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As of July 1, 2025, the PTA will no longer accept Venmo as a payment form. As we continue to make our PTA fundraising and budgeting more efficient and transparent, we are officially moving all collections to CheddarUp (and Pledgestar for Jogathon).
While Venmo is a convenient personal payment app, it lacks key features around collections, reporting, and auditing, and the California PTA website specifically advises against using person to person payment apps such as Venmo for collecting funds.
As our PTA is 100% volunteer driven, CheddarUp provides streamlined solutions to better segment, collect, track and transfer payments. Additionally, CheddarUp provides the following:
We believe that the enhanced organization, security, transparency, and features offered by CheddarUp make it the right decision to fully shift over to the platform and eliminate Venmo entirely from our PTA.
Q&A: Switching to CheddarUp
What is CheddarUp?
CheddarUp is an online platform specifically designed for group collections, payments, and fundraising. It allows organizations like our PTA to create dedicated pages for collecting money for events, dues, fundraisers, and more. See more at cheddarup.com
Is CheddarUp easy to use for members?
Yes, CheddarUp is designed to be user-friendly. An account is not needed, however it is recommended to create an account and save payment information to remove steps during check out for future payments.
What are the benefits we are getting?
Centralized Collection Pages: CheddarUp allows us to create dedicated collection pages for specific events and fundraisers
Better Reporting and Sharing: With dedicated collections, we can easily track payments by event, and it’s easier and less error prone for our treasurer to tie income back to the specific items from our budget. We can also provide access to committee members for specific events to set up and view payments, without having access to any of the funds themselves, removing overhead around sharing specific Venmo transactions with certain committees (often by deciphering emojis to know what event it is for!)
Reduced Risk of Errors: Relying on individual Venmo accounts can lead to errors in amounts, descriptions, or even sending money to the wrong person. CheddarUp's structured collection pages and ability to select specific items, minimize these risks.
Fundraising Features: CheddarUp offers features specifically designed for fundraising, such as setting goals, adding descriptions and images to collection pages, and tracking progress towards our objectives. The recent Garden collection was a great example of that!
What payment methods does CheddarUp accept?
CheddarUp accepts Apple Pay, Google Pay, credit cards, debit cards, bank transfers, and cash/check. This provides more flexibility than Venmo, which primarily relies on linked bank accounts and debit cards.
Are there fees associated with using CheddarUp?
Yes, like most online payment platforms, CheddarUp has processing fees, most of which pass through to the credit card processors. For credit cards and digital wallets, it is 3.59% + a flat fee of $0.59 per transaction. To pay via bank account, it is a flat fee of $0.95 regardless of the transaction amount, and you can save your information within your CheddarUp account. For most of our events we enable cash/check as an option too, and that allows you to drop off payment at the office with no fee, and PTA still gets the benefit of all payments being tracked in a single place (CheddarUp platform).
For some events using CheddarUp, the PTA covers the fees so that even when paying digitally, we reduce that burden on folks. In those cases there is always a step where families can optionally cover those fees (typical with most non-profit donations made online). We will continue to evaluate the best approach for future events.
I am a PTA committee lead who has used Venmo in the past, what should I do now?
Please reach out to operations@kelloggpta.org for help setting up (or getting access to) a CheddarUp Collections page for your event/fundraiser. We will provide instructions and support on how to manage collections, from beginning to end. While initial set up may take time, you will find that overall the management and tracking is more streamlined, and for events that occur every year, the setup in future years is drastically reduced.
Why did we go with CheddarUp versus some other non-profit focused payment platform?
CheddarUp is a CA PTA sponsor, and many other schools in GUSD have been successfully using them. Goleta Valley Junior High PTA also uses them. We wanted to go with an established vendor that has PTA use cases (and the financial requirements) specifically in mind.
Can I still use Venmo to raise funds at school, say as a room rep?
If you are raising money amongst a group of parents, for example for a teacher thank you gift, and it is a non-PTA sponsored effort (and it’s clear to families involved that they are not making a tax deductible donation, but instead just paying another parent to collect money for a single gift), then you are free to use Venmo, Zelle, etc to handle that private transaction. However, you must use your personal Venmo account. Asking for money to help with class auction baskets can also be handled via personal Venmo accounts, if used to reimburse another parent, as long as it is clear to those sending money that there will be no tax deduction receipt provided there, as the money is not being managed by the PTA.
Who is responsible for managing our PTA's CheddarUp account?
The VP of Operations on the PTA board manages the account, while others on the board have access to the account to view and manage collections. The only bank account that is connected to the account is our official PTA bank account.
What if I have more questions about CheddarUp and this change?
CheddarUp has several blog posts which are helpful:
If you still have questions, please feel free to reach out to Nick Burwell at operations@kelloggpta.org.
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