Empowers supporters to advocate around shared values with Bonterra's Advocacy solutions, which integrates directly with a CRM. Users can target decision-makers via email, form and petition submissions, click-to-call, and social media, which are all optimized for maximum impact.
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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…
Every Action is perfect, powerful tool for nonprofit and political advocacy organizations to cultivate a membership and utilize this base to advocate for change at the state and local level
It depends what type of event you're using it for. GiveSmart is great for getting everyone registered online with little hassle on the back end, good for collecting info like email addresses from attendees, good for sending text updates to attendees, and if you have the right crowd it can be great to silent auctions. However, if you have a more mixed crowd or one that likes to pay in cash, the disconnect between cash payments and GiveSmart logging the payments is cumbersome, and not very user friendly. It's not great for in-person raffle items - it would maybe work well if all raffling was done via GiveSmart but when you have physical tickets that you're buying online it gets confusing quickly. We also had an issue at a golf event where people could purchase mulligans via GiveSmart, but we had no way of recording when they were being used on the course. Basically, if you have an entirely virtual event I think GiveSmart would work great for you, but in our experience we have donors that like to do things in person and with cash, and that's where it gets tricky.
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!).
Some different views to examine audience at different engagement levels. Some more visual tools on engagement levels and the 'shape' of our audience in terms of opens, engagement, actions, etc.
GiveSmart Events and GiveSmart Fundraise don't fully integrate, and their processing of merchant fees is different.
We would love for there to be integration with Venmo to give.
The functionality of different crowdfunding options is a little hard to understand. For example, setup and customization for teams is different from individual funding.
For our organization, the ability to set up ticketed events for our crowdfunding teams/individuals on the event page was limited compared to the ability to set them up as keywords in the fundraising platform.
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.
As mentioned before I feel like I am referred to different people/places a lot. I would like to be able to get answers in one place. The Events Chat feature I have had mixed results with. Sometimes the chat is not picked up and then I get an email with a resolution, and other times it is picked up and not resolved. As I am doing more within the system, there seem to be little glitchy things - and honestly my best support has been GOAT Events - who we contract with for GiveSmart support the day of an event.
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.
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.
