Last October, I stood in a checkout line at our parish gala for over twenty minutes. The line snaked out of the cashier room and collided with people trying to pick up their auction items. Volunteers — mostly the same dedicated group of women who make these events happen every year — were buried in paper bid sheets, manually reconciling winners across more than 200 items. The event raised good money, but it ran on the heroics of a few rather than on good systems.
I left that night thinking: there has to be a better way.
I am parishioner at St. Christopher Catholic Parish in Marana, Arizona, and I’ve been building software for over 40 years. When our steering committee started planning the 2026 gala — this time a fundraiser for our new multi-purpose building — I offered to solve the problem with code.
Why not use what’s already out there?
We looked. The established players in this space — Blackbaud (enterprise pricing, sales-call required), GiveSmart (starting around $2,395–$2,995/year), OneCause (roughly $2,995/year or 5% of proceeds) — are built for large nonprofits with dedicated development staff and big budgets. For a parish running one or two events a year with volunteer committees, these costs eat directly into the money meant for the cause.
We needed something purpose-built for how parish fundraisers actually work: volunteer-run, one-night events where simplicity and speed matter more than enterprise features nobody will use.
What Catholic Functions does differently
I started building in April 2026, with our September gala as the deadline. The platform is designed around one principle: eliminate the lines and the paperwork.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
- QR code check-in — Attendees show their ticket QR code at the door. One scan, they’re in. No searching through printed lists.
- Automatic bidder number assignment — Buy a ticket, get a bidder number. No table to stop at, no card to pick up, no number to remember to write down.
- Phone-based bidding and payment — Scan an item’s QR code, place a bid from your phone. When you win, pay from your phone. No cashier line. No waiting.
- Live projector displays — Fund-a-Need campaigns show a real-time thermometer, scrolling donor list, and confetti effects on a projector. Energy in the room goes up. Pledges go up with it. Here is an example of the projector display being used to drive ticket sales!
- Paper bid sheet support — Not every event is ready to go fully digital. The platform supports both modes, and staff can record paper winners after the event just as easily.
- Item pickup verification — At the end of the night, volunteers handing out auction items no longer have to guess. They scan the attendee’s ticket QR code (or search by name or bidder number) and instantly see which items that person won, whether they’ve paid, and what’s ready to release. No cross-referencing paper lists, no “let me go check with the cashier.” Green means paid — hand it over. Red means unpaid — point them to checkout. One tap marks an item as picked up so nothing walks out unaccounted for.
- Express checkout — For those who prefer to pay at a station, cashiers scan one QR code and see everything the attendee owes — auction items, pledges, all of it — in one transaction.
All of this — plus ticket sales, donor tracking, program ad sales, seating charts, expense tracking, event reports, and tax receipts — in one platform. No juggling three different services and a spreadsheet.
Built for parishes, available to all
Catholic Functions is being built first for St. Christopher’s 2026 Boots and Bling gala, but the vision is larger. We want to offer this to parishes across the Diocese of Tucson, and eventually to Catholic parishes anywhere.
For non-Catholic Christian churches, we’ve launched the same platform under Flock Functions — same codebase, same features, different branding. A church in any denomination can use it to run their fundraising events without the overhead of enterprise software pricing.
What’s next
Our first live event is September 2026. Between now and then, we’re refining the experience, testing with real volunteers, and making sure the platform holds up when 120+ attendees are bidding, paying, and checking out simultaneously.
The goal isn’t to become the next big SaaS company. It’s to give churches a tool that works well, costs significantly less than the alternatives, and lets volunteers spend their night enjoying the event — not buried in paperwork.
If your parish or church is looking for a better way to run fundraising events, reach out. We’d love to help. Check it out at Catholic Functions.
