Revolutionizing Fundraising: The Birth of Raising Reimagined

Is what we thought to myself when we realized there was no fundraising platform that would help connect suppliers with organizations to help increase fundraiser success virtually. Our family greenhouse business, Blue Mountain Farms, began pursuing a solution for their own fundraising campaign efforts and a way to solve their pain points in their outdated paper order forum method. The family business could not afford to pursue a custom platform for the percentage of sales fundraising efforts produced. However, surprise sales numbers 3 days before product delivery, misplaced order forums, inaccurate tallies, long wait times for cash and check payments all led to a need for a better way.

We searched the web, to try to get them a solution - somewhere they could load product, connect with organization administrators to set up fundraising campaigns and take the cash and check only payments to rest. I tried… and after putting my googling skills to the test, I couldn’t find what we needed; there was no way to list product in boutique-fashion to support small businesses in their fundraising efforts. How is there not a solution out there for small to medium businesses who can’t afford a custom application?

For years, my brothers gave organizational administrators an excel sheet with confusing plant names and soon students and parents were posting pictures of ugly black and white spreadsheets on facebook. A stream of requests and venmo transactions soon followed; although convenient for the customer, the seller’s parent now had to organize getting the transactions to the campaign administrator and track the orders on a piece of paper. Students were turned down in person consistently due to a barrage of “no cash on me, sorry”’s. After sitting on the idea, throwing every dart we could in the need for a solution, it was decided. All in, with the William Boeing quote ringing in our ears:

“I think we can build a better one.”

Well, not us specifically… I am an engineer working on UAS implementation - a far cry from a software engineer and my husband - whose family has owned and run the successful wholesale Blue Mountain Farms since 1976 - is an airline pilot. With that I realized we had a lot of work to do and a lot of learning ahead, an ideas is nothing without execution, so execute we must.

This is the us I refer to… Ben and I (Paige) the Miller’s and the most integral part of our business decisions our Portuguese Water Dog Mookie Piper Miller.