Blackbaud NetCommunity vs. GiveSmart

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Blackbaud NetCommunity
Score 5.6 out of 10
N/A
The Blackbaud NetCommunity online alumni management system helps users to gain a deeper understanding of alumni relationships, execute multichannel engagement strategies, and eliminate tedious back-office tasks. Blackbaud NetCommunity provides tools to engage alumni and supporters, wherever they may be, helping users: Connect in person and create memorable alumni engagement events with online alumni management system tools to help foster a personal connection between alumni…N/A
GiveSmart
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
GiveSmart, a Community Brands company, offers a full-service event management platform supporting event website, event registration, attendee tracking, donor management and data insights, and full customer service for entities wishing to raise funds via an auction or charity event. The platform also integrates technology from Community Brands brand Gesture to provide a comprehensive suite of services. GiveSmart replaces the former 501 Auctions, a platform to support charity auctions, mobile…N/A
Pricing
Blackbaud NetCommunityGiveSmart
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Blackbaud NetCommunityGiveSmart
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Blackbaud NetCommunityGiveSmart
Considered Both Products
Blackbaud NetCommunity

No answer on this topic

GiveSmart
Chose GiveSmart
BBNC was clunky, outdated, and a difficult legacy product to use. Our transition from NetCommunity gave us the impetus we needed to explore alternative solutions for online registration and giving platforms, and GiveSmart was the perfect solution for us. It's flexible, …
Chose GiveSmart
We use Qgiv for donation pages and for our large-scale event where we need to sell upwards of 2000 tickets. Qgiv pages are easier to use and more customizable than GiveSmart. Qgiv is very easy for any employee/new employee to learn and use. Qgiv is more useful for general …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Blackbaud NetCommunityGiveSmart
Small Businesses
OneCause
OneCause
Score 9.2 out of 10
OneCause
OneCause
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
OneCause
OneCause
Score 9.2 out of 10
OneCause
OneCause
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Blackbaud CRM
Blackbaud CRM
Score 7.5 out of 10
Blackbaud CRM
Blackbaud CRM
Score 7.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Blackbaud NetCommunityGiveSmart
Likelihood to Recommend
2.0
(23 ratings)
8.3
(150 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
5.6
(5 ratings)
7.7
(7 ratings)
Usability
8.2
(2 ratings)
8.5
(149 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(1 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(1 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(4 ratings)
7.3
(149 ratings)
In-Person Training
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
1.9
(3 ratings)
8.1
(5 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
4.5
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Blackbaud NetCommunityGiveSmart
Likelihood to Recommend
Blackbaud
For those using the events module, NetCommunity is great, though if you do a lot of walk/run type of events where individuals sponsor other individuals, something like TeamRaiser might make more sense. If you don't have the staff resources for web developers dedicated to fundraising tasks, then NetCommunity is a great tool. It's not as customisable as an experienced programmer/developer might want, but it still has a lot of options. It also has a lot of nuance, and if you cannot make an investment of time or money into getting staff trained, it's not going to work out well.
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Community Brands
Having access to the unique setup with our package was super helpful. This service pairs you with a GiveSmart professional who helps walk you through the setup for your campaign. Our professionalism was a huge help to our team in troubleshooting and configuration, and it helped us think through creative ways to make our fundraisers more effective and efficient.
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Pros
Blackbaud
  • Data integration with The Raiser's Edge - data which is collected in Blackbaud NetCommunity directly integrates with The Raiser's Edge interface and can be seamlessly downloaded into the CRM.
  • Donation/Event/Membership registration - the product comes with out-of-the-box forms that can be used for these basic functions. They are flexible, but structured enough to integrate the data back to the CRM.
  • Email marketing - constituents can be emailed directly from the Blackbaud NetCommunity platform by querying the data available in the CRM. Targeted email communications can be setup as well as ongoing subscriptions/newsetters.
  • Content management - general tools to manage content are available. Business users can add/modify/delete this content without tremendous technical expertise. The content can also be shared across multiple websites - or A/B split tested to determine preference.
  • Friendly URLs - the product allows for friendly URLs that are also more searchable on the major search engines (i.e. Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.).
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Community Brands
  • The event pages are excellent. They offer just the right amount of flexibility while making sure the user gets a clean experience. My only qualm with them is that they are housed on the GiveSmart URL and there is no way to house them on our URL.
  • It processes payments smoothly and efficiently with no hassle for donors.
  • It has some basic reporting on campaign transactions.
  • It has some very solid P2P fundraising features.
  • Their customer service team does an excellent job of working with clients (Shoutout to our amazing Customer success manager Carissa Jay!).
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Cons
Blackbaud
  • When we have carding attacks on our payment gateway it is always a struggle to get all the players to work together and determine how to get us back up and running. ReCAPTCHA at the highest level is not supported, for example.
  • From experience, the product has not been stable in the last couple years and all signs have been pointing towards a sunsetting of this product for years.
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Community Brands
  • Statement/Receipt email in events - would love the capability to email out receipts /auction donor thank you's en mass
  • Improving - but transferring event donations/tax deductible amount to donor database (delineate the tax deductible amount from tickets, purchases, etc)
  • I would like to have one customer support system for all three platforms - I feel like I get referred to other people frequently (events has the chat for help, others do not) so hesitant to reach out because I don't know if I am reaching out to the right person
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Likelihood to Renew
Blackbaud
The only reason for this is due to the fact that we are only using the product for a specific purpose that is not directly tied to the newsletters. There are better products out there for what we are doing with grant processing. We will most likely move to a new software instead of renewing for our purposes
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Community Brands
