GiveSmart vs. Little Green Light

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
Little Green Light
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Little Green Light offers headquartered in New Hampshire offers a donor management platform providing constituent profiles with membership management features in a SaaS application, as well as featuring communication, collaboration and organizational task automation.
$45
per month Up to 2,500 constituent records
Pricing
GiveSmartLittle Green Light
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Tier 1
$45.00
per month Up to 2,500 constituent records
Tier 2
$60.00
per month Up to 5,000 constituent records
Tier 3
$75.00
per month Up to 10,000 constituent records
Tier 4
$90.00
per month Up to 20,000 constituent records
Tier 5
$105.00
per month Up to 30,000 constituent records
Tier 6
$120.00
per month Up to 40,000 constituent records
Tier 7
$135.00
per month Up to 50,000 constituent records
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GiveSmartLittle Green Light
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional DetailsOver 50,000 constituent records? Add $15/mo for each additional 10k tier. Discounts for prepayment: You can prepay for 12 months and get a 10% discount off your monthly price. Discounts also apply to prepayments of 3 months (2.5%) and 6 months (5%).
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GiveSmartLittle Green Light
Considered Both Products
GiveSmart
Chose GiveSmart
GiveSmart allows us to use one system for everything which makes doing business and understanding your donors and donations and operating your events much smoother and more efficient. And the information and insights that you can pull from Givesmart are much more extensive.
Chose GiveSmart
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 …
Chose GiveSmart
I like the broad use for our fundraising efforts, as it helped us get creative when we needed to. I would like to be able to upload data that isn’t brought in by a sale, or event and I don’t think this is an option.
Little Green Light

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
GiveSmartLittle Green Light
Communications and Marketing
Comparison of Communications and Marketing features of Product A and Product B
GiveSmart
-
Ratings
Little Green Light
8.0
1 Ratings
41% above category average
Constituent engagement and marketing00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Security and Platform
Comparison of Security and Platform features of Product A and Product B
GiveSmart
-
Ratings
Little Green Light
8.0
1 Ratings
17% above category average
Role-based user permissions00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GiveSmartLittle Green Light
Small Businesses
OneCause
OneCause
Score 9.2 out of 10
Bloomerang
Bloomerang
Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
OneCause
OneCause
Score 9.2 out of 10
Bloomerang
Bloomerang
Score 9.1 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
GiveSmartLittle Green Light
Likelihood to Recommend
8.3
(150 ratings)
8.0
(11 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.7
(7 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(149 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.3
(149 ratings)
8.9
(8 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
GiveSmartLittle Green Light
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.
Read full review
Little Green Light
When I came on board, we had a mess. We had so many gift types, categories, and campaigns that it was an epic disaster, and there was no way any reports could easily be pulled. With time, patience, and the bulk edit feature, I could clean up the mess and start again with set campaigns, funds, and appeals...We now have a clean slate for all data entered in 2023 and the future. Thank you for bulk edits
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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!).
Read full review
Little Green Light
  • Donor touch tracking (calls, meetings, etc.)
  • Relationships and stewardship
  • Forms for event and other registrations
  • Financial reporting and gift tracking
  • Great support team! I was initially worried because they don't have a contact number, but they reply to support questions really quickly and are always helpful.
Read full review
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
Read full review
Little Green Light
  • I wish it had email formatting rather than integrating with MailChimp, but a small price to pay since it does in fact handle email communications. I've actually found that donors appreciate the "personal" touch versus the more polished, formatted email of MailChimp because they feel like the email went just to them.
  • Wish it had the ability to email year-end statements as easy as it is to print them.
Read full review
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
Read full review
Little Green Light
We have had no issues with LIttle Green Light so I do not see us moving to another software platform at this time. We are all familiar with how to use it and we are a small and mighty team so we don't want to rock the boat too much. LOL
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Little Green Light
No answers on this topic
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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Little Green Light
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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Little Green Light
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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Little Green Light
LGL support is absolutely unreal. Send a question straight from inside the software and within minutes you will receive a response from someone at the company who will help you. Most of the time, the person responding to my questions is one of the developers or owners of the company. They are kind, patient, and very helpful. The online knowledge base is very comprehensive as well.
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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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Little Green Light
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.
Read full review
Little Green Light
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.
Read full review
Little Green Light
Little Green Light blows these other two CRM's out of the water. {Little Green Light has] ease of use, user-friendly prompts, and more pertinent information is captured. Little Green Light is perfect for my small-sized Non-Profit organization.
Read full review
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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Little Green Light
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.
Read full review
Little Green Light
  • In two years of using it, we went from $200,000 annually in donor revenue to $500,000. Many factors went into that, but the ease of communications through LGL is definitely one of them.
  • We went from managing communications with ~200 donors to ~400.
Read full review
ScreenShots

GiveSmart Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of

Little Green Light Screenshots

Screenshot of Data migrationScreenshot of Constituent relationship managementScreenshot of Alerts and tracking reportsScreenshot of Fundraising and donor management reports