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:| Resource family | What it does |
|---|---|
| Donation submissions | The POST /api/Raise/give endpoint — the one path that creates gifts in Raise |
| Donors | Donor records, contact details, address management, notes, archive, merge |
| Gifts | Read, refund, and delete Gift records (Gifts are created via POST /api/Raise/give, not via a Gift POST) |
| Recurring Gifts | Recurring donation schedules, payment history, cancellation |
| Campaigns | Top-level fundraising campaigns that group forms and segments |
| Segments | Sub-divisions of a campaign — typically one per donation form or appeal |
| Projects | Funding destinations for Gift designations |
| Premiums, Motivation Codes, Custom Fields | Configurable metadata Raise uses to track gift context |
| Webhooks | Real-time event delivery for donations, recurring schedules, and form submissions |
What you can build
Three classes of integrations make up the bulk of Raise partner work:| Integration class | Examples |
|---|---|
| Embedded donation experiences | A nonprofit’s website integrating Raise Donation Forms directly into the donor’s flow; a giving widget for a partner application |
| Post-donation automation | Webhook-driven flows that route donations to email platforms (welcome emails, thank-you sequences), accounting systems, donor analytics tools |
| Donor data sync | One-way export of Raise donor and gift data into a third-party CRM, BI tool, or accounting platform |
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:| Convention | Raise | CRM+ |
|---|---|---|
| API host | https://prod-api.raisedonors.com | https://api.virtuoussoftware.com |
| Paginated response envelope | { items: [], total: 123 } | { list: [], total: 123 } |
| Gift creation path | POST /api/Raise/give (no POST /api/Gift) | POST /api/Gift and POST /api/v2/Gift/Transaction |
| Pagination parameter casing | Skip, Take, SortBy, Descending (PascalCase) | skip, take, sortBy, descending (camelCase) |
| Custom-field surface | First-class resource with dedicated endpoints | Embedded in resource payloads |
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.