Brightly Event Manager™ vs. Greater Giving

This is an ideal program for any school or district looking for a way to monitor room and maintenance requests. The digital routing availability will help ease the burden of paper copies and make it quicker for everyone to use and submit their needs. Schools with a variety of staff members are best suited, especially since when submitting a request you can designate those that need to be involved and what specific needs you have from facility to technology.

Incentivized

For our organization, Greater Giving is the best option because of the credit card swiping, the ease of the registration, and the tax receipts alone. I do wish that it would allow us to pass on the credit card fees to the purchaser, but for that reason, we don't use it for registration. For an organization NOT needing to swipe credit cards at the event for on-site purchases or using their tax receipt software, I do think that there are more affordable options.

Incentivized

• You are able to designate whether you are submitting a maintenance request or a schedule request (for rooms).
• You can set recurring schedules for areas or rooms you may need weekly or monthly to be requested on a set day or time.
• SchoolDude autoroutes to the personnel you designate, taking out any physical paperwork involved.
• You can see your history of requests (both maintenance and schedule) in the database.

Incentivized

• Website design is really easy and looks very professional.
• Data uploads and downloads are generally pretty easy.
• Process flows are nicely organized and easy for a non-technical person to figure out

• The filter and ability to sort through your request history is a little difficult to navigate and can be glitchy if you are not sorting in the correct way.
• There should be a quicker and simpler way to verify whether a room is booked prior to scheduling.
• A cleaner, more simplistic look and navigation would go a long way.

Incentivized

• [I feel the] auction system is not as sophisticated as other systems
• Staff support structure
• Doesn't come out with updates very quickly [in my experience]

Incentivized

Greater Giving is very intuitive. It’s easy to set up in the backend and change as needed. Anytime we couldn’t figure something out on our own, our customer service representative was always available and super helpful!

Incentivized

Online support was one of the worst customer service experiences I've ever had (I would give them a 1). Phone support and implementation support were very nice and knowledgeable.

This is the only program I have used for the facility, maintenance, technology, and room requests. However, there are programs that include similar features. Frontline Professional Growth is a platform that includes digital forms and routing similar to SchoolDude. But it is a vastly more in-depth program with features that go beyond what SchoolDude is often used for.

Incentivized

We currently use Eventbrite for our pre-event ticket and sponsorship sales as they have a much more streamlined webpage that is customizable, they allow us to pass on the fees to our purchasers, AND they do not charge an annual fee on top of the processing fees. However, they do not have the ability to let you swipe a credit card in advance - you need a membership to Bidding for Good to do so. We tried using Eventbrite and Bidding for Good for only 1 event before we switched back to Greater Giving. Neither platform allowed you to send out tax receipts and the on-site event management was subpar compared to the ease of Greater Giving.

Incentivized

• Less printing and copying in a district.
• Quicker submitting and processing time.
• Able to track requests and see what is being used in the district.

Incentivized

• The reporting improved our abilities to provide accurate information more timely to the finance department - a plus when completing the annual 990 or other information for our auditors.
• We saw an increase in collecting on pledges when we switched from a "text-to-give" platform (from another provider) to incorporating all event elements into Greater Giving. We were able to capture over 95% of gifts within 48 hours of the event compared to less than half that amount in previous years.
• The reports generated by Greater Giving are better received by our board of directors - easier to digest and provide meaningful analytics

Incentivized