Formerly from Blackbaud and based on the former MicroEdge FIMS product, FIMS is a software solution used to manage requests, approvals, and declinations for grantmaking and scholarships.
It is a very robust system and with the various modules you can accomplish much of what is needed for traditional transaction US-based grantmaking. If you have more complicated grantmaking, deal with foreign currencies or want to have tighter alignment of finance and budget numbers, GIFTS may not meet your needs. Additionally, some of their core projects have limited accessibility in terms of various mobile devices or access from outside the organization's network.
This is such an easy platform to set up and connect to the different social media channels that you would want to use for an upcoming giveaway. It makes it simple for your participants to join and is an easy way for you to increase your engagement in the contests.
Rafflecopter helps to connect our business with our clients outside of clinic.
Rafflecopter allows the ability for our clients to spread the word about our clinic through our social media efforts.
Rafflecopter truly lets us see how successful we are with our clients, especially because if our patients were not truly satisfied with our services, then they would not want to take part in the giveaways and promotions that we run through Rafflecopter.
While GIFTS Classic is the most barren interfaces of all MicroEdge products, there are some simple capabilities I wish GIFTS could still perform such as better email integration from outlook to a GIFTS request, more efficient requirement reminders, and a wider use of Microsoft Office and other external product integration (GuideStar).
It's disappointing that you have to purchase an additional "Customizer Module" or "Budget Module" in order to access basic functions of a GMS. This seems like a basic system function that MicroEdge takes advantage of, unfortunately.
The online application module (IGAM) is still quite antiquated and you have to be knowledgeable of basic HTML in order to really customize your organization's online application. More flexibility and design functions would be greatly appreciated with the online application function, especially since this is a public document and represents your organization.
I think not that the problem was with Rafflecopter, but rather our company and it's approach to Social Media. Being a conservative B2B company in the manufacturing / safety industry doesn't, at this time, offer us many "social" connections that leads to sale/brand awareness. I think we might be better served on a different social network, say LinkedIn. On a personal note, it was a pleasure using Rafflecopter. Easy, fast, cheap and I can see how it can be hugely effective to a social media campaign for those that are in a different industry than the one I work in. I will certainly be recommending the product to my friends and other businesses that are more appropriately served by Rafflecopter.
I typically receive a response to an inquiry within an hour or two, if not sooner. Most tech support people are knowledgeable about our problems, and if not, they will escalate to the proper person.
It is really a matter of priority. I can see situations where GIFTS Classic is a very strong option! Once an organization determines its priorities then it should definitely consider GIFTS to see how well it compares with mission critical functionality.
Rafflecopter is widely used and people have usually heard of it before. The other way we coordinate giveaways is to have a. spreadsheet with all the entries. Then use Google's random number generator which correlates to one of the rows in the spreadsheet which would be our winner
Reporting was difficult on GIFTS - often we had to place data into Excel by hand since we could not create simple customized reports. This increased time spent on tasks GIFTS was supposed to streamline.
GIFTS did not alert us to duplicated organization records, so often it was difficult to reflect an organization's full grant history to our Board of Directors, leading to employees spending time searching through paper records to make sure all information was properly reported.
GIFTS created duplicate contact records, meaning it was difficult to find out which contact was related to which organization and cluttered our data. This caused decreased processing and response time to "new" contacts who turned out to be previous contacts or contacts whose information was tied to previous organizations. Even when contact information was updated for a new organization, sometimes the program would revert to the first organization contact information, several times leading to checks cashed to incorrect organizations---the very worst consequence of using GIFTS to our organization. Thankfully, the money was recovered upon the few times that error occurred, but it led to me and other employees reading through out 800+ checks before issue to make sure the correct organization was in fact being rewarded.
