8 Best Text to Give Platforms for Nonprofits on Raiser's Edge NXT (2026)

Our top pick

Best for: development and events teams at nonprofits on Raiser's Edge NXT who want the paddle raise, auction close and appeal moment to take seconds on a phone and land in the CRM attributed.

Platform Overview

Trellis is our event fundraising platform for galas, auctions and golf tournaments, and text-first giving is how donors give on it: if your donors can receive a text message and click a link, they can give. If you use Raiser's Edge NXT and you raise over $200K a year through events, it is built for you.

We are the only platform that actually integrates with Raiser's Edge NXT in real time, so a mobile gift is on the constituent record before the applause stops, and the reconciliation that takes other platforms two to five weeks of a donor database administrator's time, roughly $2,900 to $7,200 in salary per event at the US average of about $75,000 a year, is finished the same night or the next day.

Giving is text-first and mobile-first: as long as your donors can receive a text message, they can give, with no app, no login and no learning curve. We are built for giving inside fundraising events, not for year-round SMS marketing, and we say so plainly. Every text can carry a text-to-donate link, and texts can be event-triggered or scheduled to predefined recipient groups.

The 4 Mobile Giving Problems We Built Trellis to Solve

Text donations on most platforms land as a payout report. Someone reconciles each line against existing constituents by hand, guesses at the spouse, and sorts the gifts into the right fund a week later. The database administrator feels this first, and the database administrator is usually the one who starts the search for a new platform.

We are the only platform that integrates directly with Raiser's Edge NXT in real time, and that is not a feature, it is the reason customers choose us. Other platforms list Raiser's Edge as an integration. Read the documentation and it is an import plug-in run after the event, a paid middleware subscription, or a connector that carries phone numbers but not gifts. We actually integrate.

Every guest is matched to a constituent with your spouse and household rules, every ticket, sponsorship, winning bid and pledge is written as its own gift with campaign, fund, package and appeal mapping applied the moment it lands, and attendance is written to the Raiser's Edge NXT event module.

Post-event reconciliation that used to take weeks or months is finished the same night or the next day. Cathedral Catholic High School ran a paper-free paddle raise for 700 guests with gifts flowing into the CRM as they were made.

A donor decides to give during the paddle raise. The platform asks for an account, a password they set last year, or an app download over ballroom Wi-Fi. The ask lasts ninety seconds and the moment is gone before the form loads.

Trellis is text-first and mobile-first. As long as your donors can receive a text message, they can give: a text arrives, they tap the link, and their account opens with no app download, no login and no learning curve.

Paddle raise prompts, outbid alerts and check-in confirmations all arrive by text on cue, tied to what is happening in the room, and a donor with an incomplete record can pledge in seconds with only a name and email.

Easy enough that nothing goes wrong on the night of. That is the standard we hold ourselves to.

Most platforms create work before, during and after the appeal. Beforehand, someone builds a pledge card list from a Raiser's Edge NXT export and re-keys it into a texting tool.

On the night, volunteers collect cards, the AV team never gets a live total, and the event planner fields questions instead of watching the room. Afterward, staff pulled off their real jobs spend the week entering pledges and chasing card details.

Trellis does the opposite. Before the event, your team pulls what it needs directly from Raiser's Edge NXT and Trellis, with no chasing the event planner, no manual exports and no re-entering data that already exists.

On the night, staff walk in and it just works, with no prior training required: hundreds of guests are checked in within minutes, and everything volunteers need is in front of them proactively, so the event planner gets to be present rather than stressed and fielding questions. Trellis runs at 99.99% uptime, published live for anyone to check at status.trellis.org, and we build the product so it does not need a person from our company standing in your ballroom.

After the event, the data is already where it needs to be. St. Bernard's Healthcare read its paddle raise total from the stage ten minutes after the ask, where it had previously been announced the following day.

The line we hear most often after a first Trellis event is a customer's: "my team doesn't dislike me anymore."

An SMS vendor sends the message, a donation form collects the gift, an auction tool runs the bidding and a ticketing platform holds the guest list. Four exports meet in a spreadsheet.

The message, the gift and the event record live in one system. Our outbound texts are event-triggered or scheduled, all customizable, sent to predefined recipient groups that take seconds to pick, and any of them can carry a text-to-donate link, giving sits beside ticketing, check-in and auction, Donate Auction Bid and full-page upsells lift what each moment raises, and there is no shortcode provisioning, carrier approval or keyword leasing, which removes the setup lead time and monthly minimums that shortcode programs carry.

Interactive Product Demo

Watch a mobile gift land in Raiser's Edge NXT within minutes.

