Flipcause is a nonprofit fundraising management platform from the company of the same name in Oakland.
$125
per month
GiveSmart
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
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…
Flipcause has been great for our organization and donors report good experiences using the platform. It has been fantastic for our annual fundraiser, as we can sell tickets, get volunteers to sign up, solicit donations, contact all ticket purchasers, and more very easily
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!).
The functionality is great, but setting up a fundraising campaign the first time can be time consuming and confusing. However, they have customer service staff who can help you or who will set up the campaign for you from start to finish.
You must click "save" each time you open a section of your campaign even if you haven't made any changes. This can be a bit annoying, but I suppose the feature is there to prevent changes from being lost or unwanted changes from being saved.
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
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.
Flipcause has amazingly responsive customer support staff and "Success Teams." When you sign up, your Success Manager makes sure you have all the information and support needed to get up and running quickly and easily. Your Success Team will happily provide support on an on-going basis as needed, although we have not needed much support due to the easy-to-use interface
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.
We previously used Network for Good to process online donations and to sell event tickets, but Flipcause has proven much better at meeting our needs. I prefer the Flipcause interface and functionality, especially for event registrations. We have also used PayPal and PayPal Here to collect donations online and in person. While these are trusted and recognizable for our donors, they are only useful for collecting donations and do not have easily customizable donation receipts.
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.
We are a nonprofit and donations are our lifeline. By streamlining the donation solicitation, processing, and acknowledgement process, and by automatically populating the donor CRM, Flipcause has saved so much time. And as we all know, time is money...
Flipcause encourages donors to pay the additional credit card processing fees, so more of the donation lands in our account.
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.
