MarketSmart in College Park offers the Fundraising Report Card, an analytics platform supporting nonprofits with feedback on the success of their fundraising efforts.
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GiveSmart
Score 8.4 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…
Compared to other event platforms, this one has a lot more capability and is very user friendly on the patron side - I hope they continue to develop their backend of things for reports/tracking. They are by far the best platform when it comes to texting and emailing capabilities, meaning they have the least amount of limitations - giving your guests a better experience.
It makes preparing fundraising reports super easy. I used to spend 6-8 hours preparing a board report and now it takes me 30 minutes... PLUS I can pull up the reports in real time during board meetings to allow board members to see the data presented in different ways or to answer questions on-the-spot.
It has metrics that I've never even thought to prepare - including some that always felt too complicated to prepare. Lifetime Donor Value, Donor Retention Rates, Lapsed Donors, Acquired Donors, Reactivated Donors - all broken down by giving segments.
I can customize Giving Segments. I work at a small non-profit - a major gift for us is different than a major gift for a larger organization. I can break up my data in the segments that make sense for my organization [and select colors that match our branding... you've never seen a happier Marketing Chair on your Board of Directors than when you give them a report that is properly branded for the organization. It's a small thing, but it doesn't take any extra work on my part.]
Text to Give fundraising - provides convenience for donors to make commitment and then pay at their convenience.
Peer to Peer fundraising - provides great options for peer to peer campaigns including the ability to record off line gifts to individual fundraisers or teams.
Events Management - GiveSmart gave us the flexibility to switch many of our event activities to virtual experiences during the COVID crisis which we greatly appreciated and have continued to use for some of our smaller events.
The only difficulty I have with Fundraising Report Card is that the integration with our CRM [Kindful] doesn't keep track of the unique ID that is exported to Fundraising Report Card [to maintain confidentiality]. So it takes a bit more work to identify which donor[s] fall into a category. For example, Fundraising Report Card will tell me that 3 major donors lapsed in the previous quarter - and I can export the Donor ID's from Fundraising Report Card, but those ID's don't mean anything in my CRM, so I can't directly see who those donors are to follow up. This is an issue with the integration specifically with Kindful.
The Data pulled from GiveSmart is not ideal - when running reports, our data, and analytics manager have to run several different reports and cross-compare to enter them into our donor database.
Not able to turn off "check-in," which confuses guests at registration - if they check in an hour or less before the event, and there is maybe a bid paddle involved, they get confused on where to go/why they have to wait.
In addition to the "check-in," there is an extra step patron have to take that doesn't seem very clear. A lot of guests will add their credit card information, but the system will not consider them checked in unless they do an extra step. Causes some confusion at registration for events.
Even if marked that guests must add a CC, somehow guests can check-in without adding - which is concerning.
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
GiveSmart is a very intuitive platform on the user and donor side! My only reservation is that once all items are added to the cart, donors are not prompted to check-out and mistakenly never complete their purchase. They also couldn't modify their carts after adding to them.
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.
When we have been able to have our event in person, there has always been a GiveSmart representative on-site to help our guests and users to navigate the system. While we were online during Covid, our interactions with them via phone, email, and zoom were seamless. A representative always got back to us within the day. I would recommend GiveSmart to anyone doing a large online event.
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.
I find it more customer friendly. Help is easy to access. Monthly meetings with our rep are key to success. Being able to hire an additional day of event assistance is also key; I don't think the other program has that.
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.
While I don't think I can entirely quantify the ROI for Fundraising Report Card, it made it possible for us to make better decisions and set better goals. Before we had this tool, we either spent way to much time analyzing data in spreadsheets [trying desperately not to make mistakes] OR more often, made strategic decisions without the facts to back us up. Our fundraising efforts are much smarter than before, and we KNOW where are areas of concern lie.
We don't have to guess whether or not our strategies are working. We know.
This is our first year using the platform, so it is difficult to determine ROI. It is definitely very affordable, and we are very happy we chose this product.
Unlimited events have caused us to use the product even more. It is very easy to create an event, so we have used it for much smaller events than we have in other event platforms.
We have had users manage the event entirely in the GiveSmart application instead of using spreadsheets and other ways to manage items/donations.
