A giving page that does not charge you for asking
Publish the appeal on your own site, tie every gift to the alumni record it came from, and keep the whole thing running for a one-off $49 rather than a platform fee that grows with your success.
AlumDeck takes no percentage of what you raise, because AlumDeck never touches the money.
Why small appeals usually cost more than they raise
A school running one appeal a year has a maths problem that nobody in the fundraising software industry likes to talk about.
Suppose your library appeal raises 6,000 from 90 alumni. A hosted fundraising platform at 3,000 a year has taken half of it before anyone counts processing fees. The appeal worked; the tooling ate it. That is why AlumDeck is a one-time licence.
What the giving module is, precisely
A branded giving page on your own domain, plus a record of the gifts in your admin panel, in the same database as your alumni. The page carries the appeal and the ask. The admin side carries who gave, when and to which campaign, so a donor is a person in your directory rather than a line in a system nobody logs into.
What that trade actually buys you
- Nobody takes a percentage of your appeal for the privilege of hosting a page.
- Your donor list lives in your database, in your country, and you can query it directly.
- No annual renewal has to be justified to a finance committee before you may fundraise again.
- Small appeals become viable. A 900 target is worth running when the software cost nothing extra.
The pieces of a working appeal
Enough structure to run a campaign properly, and no more than that.
A giving page in your own branding
Your logo, your colours, your domain, your words. A page of your own website rather than a hosted form on someone else's platform with their footer at the bottom, which matters more to alumni trust than most vendors admit.
Campaigns, not one pot
The library appeal, the bursary fund and the sports pavilion are separate, so you can report on each without unpicking a spreadsheet.
Donors are members
A gift attaches to an alumni record with a batch year, which is how you find out that the class of 1987 gives and the class of 2015 does not.
The ask goes out properly
Write the appeal as news, send it as a newsletter, link the giving page. One system, so the link and the story never drift apart.
Your data, exportable
Gift records are rows in your own MySQL database. Export them for the treasurer, the auditor or the annual report.
How an appeal runs, week by week
A six-week appeal, run by one person who also has another job. This is the realistic version.
Week one: decide the number and the story
Create the campaign with a specific target and a specific thing it buys. Alumni give to a named bursary or a leaking roof, not to general funds, and no software fixes a vague ask.
Week two: build the page and the route in
Write the giving page, set your suggested amounts, and settle how the money will reach your account. Test that route yourself with a small gift before any alumnus sees it.
Weeks three to five: ask, then ask again
Publish the appeal as news, send it to members, mention it at the reunion. Because gifts link to member records, the second email can go to the cohorts who have not responded rather than to everyone.
Week six: thank people, then publish the total
Thank every donor individually, then post the result. The write-up of a finished appeal is the strongest asset you have for the next one, and it lives on your site.
Giving questions
Does AlumDeck take a percentage of donations?
No. There is no platform fee, no per-transaction cut and no revenue share. It is software on your own server and has no way to take a share even if we wanted one.
Whoever moves the money will have their own fees. That is between you and them.
Can we take recurring monthly gifts?
Regular giving is set up through whatever handles your payments, not inside AlumDeck. The module records and reports gifts against alumni records rather than administering mandates.
For a school running one or two appeals a year that is the right shape. If monthly giving is the core of your programme, be honest that you need a dedicated system.
Will it produce tax receipts?
Not automatically, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. Receipting rules differ in every country, and getting them subtly wrong is worse than not offering the feature.
Export the gift records and receipt them the way your finance office already does.
Is giving part of the base licence?
Yes. Donations, events, mentoring, the directory and news are in the one $49 licence, with no add-on store. That is the whole model, set out on the pricing page.
Fundraise without the subscription eating the appeal
One payment for the software, no cut of your donations, and a giving page that sits on your own domain next to your alumni records.
Want to talk through your appeal before buying? Email hello@alumdeck.com.