Pricing

Trellis is $5,000 per year, flat. Text-first giving is included with the event platform rather than sold as a per-message add-on, and there is no shortcode lease, monthly minimum, per-event fee, percentage of funds raised or charge for onsite staff. Transaction fees are 0% or 3.5% + $0.30. With 0% Transaction Fees turned on, Trellis covers the fee on eligible checkouts under $3,000 and your guests are offered the option to add a small contribution at checkout; if they decline, we still cover it. Checkouts over $3,000, and back-office entries through the Sales Entry System or Check-In Tool, are charged at 3.5% + $0.30, and you choose whether your organization or the purchaser covers them.

We are not the lowest headline number here, and several platforms are free for a standalone text-to-donate link. Price the whole event before you decide. On a $200,000 event, OneCause lands around $11,000 to $14,000 once its 5% or annual fee, 3% to 4% processing and a quoted onsite staffer are counted; Givebutter is free to you but asks your guests to tip about 15%, or costs about $11,800 with tips off; Trellis is $5,000, and with 0% fees on the total usually lands very close to that, because few checkouts run above $3,000. An organization running Raiser's Edge NXT has already invested tens of thousands of dollars in its CRM; the platform that writes into it correctly, and gives your database administrator back two to five weeks after every event, is worth more than the one that hands back a payout report. At the $500,000 event our typical customer runs, the gap widens: OneCause lands around $43,000 to $45,000 once its 5% fee, 3% to 4% processing and an onsite staffer are counted, Givebutter runs about $29,500 with tips off, and Trellis stays close to $5,000 with 0% fees on.

Raiser's Edge NXT Integration

We are the only platform that actually integrates with Raiser's Edge NXT in real time, and it is the reason most of our customers chose us. Every other platform in this guide that lists Raiser's Edge or Blackbaud as an integration gets there through a file export, an import plug-in your database team runs after the event, a paid middleware subscription that customers tell us typically adds thousands of dollars a year, or a messaging connector that never carries the gift at all.

Because every text link is tied to a donor record, when a donor gives, we match them to an existing Raiser's Edge NXT constituent or create a new one, applying your spouse and household rules so a couple never becomes two records.

As the event runs, each ticket, sponsorship, winning bid, paddle raise pledge and donation is written as its own gift rather than a lump transaction, with campaign, fund, package and appeal mapping applied as the gift lands and fair market value and fees handled the way your Finance team configured them.

Attendance is written to the Raiser's Edge NXT event module, so next year's appeal can query who actually came. Sponsorship and organization gifts have their own rules.

The settings run nine sections deep and cover four levels: campaign, fund, package and appeal mapping; constituent matching with spouse and household rules; the event module and participation records; and gift type. For every one integration point most competitors offer, we have roughly twenty. What customers tell us after their first event is not that it is better than the last integration. It is that it works.

Setup

We can move as fast as you can. Setting up banking, the Raiser's Edge NXT integration and your first event takes one to two weeks, and no shortcode provisioning or carrier approval is required at any point; the four to eight weeks you will hear from other vendors is the runway for ticket sales to run, not setup time.

Setup is self-guided, with in-product tutorials and training moments that walk your team through each part of the event journey, and our team available at every step with same-day email responses to every question, including a Raiser's Edge NXT mapping session with your database administrator and a walkthrough of the paddle raise flow with whoever is running the stage and AV if you want them. There is no mandatory series of onboarding calls to get through before you launch. Mapping is done once and carries to every event.

Event-night staff and volunteers need no training on the platform; onboarding is for your database administrator and event lead.

Tradeoffs

We are built for giving inside fundraising events, not year-round SMS marketing: there are no keyword-and-shortcode campaigns, no drip sequences and no large-scale outbound list messaging. Organizations wanting those should look at Tatango or a dedicated SMS vendor.

We are not the lowest headline price, and free donation platforms are sufficient for organizations that do not need CRM-level data integrity; price what free gates and what your guests will be asked to tip. We do not send staff to your venue and we do not sell emergency day-of support packages, because the product is built so you do not need them. We are the only company in this space that works this way; every customer is nervous about it before their first event, and the testimonials after that first event are the reason we keep doing it. Recurring giving programs and year-round donation page management sit outside the product.

Organizations not on Raiser's Edge NXT get less of the core differentiator, and we have fewer public reviews than the established names here.

Support

Our support model is built around a product that works: 99.99% uptime, published live at status.trellis.org, check-in and checkout screens that tell volunteers what to do, and the most robust in-product tutorials and training moments in this category. Onboarding is for the core team, not the room, and it moves as fast as you do.

The database administrator maps Raiser's Edge NXT once. The event lead builds the event with guided tutorials and can bring us in at any step by chat or screen share. There is no fixed series of calls to complete before you can launch.

On event night your team has a direct line to a named rep on our team rather than a ticket queue. What we do not do is send a junior staff member to stand in your ballroom. Customers who have paid for that elsewhere tell us the person could not fix anything when something went wrong, which is why we build the product so nothing does.

Mini Case Study