Cvent Onsite Solutions vs. GiveSmart by Momentive

I am highly likely to always recommend Cvent Onsite Solutions based on the positive experience I have had with them. I have had an amazing experience overall with the entire Cvent platform and all of their offerings. The support team is awesome and extremely knowledgeable. This is the type of software that offers customers the cutting edge to excel

Incentivized

GiveSmart changed the game for us in registration and bidding for our annual fundraising gala. We had tried several different software options and GiveSmart is far and away the best. It's AWESOME for our silent auction in particular, easy to upload items and helpful minimum bid and bid increment suggestions.

Incentivized

• Allows a smoother process for attendees
• Allows our staff more time to focus on other onsite tasks during the conference
• Shifts to more of a digital process rather than relying on paper/by hand check ins

Incentivized

• GiveSmart is a very easy-to-use platform that provides robust instruction on use but is so user-friendly that the instructions are mostly not necessary. I find it easy to update, change, and create all aspects of our page. For example, I first used GiveSmart without any instruction from a manager. She instructed me to look around and see what was going on. I was able to navigate the site effectively, and only found a few pieces for which I needed more instruction.
• GiveSmart offers a well-made item section. Our gala has a silent auction made up of more than 170 items, and GiveSmart makes it easy to upload those items in bulk or add them individually. It offers every field I would want to have for an item and provides a comprehensive and adjustable front-facing-view for donors that is easy to manipulate.
• GiveSmart's main page creator is easy to navigate and create the site you want. They provide helpful details like sizing for images and the ability to create buttons and links and different sections as our needs dictate. It's easy to adjust the colors and design to reflect our branding.

Incentivized

• I have had issues with them sending the correct printers in the past, but it doesn't happen often. And when they do, they ship overnight to correct the issue.
• It's an expensive option - they tend to Nickel and Dime.
• The app/gamification features are still not perfect. I've had several issues with games on the day of.

Incentivized

• Lack of customization options when building each page. The website winds up not looking all that professional.
• The reporting functionality is not very helpful at all. This is a main area of improvement we've asked for.
• Better customization of emails and texts through GiveSmart. Right now, they are limited, and you can't make them look very nice.
• The process of logging back into your account as a ticket purchaser or donor is very confusing. Most guests don't even know they can log in to access their tickets, make another donation, etc.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Cvent Onsite Solutions is very user friendly and easy for those who are not very tech savvy. My first time using On-Arrival went very smoothly while onsite for a program due to the prior training that was provided by Cvent Onsite Solutions in our OSS training. Overall, it allows for tech integrations to be utilized easily.

For the most part, GiveSmart serves our organization's needs for creating fundraising forms. It is especially useful for our peer-to-peer fundraising and event planning and registration efforts. The dashboard is relatively intuitive, and there have been improvements in creating forms and managing campaigns since shifting from Mobile Cause to GiveSmart Fundraise.

Incentivized

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/

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The person onsite can be hit or miss. We have had a few really wonderful support technicians that came prepared, were helpful, and jumped in where needed. We have had others that sat back, didn't offer advice or best practices tips, and were not pleasant to work with. It's very hit or miss.

Incentivized

We contacted support for clarification on distributions and reporting, and we continued to get escalated. However, we never had our questions answered or resolved, which was a bummer. Other members have contacted support for other reasons and received the help they needed.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• One not listed here is iCapture. We use iCapture right now for lead capture. It's easy to use and priced well, and we leverage all of our events. It's easy to use the tool.
• Moved away from Aventri/E-Touches quickly after being stuck in a 3-year contract. We started with Cvent Onsite Solutions (formerly AllianceTech), and procurement moved us to Aventri. After a good battle, we were able to move back to Cvent Onsite Solutions (formerly AllianceTeach).

Incentivized

I have been a guest at other non-profit events that utilized similar software, and I feel that the GiveSmart platform seems more user-friendly. I cannot speak to the efficiency on the administrative side because I have solely used GiveSmart, but I don't find GiveSmart lacking in any particular areas for our needs.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• We receive great feedback on registration processes
• Clients are always impressed by the app
• Our team trusts Cvent Onsite Solutions as a platform, and this confidence improves performance

Incentivized

• We have not used the database to its full extent, so I do not have specific examples as we have not used the donor insights very much
• I appreciate that the events information is now transferring to the donor database so those contributions and people are being included in the master database.
• Certainly much more efficient for a one-staff person organization as all of the information is in one place!

Incentivized