A few years ago I was sitting in a board meeting for my kid's club, going over the numbers from our latest fundraiser. We had worked hard for that money. Parents chipped in, the kids showed up, the community came through. And then I looked at what actually landed in our account after the big fundraising platform took its cut, and I did the math out loud: about a fifth of every dollar was gone.
Not gone to the kids. Not gone to equipment, or travel, or the scholarship fund that helped families who could not otherwise afford to play. Gone to fees. For a platform that, as far as I could tell, did very little that we could not do ourselves with a spreadsheet and a card reader.
I am a parent. I am a coach. I sat on the board. And that number bothered me for weeks, because I knew we were not alone. Every club in town, every league, every booster group and PTA and music program, was quietly paying the same tax on their own generosity. Small organizations, the ones with the least to spare, were handing over the most in proportion to what they raised.
So I built the thing I wished we had
I did not set out to build a company. I set out to fix a specific, annoying problem: our club was losing too much of its own money to raise money.
The design goals were simple, and they have not changed:
Keep the fee small and honest. We charge a flat 2%, plus the actual cost of card processing passed straight through. No monthly fee, no markup, no percentage that grows as you succeed. You can see exactly what a donation costs before it goes through. And when a supporter wants to, they can cover those costs when they give, so the whole gift reaches the team.
Never touch the money. Donations go directly into your organization's own account. We do not hold your funds, we do not float them, and we are not a step your treasurer has to chase. The money is yours from the moment it is given.
Stay small so it stays cheap. The reason the big platforms charge what they charge is, in part, that they are big. We run deliberately lean. Operating minimally is not a phase we are trying to grow out of; it is the whole point. It is what lets the money go where it matters.
Why two names
What began as a tool for one youth sports club turned out to be just as useful for the robotics team, the community theater, the neighborhood cause down the road. So there are two front doors now. TeamRaised is for youth sports, the world I came from. RaiseClear is for everyone else. Behind them is the same platform, the same promise, and the same person who got tired of paying a fifth of every dollar for nothing.
If your team or club or organization is tired of the same thing, we would love to have you.
the RaiseClear and TeamRaised team
Reach us any time at [email protected].