While the company would not reveal its valuation or hard revenue figures, it did say that its revenue growth is in line with its user growth, which - as noted above - has more than doubled since October 2021. Since its launch last May, Copper has grown to have more than 800,000 users. It has now raised a total of $42.3 million since its 2019 inception. The investment comes just over seven months after the startup revealed it had raised $9 million in a seed round, and included participation from Panoramic Ventures, Insight Partners, Invesco Private Capital and “all existing investors,” according to the company. And not just for the football team, either.Copper, a digital banking service aimed at teens, has raised $29 million in Series A funding in a “preemptive” round led by Fiat Ventures. So she’ll keep using the banned software. “The kid would have to take their SchoolPay link and personally email it to every single person they know, which would give every single person they know all of their digital information.” Von Arx says SchoolPay was offered to the Generals as an alternative, but they chose to continue using Snap! Raise because they felt it better protected student privacy. In 2020, the district signed a $735,000 contract for SchoolPay’s services. That program charges no fees to donors and recipients. The district says that it offers a comparable alternative to Snap! Raise: a program called SchoolPay. Dundas says districts across the country put similar policies in place: “School districts have written these policies where you can use Snap! Raise for whatever reason, or they think that they provide the same type of platform to generate funds.” The PPS ban isn’t the only one of its kind. “From the outside, it can look like we just have a ton of kids sending out their digital information,” she says, “and so I think there was miscommunication on all angles on how it worked.” Von Arx thinks the ban has to do with student privacy concerns. There is no reason for schools to give away money raised by parents to an outside organization.” Lincoln’s Ross says the district banned Snap! Raise because of the steep price: “Snap! Raise charges a very large percentage of the money raised. “But when you look at the revenue, what is being generated and how much is the district actually making in relation to what they’re spending?” “If you just looked at the percentages, then we’re expensive,” Dundas says. That digital hawking comes at a price: Snap! Raise takes 20% of funds raised. The emails don’t stop until the recipient donates or the fundraising period ends.ĭuring the fundraising period, Snap! Raise representatives go out to teams and make promotion videos featuring students to supplement the donation page. That software sends out emails to the submitted addresses, directly asking for money. All each student has to do is collect and submit 20 emails to Snap! Raise, whose software then takes over. Participants have a relatively small part to play in the fundraising. It takes them, I don’t know, 20 minutes to get all of their emails together,” Von Arx says. Snap! Raise’s ease of use is what makes the service so appealing. Grant isn’t the only school where programs ignore the prohibition-at least three other PPS high schools continue to use the service. At Grant High, Snap! Raise is still in use despite the ban. As with its predecessors, it has run into suspicious regulators.Īnother parallel: The rules are toothless. As Uber did with taxi cabs and Ridwell is doing with hauling recyclables, Snap! Raise promises to ease the unwieldy task of fundraising for high school athletics by handing the work to an app. In many ways, the conflict over Snap! Raise is a pee-wee version of fights over tech startups like Uber and Ridwell that arrived from out of town with the aim to shake up established business methods. Jill Ross, Lincoln High School’s business manager, says the district banned Snap! Raise because the IT department determined the software took too large a cut of the money raised: $1 out of every $5. The district told the Grant football team it couldn’t use Snap! Raise in January 2021, even as the COVID-19 pandemic had already limited the ways sports programs could raise money. Just one problem: It’s also banned by Portland Public Schools. Snap! Raise is quick, not demanding, and consistently successful.
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