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…
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iMIS Engagement Management System
Score 5.8 out of 10
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iMIS EMS is an Engagement Management System (EMS) – fusing database management and web publishing into a single system – to drive operational efficiencies, revenue growth, and continuous performance improvement. Harnessing the power of Microsoft Azure’s cloud platform, iMIS EMS is purpose-built to meet the most important challenge facing associations and non-profits – Engagement.
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.
iMIS Engagement Management System is well suited for associations or other non-profits that operate without a lot of bells and whistles. So far in my experience if you want to do more sophisticated operations, marketing in my specific role, then iMIS Engagement Management System may not be the best AMS. It does the basics well but the more high-powered you want to get then the more it's going to cost by having your vendor of choice to work to enhance or upgrade what you have.
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!).
One-stop-shop. I love that we have one system that will track our income, manage membership, email contacts, manage our website and pull reports.
Response time on support tickets. Whenever I have a problem using iMIS, I can either log into their support site to submit a help ticket or send it directly from my email account. Someone normally responds to me within the hour and then I will get a solution within the day no matter the time of day I submit the ticket.
Easy to use widgets. I love using widgets to pull a page together. They have slideshow widgets that use on a daily basis. There are also forum widgets and widgets to pull an already created query to a page you choose to display this information on.
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
System Performance: iMIS has always seemed to have had performance issues....sluggish specifically. Though some of that may be in part to some of our customizations, but we don’t think so.
Integrations with 3rd Party Products: we would like to see more integrations with 3rd party apps.
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
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.
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/
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I think both are great tools. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. I really like the CMS component that comes with iMIS. It is important for an organization to be able to quickly build websites to engage their members. iMIS provides tools to do this out of the box.
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.
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.
iMIS had a neutral impact on my non-profit organization's overall business objectives. Both the finance and department teams just worked around the limitations that iMIS had.
