1. Fundraisers and Sponsored Events

Sponsored walks, read-a-thons, colour runs, the classic "get sponsored, raise money" format, now with none of the paper forms.

The Event Template Wizard sets the whole thing up in four steps: basic event details, your suggested donation amounts, your fundraising information and your volunteer requirements. From Admin > Events > Manage > Add Event from Template, choose Fundraiser / Sponsored Event – on Platform, and the platform pre-populates the fields, creates the products and adds a Donate Now button for you.

Why PTAs love it:

• Set a goal amount and choose to close donations automatically once you hit it
• Attach donation text to each amount, so supporters see "£10.00 will enable us to purchase 5 library books" rather than a bare number
• Let individuals register for their own fundraising link and QR code, so money raised is attributed to them
• Turn on class and group leaderboards - nothing motivates Year 4 like being second to Year 3

📺 Watch the tutorial: How can I add a Fundraiser/Sponsored Event?

2. Recurring Donations

One-off donations are lovely. Regular donations are budget you can actually plan around.

Tick Accept Donations under Admin > Settings > Fundraising and a donation message appears across your customer-facing pages, along with a product group containing both a one-off Donation and a Recurring Donation. The recurring payment schemes are created automatically - including for custom amounts a supporter types in themselves - and future payments are set up through Stripe.

Why PTAs love it:

• Predictable income between events, not just at the summer fair
• If your Charity Commission number is in your site settings, supporters are prompted for Gift Aid at checkout
• Supporters manage or cancel their own donations under My Account > Subscriptions - no awkward emails to your treasurer
• You can view, filter and export everything from Reports > Subscriptions to Excel or PDF

📺 Watch the tutorial: How can I accept global one-off and recurring donations?

3. Online Prize Draws

The raffle, minus the cloakroom tickets, the float and the person who has to stand by the door with a tin.

Prize draws run entirely online: supporters buy entries from anywhere and the platform runs a fully random, independently audited draw when you’re ready.

Worth knowing before you start - the Hold Prize Draw button only appears on your Event Prizes page once all three of these are true:

• The draw date has passed
• Total prize draw sales exceed £40
• There are more eligible entrants than prizes (5 prizes and 4 entries won’t run)

There’s also a complete end-to-end PDF guide attached to the below FAQ, plus separate articles on the terms and conditions and on crediting the local businesses who donated your prizes.

📺 Watch the tutorial: Do you have a guide for running Prize Draws (Online Raffles)?

4. Online Auctions

Auction lots such as the signed shirt, the headteacher-for-a-day, the cake don’t need a room and a gavel anymore.

Set up lots against an event, let your community bid from their phones over days rather than minutes, and let the platform handle what happens when bidding closes. Bidding for longer, in front of a bigger audience, is usually how a lot goes from "nice" to "no, seriously, how much?"

The below FAQ has a step-by-step video and a downloadable guide covering the whole process from setup to completion, plus separate articles on how customers bid, what happens after an auction ends and how to copy a lot you want to reuse.

📺 Watch the tutorial: Is it possible to run an online auction?

5. Customer Tags

A new tool and the quiet favourite of anyone who’s ever tried to email "just the people who volunteered at the Christmas fair."

Head to Admin > Customer Tags, hit Add Tag from the Manage menu, give it a name and a colour, and you’ve got a reusable group. Manage Customers lets you allocate people to it in a couple of clicks.

Why PTAs love it:

• Tag once, use forever: Volunteers, Cake Bakers, Class Reps, Uniform Shop, Won’t Say No To A Gazebo
• Tags show in your Customers report, and you can search by tag from the Manage > Search menu
• Email everyone with a given tag in one go via Manage > Send Email
• Colour-coded, editable and deletable, so your tagging system can evolve as your committee does

📖 Read the how-to: Can I tag customers to group and contact them together?

6. Refunds That Don’t Ruin Your Evening - bulk refund made simple

Events get rained off. Heatwaves force cancellations. Children get chickenpox. When refunds happen, you need them to happen fast.

Instead of refunding orders one at a time, you can now bulk refund - select multiple orders at once and process them all together. What used to be an evening of clicking is now done in minutes.

How to bulk refund:

• Go to Admin > Events and find your event
• Select Refund Event from the Manage menu
• Select the orders you need to refund
• Click Preview Refunds then Queue Refunds

Just one thing to check first: make sure you have enough funds in your Stripe balance to cover the refunds.

📖 Read the how-to: Can I bulk refund an event?

Pick the tools that map to your biggest current headache - the sponsored walk, the raffle, the mailing list you keep rebuilding in a spreadsheet - and let the platform take that job off your list.

Everything above lives in the PTA Events Knowledge Base, where most articles come with a short video. And if you get stuck, our support team and the PTA Events Facebook Community are both a message away.

Join the thousands of PTAs already using the platform. Registration is completely free, so sign up today and have your first event live before the next committee meeting.