet, I think it's a great place to start and really, really reasonable. I'm not fully. I haven't deployed the tool yet, but from an onboarding perspective, they do have fairly strong community supports and resources available online, so I've been impressed by that. Some maybe take a little bit of digging to find online, but that's, I think, often the case with just put anything. There's more than I probably expected and perhaps more meaningful, the tool is sufficiently easy to use, that I haven't found myself looking for help very often in the first place, which is really the key. So my number one recommendation for others considering Raklet would just be to really go through all the learning material first, and I think the onboarding process will be a lot smoother. There's a lot of great content there, and I found that even though I was able to figure things out for myself as I went, I think it would have gone a lot faster if I had taken the time to look at their resources, because they're really impressive and shouldn't be taken for granted.

Savannah: Hey there. My name is Savannah. I'm a visual content strategist for OneHope. We're an international nonprofit and we love Fundraise up. We definitely give it five stars. So, I'm not the developer in this case. I work more on the front-end design. However, I know that we did not have really strong mobile-friendly fundraising integrations at all in our website before. So this is a new integration and it really opened up a lot of doors for us. Given our size, we should have had a much larger donation presence online, and we didn't. We were still receiving a lot of mail-in donations, physical donations, and so we wanted to increase our digital donation presence. But that needed to be mobile-friendly. It needed to be accessible for a lot of different payment methods like Venmo, Apple Pay, things like that. And so Fundraise Up ticked all the boxes. It was easily integrated into our website. It looks great on mobile, and it was just so easy to use, so we were thrilled. I thought it was extremely easy. Their website really lays out all of the different templates and options that you have, and if we ever had an issue, we could reach out to them directly. Definitely, I don't work on the embed itself, but as far as layout and working with it as a designer, it was extremely easy. And actually it saved me a lot of time because it automatically optimizes for mobile, so very easy to use. I really just can't recommend it enough. We saw a tremendous increase even within the first year in our donation rate, just because we made it easier for people to donate. It even has this function where it will follow the user if they started the donation process or if they were interested and then they dropped off. It will have a tag, follow them on the website, just not in an aggressive way, but in an encouraging way to say, "Hey, do you want to finish this donation process? Do you want to follow through?" And we've just seen great turnover through that. We've seen great results, and so I can't recommend the platform enough. It's intuitive. It makes the process easy, and we've seen the results.