Givebacks (formerly MemberHub) is a membership, dues, and fundraising platform bundled with National PTA membership — not a website platform. It is good at member records and remitting dues, and PTAs consistently report two frictions: a steep learning curve, and a Givebacks fee charged on top of Stripe's own processing fee. Most PTAs are best served pairing it with a real website rather than trying to make it be one.
Givebacks — the platform formerly called MemberHub — is a membership and fundraising tool, not a website platform. It is bundled with National PTA membership, which is why a lot of PTA boards discover they are already paying for it. It handles member records and dues remittance well. It is not designed to be your school community’s main website, and the two frictions PTAs raise most often are a steep learning curve and a Givebacks fee charged on top of Stripe’s own processing fee.
This page is about where it fits, not about talking you out of it. If you are a chartered PTA, you probably already have it.
What Givebacks is actually for
Memberships, dues, a simple store, and fundraising pages, with money remitted to the PTA on a schedule. For a chartered PTA that has to track who is a member and move dues to the council and state, that is a real job and Givebacks does it.
Parent groups describing their setup put it plainly: dues are set up there, payments remit weekly, and you can create categories for donations, event tickets and the rest. That is a functioning membership back office, and building it yourself would be a bad use of a volunteer’s time.
The rebrand matters for research purposes: MemberHub and Givebacks are the same product. If your board minutes from two years ago mention MemberHub, or you find a forum thread praising or criticising it, that is this platform.
The two frictions PTAs actually report
Fees stacked on top of Stripe’s fees
This is the complaint that comes up most, and it is specific: Givebacks processes through Stripe and adds its own fee on top of Stripe’s.
Why it stings is arithmetic, not principle. Card processing is roughly 2.9% plus 30 cents, which every platform pays and nobody escapes. A platform fee on top of that is a second cut of the same dollar. Against $4,000 of annual giving, an extra couple of percent is a rounding error. Against $40,000 — well below the $269,000 median income of NYC’s 100 highest-earning PTAs — the same percentage is real money that was donated to your school.
Two things to do about it:
- Get the current fee schedule in writing and run it against your actual dues and donation volume. Not the headline rate — your number.
- Separate your donation path from your membership path. Dues genuinely need to flow through your membership system. General donations, event tickets, and the spring appeal do not. A donate button on your own site, wired to your own Stripe account, takes only the card processor’s cut and lands directly in the PTA’s bank account. Our builds do it that way, and we take 0% — but the point stands whoever builds your site.
The learning curve, and who pays it
The other recurring note is that it works as advertised but takes real effort to learn. That is a fair description of most membership software.
It matters more for a PTA than for a business, because of turnover. A tool with a steep learning curve is a tool that one person learns — and when that person’s child graduates, the learning curve resets for the whole board. This is the same dynamic that kills volunteer-built websites, and it is worth planning for: get at least two people trained, and write down the parts that are not obvious.
The payment-processor collision
One more practical trap. Givebacks runs on Stripe. If your PTA has standardised on Square for in-person events — bake sales, the book fair, the spring fair — you now run two payment systems, two sets of fees, and two reconciliations for your treasurer.
Decide this deliberately before a year of books is built on it. There is no universally right answer, but discovering the conflict in April is worse than choosing in September.
What Givebacks does not do
It is not a school community website. It will not give you:
- A calendar parents actually check, with recurring events and
.icsexport - A news and announcements stream, in more than one language
- Photo galleries from the fall festival
- The static pages that make a school legible to a family deciding whether to enroll — who you are, what you fund, how to get involved
- Accessibility you can defend. Your obligations under Section 504 and the ADA attach to what you publish, whichever tool published it.
Trying to run all of that through a membership platform produces a thin site that parents stop visiting, which then undermines the fundraising the platform exists to support.
The setup that actually works
For most PTAs:
| Job | Where it belongs |
|---|---|
| Member records, dues, remittance to council/state | Givebacks — this is what it is for |
| Calendar, news, pages, galleries, forms | Your website |
| General donations, appeals, event tickets | Your website, on your own Stripe — no platform cut |
| In-person card payments | One processor, chosen deliberately, reconciled with the above |
The mistake is treating this as an either/or. Givebacks is not competing with your website; it is competing with a spreadsheet of members, and it wins that. Your website is competing with parents not knowing what is happening, and a membership platform does not win that.
If your website is the weak half
That is the common case: the membership side is handled and the public side is a Wix page a parent built in 2021, or a Google Site, or nothing. Among NYC’s 100 highest-earning PTAs, 47 are on a DIY builder and 20 have no identifiable platform at all.
What we build is the public half: a custom site, content migrated from whatever you have now, a CMS any board member can run, WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility checked on every deploy, and a donate path on your own Stripe with no cut taken. $900 a year flat, no setup fee, and the domain, content, and code are yours outright. Keep Givebacks for dues.
Written by Full Stack Tech NYC. We build and host custom school and PTA websites for $900 a year flat — migration included, accessibility checked on every deploy, and you own the domain, content, and code outright. Title I and high-need public schools can apply for a free build. See pricing and process →
Common questions
Is Givebacks a website builder for PTAs?
Not really. Givebacks is built around memberships, dues, store and fundraising pages. It can host simple pages, but it is not designed to be your school community's main website, and PTAs that try to use it that way usually end up with a thin site nobody visits.
Does Givebacks charge fees on top of Stripe?
PTAs using it report that it does — a Givebacks platform fee layered on top of Stripe's own processing fee. Ask for the current fee schedule in writing and calculate it against your actual annual dues and donation volume, since a percentage that looks small reads very differently against $40,000 of giving than against $4,000.
What is the difference between Givebacks and MemberHub?
They are the same product. MemberHub was rebranded as Givebacks, so older guidance, forum posts, and board documents referring to MemberHub are describing the platform now called Givebacks.
Do we already have Givebacks if we're a PTA?
If you are a chartered PTA affiliated with National PTA, very likely yes — it is bundled with membership, which is why PTA boards often find they are already paying for it. PTOs, which are independent, are not.
Can we use Square instead of Stripe with Givebacks?
This is a common sticking point. Givebacks runs payments through Stripe, so a PTA already standardised on Square for in-person events ends up running two payment systems and reconciling both. Check this before committing, not after your treasurer has built the year's books around one of them.
What should a PTA pair Givebacks with?
A real website for everything public — calendar, news, forms, galleries, the donate path — with Givebacks kept for what it is genuinely good at, member records and dues remittance. The two are complements, not competitors.