Custom Fundraising-Donation Management Software

About the project

For our B2B client, a Swiss fundraising company that operates in pedestrian streets, marketplaces, and through door-to-door fundraising, we developed a comprehensive donation management and operations system. The company works with major charitable organizations like Save the Children, collecting donations on behalf of these clients.

Our B2B client needed a custom system to serve as their central operational hub; handling donation collection, and also internal team management, resource planning, time tracking, and detailed reporting capabilities.

This internal tool, accessible only to their team members and the clients they serve, functions as a blend of CRM & ERP system, designed to replace expensive market-standard software while providing complete operational control at a significantly lower cost

Important: Due to confidentiality agreements, we're presenting this case study without identifying client information, focusing instead on the technical solution and the significant cost savings achieved through custom development.

B2B Client:

Swiss Fundraising Company

Development & Deployment:

2024 - 2025

Technologies:

Laravel

Filament

PDF

Mailgun

Client account - fundraising progress activities

Client's Pain-Point

Our B2B client's primary pain point was the prohibitively expensive pricing model of the industry-leading market-standard software. Their previous solution charged based on the number of contacts in the system, meaning our B2B client paid for every donor record regardless of whether that donor was still actively donating.

This contact-based pricing model meant that successful months where our B2B client acquired new donors would immediately increase their software costs by thousands of euros.

For example, rough estimate: if at two euros per contact, acquiring a thousand new donors would add two thousand euros to their monthly software bill.

Additionally, they weren't utilizing all the features the previous software offered, making the high cost even less justifiable. Our solution eliminated this pricing pressure by providing a flat operating fee structure. While they still incur costs for server hosting, maintenance, and developer support, these costs remain relatively stable regardless of how many donors they add to the system.

Our solution was able to replace almost all functionality of the previous software, handling team management, time tracking, donation collection, and reporting with better capabilities.

The only feature not implemented was direct payment processing integration, which remains available as a feature extension.

HOW WAS THE CUSTOM SOLUTION BUILT?

The internal management software solution was developed using Laravel as the foundational framework, with Filament serving as the primary user interface for the administration side and the interface that individual team members work with.

The tech stack remained deliberately simple, requiring no external APIs beyond the Mailgun integration for email deliverability. The application was customized with the company's branding including logos and colours to create a personalized solution.

The development team focused on creating user-friendly forms (easy data entry forms- IBAN, phone and physical address validation using Google maps / Swiss postal API), that could be completed quickly, which was essential, given that data collection happens on-site with donors present. The architecture consists of four main components:

1. Team management (organizing employees into teams and assigning them to campaigns);

2. Work time tracking (employees logging their hours, breaks, and activities);

3. Donation management (collecting and storing donor information with role-based access controls);

4. Reporting (comprehensive analytics and data export capabilities).

The system uses a role-based permissions structure where different user types; employees, administrators, and clients, have assigned access levels. Employees can only access time tracking and their assigned campaigns, while administrators have full system control, and clients have read-only access to their specific campaign data.

Our solution connects to a MySQL or SQLite database, providing storage capacity in the millions of records compared to standard off-the shelf capacity. For email functionality, Mailgun was integrated using Laravel's built-in driver to ensure that welcome emails and review requests sent from client domains have optimal deliverability.

How Does It Work?

The software operates as a multi-layered management system with a clear hierarchical structure.

At the top level, the fundraising company creates client accounts for organizations like Save the Children. Each client can have multiple campaigns, for example, an early summer donation run or a winter donation run. These campaigns are then assigned to teams, which consist of small groups of employees (typically up to five people) who are tasked with fundraising in specific regions or city districts.

Employees log into the system to check their assigned campaigns, track their work hours, and collect donations on-site. When a fundraiser meets a potential donor, they quickly input all relevant information including personal details, contact preferences, donation amounts, payment types, and whether the donation is one-time or recurring. The system validates payment information in real-time, including mathematical validation of IBAN numbers and blacklisting certain banks with high chargeback risks. The list of blacklisted banks can be managed using the application settings.

Once a donation is collected, donors receive automated thank-you emails, followed by a review request where they can rate their experience with the fundraiser. Approved reviews are displayed on campaign pages visible to the client organizations. Clients themselves can log in through guest accounts to view live statistics on their campaigns, track fundraising progress, and see approved reviews.

The entire system provides comprehensive reporting capabilities with customizable KPIs, exportable Excel reports, and visual dashboards showing performance by team, employee, campaign, district, and various other metrics.

Data Governance

Self-hosted software provides complete control over data.

Our B2B client - A Swiss Fundraising company, chose Swiss data centres, ensuring data remains within Switzerland without transfers to other jurisdictions.

There are no concerns about data being sent to external companies beyond the hosting provider, who signs a data processing agreement, in German: (Datenverarbeitungsvertrag).

This level of control is impossible with many SaaS solutions.

