Cvent is a cloud-based enterprise event management company with nearly 4,000 employees and over 300,000 users worldwide. Cvent offers software solutions to event planners and marketers for online event registration, venue selection, event management and marketing, onsite solutions, email marketing, and attendee engagement. Cvent's suite of products automate and simplify the planning process to maximize the impact of events. Cvent provides hoteliers with an integrated platform, enabling…
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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…
Cvent Event Management has streamlined our processes, allowing a small staff to manage our events effortlessly. From event set-up through feedback, the software integrates all elements, reducing duplication of effort. Our contact database tracks our membership, allowing us to charge the appropriate registration cost and send event emails based on registration type. Using the Attendee Hub App, we have eliminated the paper program and communicate instantaneously with our attendees. Printing the badges onsite has allowed us to keep registration open longer and gain more attendees.
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!).
Allowing more in depth paths for registration questions (i.e. drill-down questions as needed)
Hotel widget does not model in a user-friendly way, allowing for customer confusion and cumbersome work-arounds
Flex Email customization widgets need to integrate into the emails more smoothly and be able to customize to have the same look, feel, font of the written text. At this time it does not allow for the same level of customization.
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.
We are very pleased with the features that Cvent gives us. The ease of use and the immediate support when something does stump us. Cvent provides us with everything that we need to run a successful event. The only reason I did not Rate Cvent as a 10 is the cost
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
Overall, Cvent Event Management is a highly usable platform, with a user-friendly interface and a wide range of features and tools to help plan, promote, and manage events. The platform is designed to be intuitive, allowing users to easily navigate and access the various features and functionalities. One of the key benefits of Cvent Event Management's usability is its high level of customization. The platform offers a range of customization options, allowing users to tailor the platform to their specific needs and branding. This can include custom registration forms, event websites, email communications, and more. Additionally, Cvent Event Management provides robust data analytics and reporting, enabling users to gain insights into attendee behavior, event performance, and ROI. The platform also offers real-time reporting, which can be particularly useful during an event, allowing organizers to monitor attendance and event progress. While there may be a learning curve for some of the more advanced features, overall, the platform is highly usable and intuitive and we have had positive experiences with the platform's usability, citing its ease of use, customization options, and comprehensive feature set as key benefits.
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.
Cvent does go down pretty frequently. And while it often doesn't impact day to day use usually, if it does go down at the wrong time, you may not be able to access very important event information when you need it. Usually outages do not last very long, but it could still be a very bad situation if this happens at the wrong moment
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.
I have very rarely needed support, but when I did, it seemed that there was an underlying push for a webinar, training session, or multiple phone calls. If I have a question or a need, that should be addressed nothing else.
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.
Our on-site trainer was very knowledgeable in the product and gave us very important pointers on best practices and how to perform tasks in the simplest manner
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.
It would have been nice during implementation if we had received more pointers on how to organize our parked report folders, libraries, etc. to avoid the mess we find ourselves in today. If we had known ahead of time the limitations we could have planned better.
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.
Eventbrite is not able to handle the complex registration forms that Cvent can. It does not collect as much information, cannot produce the save level of reports, and does not allow for multi-leveled and/or multiple registration types within one form. Being able to offer, and compare, those is vital to determining our ROI and event planning efforts. Additionally, Eventbrite does not provide as many customizable options or branding opportunities.
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.
