GiveSmart vs. Greater Giving

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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…N/A
Greater Giving
Score 7.2 out of 10
N/A
Greater Giving, a Global Payments company, works exclusively with schools and nonprofits across the United States and Canada—offering integrated technologies to help simplify event management; quickly train volunteers; streamline check-in and check-out; and raise more funds. Greater Giving solutions are based on a single cloud-based platform.N/A
Pricing
GiveSmartGreater Giving
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GiveSmartGreater Giving
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GiveSmartGreater Giving
Considered Both Products
GiveSmart
Chose GiveSmart
GiveSmart enabled us to have a Livestream event hosted directly in the same bidding/giving screen - which made it so easy for our donors as we transitioned to a virtual event in response to COVID19. OneCause was more expensive and included a transaction fee for each …
Chose GiveSmart
Greater Giving is convoluted and hasn't evolved with the times. It is very difficult to train to and the reports are messy and take a lot of time to comb through to get the information you need. There are a couple of things that I like about Greater Giving that I do hope that …
Chose GiveSmart
We have looked at both Greater Giving and OneCause, and ultimately for what you get for the same price, this seems to be the most user-friendly and easy-to-use software. The staff is always available to help with questions. We have used GiveSmart for 7 years, and see no reason …
Chose GiveSmart
We also checked out HandBid, Charity Proud, and Auctria. We chose GiveSmart for the breadth of capabilities, competitive pricing and credit card processing fees, unlimited logins, ease for our accounting staff to manage, and high support availability.
Chose GiveSmart
Price was comparable, love the functionality and ease of use.
Chose GiveSmart
GiveSmart was way better and so much easier to use. GiveSmart was way more customizable and much better looking. The customer service was much easier to contact and they build a sense of community across the country with weekly and monthly optional webinars and meetings. That …
Chose GiveSmart
We selected GiveSmart this year solely because of their user-friendly and highly interactive auction interface. We were impressed by the ability to broadcast a video on their site, alongside our online auction. This opened up a lot of additional visibility for our organization …
Greater Giving
Chose Greater Giving
I personally prefer GiveSmart over Greater Giving. We're now starting to role out GiveSmart nationally and the usage of Greater Giving is becoming less and less. There are a few things that Greater Giving is better than GiveSmart at...auction donation forms and ticket sales. …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
GiveSmartGreater Giving
Small Businesses
OneCause
OneCause
Score 9.2 out of 10
OneCause
OneCause
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
OneCause
OneCause
Score 9.2 out of 10
OneCause
OneCause
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Blackbaud CRM
Blackbaud CRM
Score 7.5 out of 10
Blackbaud CRM
Blackbaud CRM
Score 7.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GiveSmartGreater Giving
Likelihood to Recommend
8.3
(150 ratings)
3.1
(5 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.7
(7 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(149 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.3
(149 ratings)
4.0
(1 ratings)
Online Training
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.1
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
4.5
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
GiveSmartGreater Giving
Likelihood to Recommend
Community Brands
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.
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Global Payments
For our organization, Greater Giving is the best option because of the credit card swiping, the ease of the registration, and the tax receipts alone. I do wish that it would allow us to pass on the credit card fees to the purchaser, but for that reason, we don't use it for registration. For an organization NOT needing to swipe credit cards at the event for on-site purchases or using their tax receipt software, I do think that there are more affordable options.
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Pros
Community Brands
  • 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!).
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Global Payments
  • Payment Facilitation
  • Ticket Puchasing
  • Auction Coordination
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Cons
Community Brands
  • 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
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Global Payments
  • Reports have frequent glitches; especially when downloading large amounts of data (more than 500 records).
  • Lacks data integration capabilities with other systems (Salesforce, Constant Contact, Zoho, etc.); I have found workarounds by uploading and downloading reports, but it really is a pain
  • Customer Support is terrible! The online support is uncaring and completely incompetent. On the other hand, the phone support is really friendly and generally quite knowledgeable about the product and solutions.
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Likelihood to Renew
Community Brands
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
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Global Payments
No answers on this topic
Usability
Community Brands
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.
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Global Payments
Great for beginners. Easy to get up and running quickly. I did worry a bit about my end-users accidentally changing or deleting data.
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Reliability and Availability
Community Brands
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/
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Global Payments
No answers on this topic
Performance
Community Brands
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.
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Global Payments
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Community Brands
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
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Global Payments
Online support was one of the worst customer service experiences I've ever had (I would give them a 1). Phone support and implementation support were very nice and knowledgeable.
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Online Training
Community Brands
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.
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Global Payments
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Community Brands
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.
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Global Payments
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Community Brands
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.
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Global Payments
We've used this for years, and see no reason to explore others!
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Scalability
Community Brands
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.
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Global Payments
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Community Brands
  • 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.
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Global Payments
  • The reporting improved our abilities to provide accurate information more timely to the finance department - a plus when completing the annual 990 or other information for our auditors.
  • We saw an increase in collecting on pledges when we switched from a "text-to-give" platform (from another provider) to incorporating all event elements into Greater Giving. We were able to capture over 95% of gifts within 48 hours of the event compared to less than half that amount in previous years.
  • The reports generated by Greater Giving are better received by our board of directors - easier to digest and provide meaningful analytics
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ScreenShots

GiveSmart Screenshots

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