The Genius Blog

Fundraising Made Easy

Did you know that SignUpGenius is a one stop shop for all of your group’s fundraising needs? That’s right! SignUpGenius maximizes the potential of every fundraiser for schools, churches, nonprofits, sports teams, and clubs. In fact, in many cases the exact same sign up you are using to organize your volunteers can be used for your fundraiser. Add SignUpGenius Payments to your sign up to collect money for capital campaigns, event registrations, ticket sales and more!

Easy to set up. Easy to sign up. Easy to collect money. It’s genius! 

Be the next Fundraising Genius
Learn more about how SignUpGenius can help with your next fundraiser, read helpful fundraising ideas and tips, and view sample sign ups HERE.

Win $2500 in our Fundraising Made Easy Giveaway
Online fundraising gurus SignUpGenius and FlipGive have partnered to bring you the ultimate opportunity to win over $2500 for your group’s fundraising needs! Learn how to nominate your Fundraising Group HERE. 

Share with SignUpGenius
Akins High School Band Boosters raised $70,000 in nine months by using SignUpGenius to bolster their fundraising efforts. Have you run a successful fundraiser with the help of SignUpGenius? Tell us about your experience on Facebook or in the comments below and your story may be featured right here on the Genius Blog! 

Happy Fundraising!

SignUpGenius Volunteers at Bright Blessings

Recently, SignUpGenius staff members stepped out of the office to serve in our local community. We spent some time with Bright Blessings, an amazing nonprofit that is on a mission to celebrate, inspire and support homeless children.

Bright Blessings organizes birthday events for children living at local homeless shelters and also works to locate transient homeless kids in the local schools. We were shocked to learn that there are approximately 5,000 homeless kids in the Charlotte Mecklenburg school district alone! On their special day, homeless children are gifted with special care packages to meet their daily needs and classroom party packages to help them celebrate. Yet, the most meaningful gift proves to be the recognition they receive, which boosts confidence and provides hope.

SignUpGenius employees worked in the Bright Blessings “giving village” assembling birthday blessing bags and classroom treat bags. As we put together treat bags for the kids to hand out in the classroom, we learned that the children take great pride in being able to GIVE on their birthday – a rare occasion for them. The nonprofit provides 4,000 treat bags per month!

While serving, we also discovered that Bright Blessingsuses SignUpGenius to coordinate their monthly volunteer opportunities! This was a great reminder to us that our daily efforts here at SignUpGenius are often supporting life-changing missions.

We encourage you to share how your group helps others in the comments below, or on Facebook. Thanks for continuing to inspire us!

Congratulations to our latest PinToWin Contest Winner!

We wanted to take a moment to say thank you to everyone who entered the SignUpGenius Feel The Love #PinToWin Contest! 

Congratulations to our WINNER:
Geoff Kaufman of Lebanon, NH

Geoff will be receiving a $250 Visa Gift Card.

Haven’t joined us in the fun yet? Come feel inspired with us on Pinterest HERE.

To keep up to date with our latest news, feature upgrades and giveaways make sure to like us on Facebook and Twitter.

To check out our new Fundraising Made Easy Giveaway Giveaway, visit the contest page HERE.

Look Who’s Talking… about SignUpGenius

The word is out! It’s no secret that SignUpGenius is used by teachers to coordinate parent teacher conferences, class volunteers, parties, fundraisers and more. Since we are here to lend a helping hand to so many schools across the country, we are always looking for new ideas and resources to help users get creative in the classroom. When we stumbled upon this article on Scholastic.com, we were impressed by the great ideas on how this teacher incorporates a classroom economy system to manage and reward behavior and student job contributions. We were also thrilled to be mentioned by Scholastic as the perfect tool to manage parent volunteers in the classroom! Scholastic blogger Lindsey Petlak says, "To make requesting and managing parent/community volunteers painless and efficient, I use SignUpGenius." Thanks Lindsey for spreading the word about SignUpGenius! You can read the full article HERE. 

How about these other recent RAVE reviews by teachers? 

