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…
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Greater Giving
Score 8.1 out of 10
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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.
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Pricing
GiveSmart
Greater Giving
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Event Package
Contact Sales
per year Unlimited Users and Events
Express Package
Contact Sales
per year Unlimited Users and Events
Virtual and In-Person Events Package
Contact Sales
per year Unlimited Users and Events
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GiveSmart
Greater Giving
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
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The comparison chart helps to understand which package is best for any organization based on the features included.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GiveSmart
Greater Giving
Considered Both Products
GiveSmart
Verified User
Manager
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 …
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 …
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 …
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.
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 …
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 …
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. …
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.
Greater Giving is the perfect platform for small/medium organizations looking for a solution to manage their fundraising and other events during the year. It is very easy to use, and new team members are quickly trained and up and running on the platform in no time. For organizations of our size, having the option of having a live person assist during big events is invaluable.
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.
Credit card swiping at registration is important to us. It allows our attendees to have the option to make a contribution during our special appeal, purchase silent auction items, etc... without having to make a payment each time.
The day-of-event registration is so easy. As long as our host has provided us the name of the attendee registration is a breeze.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The RNL Scalefunder platform is more suited toward Giving Days and digital types of events. I have found the Greater Giving platform can deliver on that but also gives us great support for in person fundraising, ticket sales, auction tracking and gala events which we do more of throughout the year.
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 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!
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