For us, we have a very dissatisfying donor database solution right now, but we have built the hacks we need in order to manually integrate data we pull out of GiveSmart with the system. None of us are trying to reinvent that particular wheel, so for now, until the organization decides to upgrade the useless database we've been saddled with, we are satisfied to maintain our GiveSmart subscription. Might this change if we acquire a more sophisticated donor solution? Maybe. But we will also be looking for options that will integrate smoothly with GiveSmart. What we like about GiveSmart, we really like. GiveSmart is great at what it does really well, namely event management. Yes, they need to address the inflexibility issues that make customization and some report features particularly frustrating, but for our organization the benefits are outweighing the drawbacks at this time. Their customer service is top-notch, and they have done an admirable job of creating an extensive Help section and responsive Support department that can assist with how-to's for various tasks within the system
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Usability
Blackbaud
The interface with Raiser's Edge and the many different ways our users can interact with the website are a big plus for us. Event registrations are our most popular transaction type and having this on line makes our lives much easier.
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Community Brands
I do not have to create new campaigns often, but when I do, I still have a hard time determining how it is done as well as the use of the Keyword. Eventually, I am able to create what I need.
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Reliability and Availability
Blackbaud
Product is stable is up 99.99% of the time. As a hosted customer, we do experience some minor downtime when routers or switches malfunction. We feel the downtime has been minimal and the communications around these outages has been good.
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Community Brands
We never experienced any issues with outages, the system being down, etc. It's extremely reliable. That's very important when you're dealing with financial and personal information! We want to make it easy for people to give, and it's great that we've never had to worry about service issues making that more challenging/
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Performance
Blackbaud
Blackbaud NetCommunity uses .NET technology. It can be sluggish at times if not optimized, but overall we have been pleased with the performance when handling large volumes of traffic.
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Community Brands
We haven't had any issue regarding performance or reliability with GiveSmart. We don't integrate it with any other software so that issue isn't relevant. The pages load quickly and reports are completed almost as soon as you hit the "run" button. Overall, the system works as designed and is pretty quick when people use it.
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Support Rating
Blackbaud
Blackbaud NetCommunity and all of the Blackbaud products have a great support system. Blackbaud NetCommunity offers support through phone calls, chats, online, and email. Their response time is very quick and the support analysts work with you to resolve issues in a very timely matter. If they do not personally know the answer they will direct you to another support analyst that will be able to assist in a resolution.
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Community Brands
They are well able to answer the questions. Sometimes, they reply to me customer support emails with an article that I did not find in their help section. That works for me! If I am on a call with them, they have walked me through the situation, which was helpful as well
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In-Person Training
Blackbaud
As expected. Courseware was a nice reference guide.
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Community Brands
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Blackbaud
No answers on this topic
Community Brands
GiveSmart provides great training videos on their system. Not everything is covered with their videos but their support staff are very friendly and knowledgeable. I would have given them a ten but not everything is covered in their videos and sometimes you have to find the right word to search for in able to find the right training video.
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Implementation Rating
Blackbaud
I truly wish that "0" was an option. I never really pin-pointed whether the implementation issues that we had were caused by Blackbaud, or if it was part of a larger issue that began in-house.
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Community Brands
We just made the change using the band-aid approach. In other words, we just went for it and taught the users how to do it at our first event and went from there. 90-95% of people haven't used a mobile bidding software so most everyone was on the same stage of knowledge so implementing it was easy as people didn't have to re-learn anything.
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Alternatives Considered
Blackbaud
We tried to use this for a while and actually had different groups set up to begin implementing the interface into our computer but for some reason, we could not get a handle on it. iMIS ended up winning out in the long run because it was easier for people of all generations to use and understand. People just preferred the layout and the usability so ultimately it was kept as our main system.
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Community Brands
Ultimately, we chose GiveSmart because it was the upgraded version of the Abila software we had already been using for years. Our donor records get a unique update each year that most donor CRM organizations don't know how to handle. We also liked how they offered the three modules: DonorCRM, Fundraise, and Events. Many other companies only offer one or two of those functions.
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Scalability
Blackbaud
No answers on this topic
Community Brands
We are a small, independent, private, nonprofit school. GiveSmart is very flexible and works extremely well for us. But I could also see it being equally efficient for larger school systems, large or small nonprofit organizations, etc. I never feel like the product is too "big" for us to use.
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Return on Investment
Blackbaud
  • We were able to purchase a package integrating all types of Blackbaud products which integrate.
  • We are able to update our desktop, mobile donation pages which allow us to take donations while having great support available at all times.
  • The donation forms and email tools are not very visually appealing and user-friendly so this makes it difficult to implement and in return donors don't have a user-friendly experience.
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Community Brands
  • I really can't give hard numbers as we are a smaller non-profit, but we like the service being provided - it's easy to use, easy to reconcile, easy to use their backend processing service CardPointe, it's just easy.
  • We have used this service a lot over the years - from event registration to website donation processing to information gathering, so for us, it is well worth the investment each year.
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ScreenShots

GiveSmart Screenshots

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