“I love this website! My teachers love it! I am in an online school, and we do our tests online, so this makes it SO MUCH easier than emailing everybody, and then forgetting what time they need to be there. THANK YOU GUYS SO MUCH!!!!!”
Katharina Burke, Jacksonville, FL 

“Just a note of thanks for the use of your website. I work at a middle school and your site successfully managed hundreds of parent/teacher conferences… feedback from the community was supportive of this process and appreciated its efficiency.”
Charlie Vonk, Grand Rapids MI 

“I am a teacher... What a great way for me to organize my parent volunteers. It was very easy to use, looked great and has saved me lots of time! Thank you for making such a fabulous resource!”
Donna Guzman, Snohomish, WA 

Have something to share with us? Please do so by commenting below or writing to us HERE. Thanks for making it an honor to serve your organizational needs here at SignUpGenius!

You're going to LOVE our new feature!

This Valentine's Day, we've got a sweet treat for you! Starting today, we've added a powerful new feature for SignUpGenius Pro users: start/stop dates for sign ups.

Sign Up Start/Stop Dates

• Set a date/time to start accepting sign ups
• Set a date/time to stop accepting sign ups
• Choose whether or not to hide your slots from your users before the start date
• Choose whether or not to lock your slots from changes after the close date
• Choose alternate text to display on your page when sign ups are closed

What's it for?

When an event is in high demand, making the sign up process fair for everyone is critical. Say that you're accepting sign ups for a new "Mommy & Me Kickboxing" class that you are teaching. Obviously, the highly-coveted slots for this mom/toddler smackdown will fill up immediately. With our new start/stop dates feature, you can avoid having your neighbor go all Chuck Norris on you because she didn't get the email about the sign up at the same time as everyone else. Simply set an official start time for when you will begin accepting sign ups on your page at SignUpGenius and announce it to everyone well in advance. Our system will then prevent people from signing up until the exact time you specify. When the time comes, SignUpGenius will open the page to sign ups automatically. We make it easy so you can just sit back and let the mad competition begin! Kapow!

Alternately, maybe you're the one in charge of planning the big "End of Season Sheep Racing Banquet." Members have to sign up that they are attending at least a week in advance so you know how many dinners to order (steak, of course… not lamb). With our start/stop dates, you can now close your sign up at a specific time and SignUpGenius will automatically block people from signing up after the designated time! It's easy - put the date in the system and let SignUpGenius do the rest. You can even lock your sign up so angry sheep racers can't cancel their reservation the night before when they find out that some of the all-star sheep were eating performance-enhancing grain! Ewe feel me?

Available in SignUpGenius Pro

We know you're going to fall head over heels for this new feature so we're making it available immediately for all levels of SignUpGenius Pro. Pro users will find the new feature in the "settings" page of the sign up creation screens.

And because we want to make sure you get a chance to use this new feature, we're extending our SignUpGenius Pro promotional pricing until February 12th!

• $99.99 for 1 Year of SignUpGenius Pro Silver
• $249.99 for 1 Year of SignUpGenius Pro Gold
• $499.99 for 1 Year of SignUpGenius Pro Platinum

Learn more!

January Closet Cleaning

I love January. It’s a great time to clean out the closets and wrap up some of those small organizational items that you couldn’t get to over the busyness of the holidays. Here at SignUpGenius, we’ve been hard at work cleaning out our “code closet” and just released a set of small updates to the site to help with general performance and security. 

Recent Updates include:

• An improved spam and vulgarity filter
  This filter helps protect emails that are sent to the sign up creator through the contact form on a sign up page. The same filter also now protects comments on our blog and resource articles to ensure our site is always family-friendly for browsing.
• New safety protections in our sign up creation wizard
  The system will now automatically prevent double entries when creating dates and slots.
• A new “Contact the Sign Up Creator” link for “access code” sign ups
  As you may know, sign up creators can choose to protect their sign ups with an access code. We added a link to the access code login page so participants have an easy way to contact the sign up creator if they lose or forget the access code. This was updated on both the main site and mobile app.
• An upgraded WYSIWYG editor
  The sign up creation wizard includes a new version of the WYSIWYG editor that is used for creating your sign up description. This editor has better compatibility with the new Internet Explorer 11 browser.
• An upgraded server for SignUpGenius Mobile
  The mobile app was moved up to a big monster server to provide faster performance and handle more traffic.
• Removal of the advertising captcha
  The advertising captcha puzzle was removed from our “Find a Sign Up” and “Forgot Password” pages. We experimented with this new form of advertising during the last year, but ultimately decided to remove it based on user feedback.

Be sure to subscribe to our blog as there are lot’s more updates on the way this year! The closet is out of the way, but now we’re heading towards the garage. Yikes! Wish us luck.