TeamRaiser vs. Personal Fundraising

Amanda Maccullough

Can anyone explain the major differences between TeamRaiser and Personal Fundraising (formerly Tribute)? Additionally, must one have TeamRaiser in order to make use of Personal Fundraising (is Personal Fundraising just an upsell of TeamRaiser)? Are there any major benefits to TeamRaiser that do not exist in Personal Fundraising?  Any information that anyone has based on personal experience, or research for their own organization would be incredibly helpful!

Sally Heaven

Hi Amanda - I'm sure others will chime in as well, but the main differences between TeamRaiser and Personal Fundraising are:

TeamRaiser is used for organizing peer-led fundraising events that usually happen on a specific day (think a walk, run, bike race) where people organize themselves into teams with team captains.  TeamRaiser is very goal-driven - teams and individuals agree to raise a certain amount of money in order to participate in the event.  Progress toward goals are reported on an individual basis, and also in aggregate for the team.  There are pages that exist for the team, with links to each individual's fundraising page.  Usually people and teams create pages that stay live until the event, and then are retired.

Personal Fundraising, on the other hand, is more appropriate for an ongoing fundraising effort where there is not necessarily one specific date for an event.  Think more like memorial giving, in honor of, tribute, or simply one person's ongoing effort to raise money for a nonprofit they are involved with.  Someone could create a Personal Fundraising page and it could be live for years, and the person could continually push people to their page from year to year.

Amanda Maccullough

Sally Heaven:

Hi Amanda - I'm sure others will chime in as well, but the main differences between TeamRaiser and Personal Fundraising are:

TeamRaiser is used for organizing peer-led fundraising events that usually happen on a specific day (think a walk, run, bike race) where people organize themselves into teams with team captains.  TeamRaiser is very goal-driven - teams and individuals agree to raise a certain amount of money in order to participate in the event.  Progress toward goals are reported on an individual basis, and also in aggregate for the team.  There are pages that exist for the team, with links to each individual's fundraising page.  Usually people and teams create pages that stay live until the event, and then are retired.

Personal Fundraising, on the other hand, is more appropriate for an ongoing fundraising effort where there is not necessarily one specific date for an event.  Think more like memorial giving, in honor of, tribute, or simply one person's ongoing effort to raise money for a nonprofit they are involved with.  Someone could create a Personal Fundraising page and it could be live for years, and the person could continually push people to their page from year to year.

Thanks for the response Sally. I understand, conceptually, the difference between TeamRaiser and Personal Fundraising, but I was wondering if anyone can further explain the differences that our users are going to experience if we were to switch from TeamRaiser to Personal Fundraising. Are there functions that are available through TeamRaiser that are not available through Personal Fundraising? The way we see it now, it seems that Personal Fundraising is a streamlined (possibly easier to use functionally) than TeamRaiser. Is this correct?

Sally Heaven

Amanda Maccullough:

Thanks for the response Sally. I understand, conceptually, the difference between TeamRaiser and Personal Fundraising, but I was wondering if anyone can further explain the differences that our users are going to experience if we were to switch from TeamRaiser to Personal Fundraising. Are there functions that are available through TeamRaiser that are not available through Personal Fundraising? The way we see it now, it seems that Personal Fundraising is a streamlined (possibly easier to use functionally) than TeamRaiser. Is this correct?

Didn't realize that you were currently a TeamRaiser user.  I think that your users will experience a similar, but different process with fewer steps.  Of course, all change can be hard if someone's used to doing something a certain way so it depends how many long-term TeamRaiser users that you have, and how attached they are to being part of a team, and whether you're organizing around a singular event, etc...

One of the best ways to find out might be to try your hand at creating a Personal Fundraising page - here is one client's homepage for encouraging their users to create a PF page:

http://wwf.worldwildlife.org/site/PageServer?pagename=trib_home

Noel Beebe

Hi Amanda,

Yes, there are features available in TeamRaiser that are not available in Personal Fundraising.  For instance, the rich-text editors available for creating email and personal page content in the TeamRaiser Participant Center have not yet been implemented in Personal Fundraising.  We also recently created "Participant Center 2.0" in TeamRaiser, but this has not yet been replicated for Personal Fundraising.  There are also many event-driven features (tenting, blue-printing, event manager center, milestones) that do not exist in PF.  Because so many clients - and end users - use TeamRaiser, demand is much greater for new and different features.  As a reult, Personal Fundraising is simpler, but less-feature-rich.

The two products are completely separate from one another and not dependent on each other in any way at this time.

I hope this helps - please let me know if you have further questions.

Thanks

Noel