THE CHALLENGE

Very low difficulty

From a technical standpoint, the development process was straightforward with very low difficulty.

The project was one of the easier builds due to its basic data structure and the powerful capabilities provided by Laravel and Filament out of the box. Filament handled the heavy lifting for features like in-depth reporting and Excel export functionality, which were mandatory requirements.

Laravel's bare bones framework allowed for customizations when needed, but the overall architecture remained simple, connecting different data layers with role-based permissions and scoped database queries.

The lack of external API requirements further simplified the development. The main integration, Mailgun for email deliverability, was also straightforward since Laravel provides a native driver for it.

SOLUTIONS WE BUILT

Key Features

Team Management and Time Tracking	Employees track work hours, breaks, and operational activities while viewing their assigned campaigns and geographic areas they should focus on.
Donation Management	Collects donor information including name, birthday, salutation, address, and contact details (email, phone, cell phone). The system captures permission preferences for future contact (newsletters, re-engagement offers). For each donation, the system records the amount, frequency (one-time or recurring subscription), and payment type. Switzerland-specific payment methods are supported including ESR, LSV (debit deduction), debit direct, and Twint (electronic payment).
Comprehensive Reporting and Analytics	The reporting module allows users to export donations based on multiple criteria including time frame, campaign, client, and other filters. Reports can be exported as Excel documents for distribution to client accounts. The system features a powerful dashboard that pulls statistics by date, employee, and campaign. Key performance indicators (KPIs) include: overall number of donors, total monetary value of donations, percentage-wise breakdown of payment types used, number of donors collected per team, number of team members involved, and average donation amounts. These metrics are presented using Filament's dashboard utilities as bar charts, pie charts, and graphs. The reporting is fully customizable, allowing for creation of any additional KPIs based on the available data.
Role-Based Access Control	Role-based permissions determine access levels. Employees access only their assigned campaigns and time tracking, administrators have full control, and clients have read-only access to their own campaign data through filtered database queries.
Bank Blacklisting and IBAN Validation	Blacklists banks with high chargeback risk and performs real-time mathematical validation of IBAN numbers to prevent errors and ensure accurate banking information.
Automated Email and Review System	Donors receive a customizable welcome email, followed by a feedback request with the fundraiser's photo and a five-star rating system. Reviews are stored, linked to fundraisers, and administrators can approve them for display on campaign pages.
Client and Campaign Management	Clients (e.g., Save the Children) can have multiple campaigns (e.g., seasonal donation runs). Each campaign is assigned to employee teams in specific regions. Clients log in to view live statistics, approved reviews, and campaign performance.
Gamification and Performance Incentives	The system includes a sophisticated point-based gamification system to motivate employees. Employees earn points for each collected donation, with bonus points for specific payment types and for donations exceeding certain thresholds (e.g., over 100 Swiss francs). A weekly scoreboard tracks the highest amounts collected, most donations, and best payment types (evaluated by transaction costs). This scoreboard refreshes weekly and displays rankings, showing employees where they stand relative to their peers.
Salary Calculation and Commission Tracking	Computes payments based on donation quantity and amounts. Employees view live commission amounts calculated on fixed payment plus commission structure, enabling team leads to determine monthly payments.

BENEFITS OF CHOSEN TECH STACK

Scalability

The software architecture could handle millions of users if needed. The technology stack chosen provides room for massive contact capacity without requiring a fundamental rebuild.

Extensibility

Laravel's flexibility means the software can be extended into numerous additional use cases. Future enhancements could include integrating Stripe marketplace payments for direct payment processing, connecting to marketing automation solutions for newsletters and drip campaigns, adding re-engagement campaign tools, or licensing the software as a white-label product to other fundraising agencies.

Integration Capabilities

Laravel can connect to virtually anything with an API. We regularly use Laravel to integrate with modern APIs as well as age-old legacy APIs that aren't even supported by automation tools like Zapier. This means clients are never locked into a closed ecosystem, if they need to connect to another system, it can be done.

Buy or Build?

The buy-or-build question is age-old, and the answer is highly individual to each business situation.

However, for companies with specific needs and growth targets, custom software offers a fundamentally different cost structure.

For our B2B client, instead of per-contact pricing that increases with growing contact acquisitions (buying off-the-shelf software), software development costs remain relatively flat based on server hosting, maintenance, and developer support. While these aren't free, they're predictable and don't penalize business growth.

Why Choose Us as Laravel Experts

When clients reach out to us, they often do so specifically because we have the answers to their pain-points.

We have mastered the Laravel framework intimately, and we know how to use it.

We understand how to structure Laravel applications for complex projects, bi-directional system integration, maintainability, performance optimization, proper security implementation measures, website accessibility, and how to integrate Laravel with other and older systems.

For our future clients considering custom software development, Laravel represents an excellent choice, and partnering with us, Laravel experts, ensures that choice pays dividends.