Fundraise Up’s 4% Fee Adds Up Fast. Here’s How to Keep More of Every Gift.

How much of each online donation actually reaches your mission?

Every fundraising platform comes with costs. The difference is how much those costs reduce the value of each gift and what your organization can do to offset them. Fundraise Up relies entirely on donors choosing to cover fees, but Blackbaud Donation Forms offer additional options to help you retain more of the revenue you work hard to raise.

Comparing the platform fee

Fundraise Up is often positioned around a polished donor checkout and an enterprise-style giving experience. But, when you look at platform fees side by side, the financial impact can be significant.

Based on $1 million raised online. Both platforms charge payment processing separately.

In a direct comparison, Fundraise Up charges a 4% platform fee, while Blackbaud Donation Forms for Raiser’s Edge NXT charge 1.5%. On $1 million raised online, that’s a difference of $25,000 per year even before payment processing factors in.

How to offset fundraising costs

Fee coverage is one of the few fundraising tactics that allow your organization to keep more of the revenue you’ve already raised. This has become common practice. In fact, more than 80% of organizations on supported Blackbaud solutions use a fee cover option. Every gift where the fee is covered means more money available to support the work that drives your mission.

Fundraise Up and Blackbaud both offer fee cover to help offset fundraising costs, but they take different approaches.

With Fundraise Up, fee recovery depends on donors choosing to cover fees at checkout. When donors opt out, your organization absorbs the platform and processing costs.

Blackbaud offers two options:

• Donor cover works like Fundraise Up’s model. Donors can choose to add the fees to their gift. Across Blackbaud customers, 70% of donors add the fee when given the choice.

• Complete Cover® helps organizations receive the full value of the donation every time. With this option enabled, Blackbaud pays platform and processing fees on eligible gifts up to $3,000, even when donors choose not to contribute additional funds. The donor is invited, but not required, to add a voluntary amount toward Blackbaud’s Complete Cover® program.

Comparing costs at different fundraising levels

To illustrate the financial impact of fee cover options, let’s explore the following examples.

These scenarios assume a $100 average gift paid by card. For Fundraise Up, the calculations use its stated 80% donor-coverage rate, meaning the organization absorbs platform and processing fees when donors decline to cover costs (approximately 20% of gifts). For Blackbaud, the examples assume eligible gifts of $3,000 or less processed through modern Raiser’s Edge NXT donation forms with Complete Cover® enabled.

*Illustrative example.

Even giving Fundraise Up full credit for its 80% coverage claim, its model still leaves $14,400 on the table at $1 million—and $72,000 at $5 million—every year.

A single $100 gift illustrates how the models differ. For eligible gifts processed with Complete Cover®, your organization receives the full donation regardless of whether the donor chooses to contribute additional funds. With Fundraise Up, fees are deducted when a donor declines to cover them.

*Illustrative example.

Organizations using Fundraise Up may still absorb meaningful fundraising costs, even with strong donor cover participation. In these examples, Blackbaud Complete Cover® reduces those costs to essentially zero for eligible gifts.

Will asking donors to cover fees reduce giving?

This is a common question about fee cover, and Blackbaud data suggests fee-cover options can coexist with strong donor participation. Among Blackbaud donation forms, donor cover forms convert at 60%—higher than forms with no fee cover option at 56%.

Offering a fee cover option does not necessarily reduce donor participation. Most donors now expect transparency around transaction costs, and providing a choice can help you communicate those costs clearly.

The adoption numbers reinforce that point: more than 80% of organizations on supported Blackbaud solutions now use a fee cover option, and 58% of all donors choose to cover fees in some form when asked. In 2025 alone, organizations using Blackbaud fee cover features kept a combined $17.4 million that would otherwise have gone to fees.

For some, that’s enough to cover their entire software subscription.

The system behind the form

A donation form doesn’t live in isolation. It has to get the gift, the donor, and the data into your system of record, and integration requirements can influence total cost of ownership.
Fundraise Up doesn’t include a donor database. It’s a giving layer that must be integrated into whatever CRM you already use, through native connectors or its API. That means two systems to maintain, fields to map, records to reconcile, and ongoing staff time that doesn’t appear on the pricing page.

Blackbaud Donation Forms are native to Raiser’s Edge NXT. Gift processing, donor records, receipting, and reporting all live in a connected workflow. For a lean development team, that reduces administrative complexity and gives your team valuable time back.

Important considerations

Good competitive analysis explores different angles. Here’s some context to keep in mind when it comes to Blackbaud fee cover options:

• Complete Cover® applies to eligible card gifts up to $3,000. Gifts above $3,000, and gifts paid via PayPal or Venmo, aren’t eligible. Donor cover can serve as the checkout fallback, but very large gifts are often better processed outside an online form.

• With Complete Cover®, the donor’s voluntary contribution goes to Blackbaud and isn’t tax-deductible. With Donor Cover, the full amount remains tax-deductible. Fundraise Up’s coverage works the same way: covered fees aren’t a deductible donation.

• The Online Form platform fee is charged in addition to standard processing, and it has no per-gift cap—so turning on a fee cover option really makes a difference.

What could retained revenue do for your organization?

Consider the $40,000 that Fundraise Up costs for every $1 million raised. Reclaiming even part of it means more mission capacity. Maybe it’s a year of program supplies. It could be a development associate’s salary. It might even be the matching pool for your year-end campaign.

Fundraise Up is a capable platform with a good checkout experience. But for organizations evaluating total fundraising costs and fee recovery opportunities, Blackbaud Donation Forms offer several advantages: a lower platform fee, a fee cover model that can significantly reduce transaction costs, and a form that’s already integrated into your CRM. These benefits all add up to a simple bottom line: more of every dollar reaches your mission.

If a $100 gift should mean $100 for your cause, Blackbaud Donation Forms—with fee cover turned on—are built to make that happen.