Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review If you are looking for a quick and easy database option, which integrates breezily with email clients like
MailChimp and Constant Contact, and has built-in credit/debit card processing capabilities, NeonCRM is a very good option. An affordable alternative to Salesforce or Raiser's Edge, it does lack some of their "bells and whistles" but gets the job done. On the one hand, Neon features a shallow learning curve and solid user interface, and is web based and mobile friendly. On the other hand, Neon might not be totally appropriate for large or national level organizations because some of the reporting seems less "robust" than pricier alternatives...
Read full review Pros 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!). Read full review NeonCRM allows you to build events, take registrations, and customize those events. Customizations include different ticketing options, add-ons, promotions, etc. NeonCRM does a good job helping you track donors' activities/engagements. It also provides a variety of reporting mechanisms - from dashboard snapshots to graphical reports - that allow you to review programs at a glance or in-depth. Read full review Cons 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 Read full review Learning the ropes is largely accomplished by reading manuals and watching videos. I don't learn that way. I'd much prefer to be shown. I guess I'm old school. They can be stingy with the customer support. We bought the big package and I still wind up going back to my salesperson to help me cut through any red tape to get what I need. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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
Read full review Neon CRM was difficult and frustrating to use without IT experience, and way to costly for the a small to mid-sized nonprofit. We believe that we lost donors due to the inaccurate report system in Neon CRM
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review The Neon CRM system is confusing (we had to watch video tutorials and html code to understand many of the features, many of which we did not need). Around 2022, Neon started to go downhill. Bells and whistles were added that were of no benefit (to our nonprofit) and the system became even harder to use
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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/
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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
Read full review As stated before, they push you to read the manual or watch the video when what I want is a human being to walk/talk me through it. Like I said, maybe I am old school but that's how I learn. It's been a challenge.
Read full review Online Training 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review We had to hire someone to implement our donors into Neon CRM
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review It works. It's easy to customize for nonprofit and industry-specific categories. It does what it does well, and integrates with platforms that specialize in those areas rather than trying to be everything to all users.
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Positive: Neon allows us to track, analyze, and optimize our fundraising efforts and outcomes. It is critical to our success. Positive: Neon works easily with our website, making donations easy for the donor. Positive: Neon is affordable in comparison with similar products. Negative: Neon is not well known (yet) so each new employees will probably need to learn it from scratch. Read full review ScreenShots