What Raise is
Raise is a donation-platform-as-a-service. Nonprofits configure Donation Forms in Raise — branded, customizable forms with their fields, designations, recurring options, and payment processing — and embed those forms on their websites, share them via email, or drive traffic to them through campaigns. When a donor completes a form, Raise processes the payment, creates the Donor and Gift records, and (in a Virtuous-platform customer’s typical configuration) flows the gift data through to CRM+ for downstream stewardship. The API exposes the same surface partners need to integrate around this flow:What you can build
Three classes of integrations make up the bulk of Raise partner work:
If your work involves donor stewardship workflows, multi-channel donor cultivation, or relationship management features that operate across communication and gift records, those are typically built against CRM+ — see CRM+ Overview. Raise’s lane is the donation event itself and the form that produced it.
How Raise fits with CRM+
For customers running both products, the data flow is one-directional: Raise gifts surface in CRM+ as Contact and Gift records through a platform-level sync that’s outside the API surface of either product. Your Raise integration doesn’t write to CRM+ directly, and your CRM+ integration doesn’t write to Raise directly. Each product has its own API token, its own webhook subscriptions, and its own conventions. This has two implications for partners:- Most integrations target one product, not both. A payment-platform integration is a Raise integration. A donor-stewardship integration is a CRM+ integration. Partners that need both surfaces typically build two separate integrations against two separate APIs.
- Cross-product reconciliation is sometimes necessary. If your integration writes Gifts via Raise and also reads them from CRM+ (for example, to surface them alongside other Contact history), expect a delay between the Raise write and the CRM+ visibility, and design reconciliation accordingly.
Conventions you’ll see throughout the docs
A few Raise-specific conventions worth knowing upfront — partners coming from CRM+ will notice some differences:
These differences are products of Raise’s separate history and codebase. The platform team is working on a future v2 of all three APIs that will reconcile conventions; for now, treat each API’s conventions as authoritative and don’t carry assumptions from one to another.
Where to go next
Quickstart
Make your first successful API call against Raise in a few minutes.
Authentication
How to authenticate against the Raise API.
Base URLs and Environments
The Raise API host, environment selection, and sandbox setup.
The Raise Data Model
A deeper look at how Donors, Gifts, Forms, and Campaigns relate.