Classy is a fundraising platform that supports direct giving and peer-to-peer fundraising, recurring donations, and event management. Classy offers nonprofits the tools to provide the right experience to the right donor at the right time. Classy gives nonprofits access to customizable campaigns, best-in-class integrations, and an expansive library of resources including always-available care agents and hands-on fundraising coaches. Together, the vendor states that Classy and…
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Dryfta
Score 3.0 out of 10
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Dryfta is and event
platform that is comprised of a free suite of applications that are designed to
collect event data and measure event ROI, sell tickets, build event websites,
launch mobile apps, engage and network attendees, retrieve and manage leads for
exhibitors with a unified CRM, segment attendees and create email campaigns,
create shareable real-time custom reports and more.
Well suited for organizations with large fundraising programs or many recurring donors, especially those who have the staffing to devote to reporting and fundraising data analysis. Variety of payment options is good for mobile-first or younger audiences who may be taking more frequent advantage of payment methods like Venmo and Apple Pay. Most useful if it is used in tandem as an event registration/event hosting platform (Classy Event Registration or Classy Live) as attendee data and fundraising is kept in a single place. Less appropriate for smaller organizations, or folks that will not be doing crowdfunding/peer-to-peer/events. There are other platforms that do standard donation pages well that have fewer bells and whistles but are accordingly cheaper.
I can't provide a scenario where Dryfta could be well suited. I guess it's a matter of delivering what has been promised on time, and without having to invest thousands of hours in extra work, as it was in our case. If it worked properly it could be a good tool for any conference.
It has a lot of functionalities (website and administration) all included in the same platform. If it worked properly, it allows you to organise a conference paper-free.
Campaigns lack customization options which can be limiting- while you can add code to make some changes, there is a basic framework that you can't always override.
Slow to roll out some donor payment options like Venmo.
Not inexpensive price point and on an annual contract, so the software is definitely an investment.
Multilingual issues. Although it is advertised as multilingual, it didn’t really work as such. The many issues that popped up throughout the conference preparation were fixed little by little at a cost in time, from help desk emails and to struggles with the unfriendly UX.
Admin pages reloaded every time you clicked on a button (their developers seem to ignore Ajax technologies). It was time-consuming and required constant page searches.
Inflexibility in many of the supposed functionalities it offers.
Certificates were not modifiable nor custom when we had to send them (it was solved months after the conference finished when we were surprisingly contacted by the help desk).
Problems with the size of images to be displayed on the site, very small fonts and limited options to display content. We had to hire a professional developer in order to get a graphically consistent and presentable website.
Very poor mobile version. Too big margins, unreadable text, endless text blocks and lists, distorted pictures, etc.
Issues with the ordering of the authors’ names for different proposals (authorship being so important in research).
Fixed, inflexible fields in the contact sheets, speakers info, and so on.
Special character issues (due to Latin characters and other types used in linguistic research).
Not being able to include links in the HTML editor due to Dryfta's inadvertent decisions to block them.
Only one Superadmin user allowed to access the full functionalities of the platform, so we had to share it (consequently not knowing who did each action).
Problems with the generation of reports and the high complexity of their interface.
Some issues on the mandatory anonymity. The double-blind review process not fully respected due to unclear user info and options, with other issues coming up on the go such as unwanted info in automated notifications and messages in the Welcome dashboard.
Not being able to use the other payment methods on the platform because they were incompatible with the conference country.
Missing information and time wasted when creating events for sessions with info that already existed in the server that randomly failed to be selected. These issues were reported even with video proofs (help desk didn’t believe us), and were never solved. We had to repeat the same processes again and again, never knowing what was going on
VERY easy to use, but lacks flexibility. But very easy to learn and master, even for someone with technical skills. They offer live chat which is a great help for on-demand support. At higher call volumes, you may wait 10 minutes, but I’ve never waited for more than that and the support if 90% of the time very helpful.
Classy's team was very helpful as we transitioned over, and helped us get everything set up quite easily. The few times we've had issues or questions, their online chat feature has been a quick way to get answers. On Giving Tuesday last year, the site went down, but Classy was quick with communication to its clients and had the problem resolved in about an hour. I know that if we have any problems or questions, the company and its team will be responsive and helpful. That makes a difference to me and our small team. We don't have time to troubleshoot or stay on hold for a long time waiting for support.
It was quick, that's all we can say. Quite a few times they sorted out the problems and issues. But, sadly, sometimes their answers were useless and irritating (not addressing the problem or simply ignoring it, "passing the buck"). In some cases, they pretended the problem didn't exist and we had to send them videos as proof. No response to that.
I have not used any other platforms like Classy. Given I came into this organization after Classy was already chosen, I was pleased with how easy it was to learn the platform and how user-friendly the entire thing is. Although I haven't used any other platforms like it, I would highly recommend it.
This has been nothing but positive. We use the basic version so there is no fee associated with it other than a percentage of each transaction. So everything that comes in is added revenue where the only investment is staff time, but there is no monetary investment.
The overall performance was okay in the end, but it was due to our team's commitment and effort. Without that extra work, the results would have been awful.
