Blackbaud's Target Analytics is a database for nonprofit fundraising, with an emphasis on direct marketing.
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GiveSmart
Score 8.3 out of 10
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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…
ResearchPoint is well suited for Prospect Research, especially if the user has Raiser's Edge as their main database given its integration capabilities with qualified data; however, it is not necessary. I used the Target Analytics product that came before ResearchPoint (The Researcher's Edge) as a stand-alone prospect research database for about a year. For small shops that do not have a prospect researcher or prospect research team, it could even be used by gift officers looking for new prospects or for wealth data on their known prospects. Once systems are in place, the content is fairly intuitive and easy to navigate. The product is really a one-stop-shop, find prospects, wealth screen them, verify the data (the product saves you time by verifying a lot for you already), sync your findings to The Raiser's Edge, and if you'd like, export or print a professional-looking profile to a .pdf for your president or gift officer.
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.
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!).
Confirmed relationships needs to be a field that can be synced to The Raiser's Edge
Philanthropic giving, when synced to the Prospect tab, needs to be able to be sorted by dollar value (like in Excel); this is a change that would need to happen in The Raiser's Edge
With increasing competition from other wealth screening vendors, it would be useful if data sources were updated more frequently (i.e. real estate and giving).
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
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.
While there is always room for improvement, I have always had good luck with TA support. There are so many ways to get help! Sometimes I can answer my own question by just accessing the vast Knowledgebase directory. I have been able to get quick answers by initiating a live Chat without having to navigate the call center voice mail options, which can be a little overwhelming. Sometimes my question or problem is more involved and I'll submit a case online. Between email conversations or a phone call, the representatives I've worked with have always been super helpful, never condescending, and they often follow up days later to make sure everything is working well
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.
Currently there are several prospect research software companies on the market, such as WealthEngine. In my opinion, Target Analytics with the ability of integration between Raiser's Edge and ResearchPoint creates a greater value for an organization.
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.
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.
Address Appends - we are saving tons of money on returned mail, NCOA updates, and ensuring donors are receiving timely correspondence.
Data Appends - ensured that we know who we have in our database and how we need to reach each household. Not only through updating records of deceased constituents but knowing the correct email addresses and phones to reach out and share our mission.
Prospect Research - allows us to learn more about potential donors, existing donors, and how to create increased donor-centric interactions and solicitations.
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.
