CharityEngine is designed to simplify the complex world of online fundraising for nonprofits, as a nonprofit CRM. Integrated tools for donations, emails, and other elements of fundraising feed data into a central view to make it easier to know and care for donors. The solution boasts secure, payment-ready forms to give users complete control of donors' information.
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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…
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Pricing
CharityEngine
GiveSmart
Editions & Modules
Standard
$350-$700
per month
Professional
$700-$1,500
per month
Enterprise
Call for Customized Pricing
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CharityEngine
GiveSmart
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
Pricing starts based on our core offering and your projected contact and email volume.
CharityEngine has the POTENTIAL to be a good CRM, but both unresponsiveness to the more complex problems go unresolved for months at a time. Employee turnover is huge, which is likely because upper management is doing nothing to solve the internal problems. I would NOT recommend this CRM at this point. While CharityEngine does allow reasonably robust storage and querying of data if you plan to send emails through your CRM, look elsewhere. CharityEngine's framework is clunky and counter-intuitive, in addition to frequently just not working at all.
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!).
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
There are a lot of frustrating things about the general usage of CharityEngine. It syncs with a nine-digit zip code database, but doesn't automatically populate exportable fields with this data - it must be manually requested for each record. Buttons that allow a user to quickly move to a specific area of the data in a customer record frequently stop working after updates; are found by users and reported, and then take a month or longer to be fixed. A clunky and counter-intuitive "creative" database frequently fails completely and is always slow.
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.
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.
CharityEngine has allowed our organization to grow in the past few years, but it has not kept up with industry trends and avoids making changes and updates requested by users.
Our overall business objectives cannot be met with CharityEngine alone. We must export data and use other applications to generate the data we need.
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.
