GiveSmart by Momentive vs. Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit (discontinued)

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.

Incentivized

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit is well suited for non-profit settings requiring one coordinated and one-stop-shop for electronic file management, especially of Microsoft file types such as Microsoft Word documents, Excel sheets, and PowerPoint presentations. Some scenarios where it is less appropriate are for those who need to transfer or share files across different platforms outside of the Microsoft Suite of products.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Providing a basic framework for nonprofit organizations who've been limping along or have capped out with their current platforms to consider switching to amplify and multiply their capabilities, reach, and impact
• Increasing the accessibility for both citizen developers and tech teams to extend a platform, so long as there are clear parameters (business use case) and thoughtful design and architecture planning
• Sharing some core infrastructure that accelerates the use of important tools to further the mission of nonprofit organizations

• 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.

Incentivized

• The system is ridiculously hard to implement, requiring too many tiers of Microsoft cloud services to be enabled.
• The technical aspects of the product are far too complex for anyone with standard cloud-based app training to implement.
• The non-profit "qualification" system is poorly designed.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

It's been very helpful at a very discounted price, especially in data analysis and visualization with Power BI.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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/

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Other solutions may have a head start in terms of features, but MC4N is catching up quickly. Easy integration with the entire Microsoft tech stack including Office 365, Dynamics 365, Azure, Power BI saves costs over time. Microsoft’s Power Platform also allows for easy and rapid low code extensibility. Finally, the Common Data Model enables interoperability with other products and oAppSource apps.

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.

Incentivized

• 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!

Incentivized

• Attempting to deploy Microsoft Cloud for Non-profits had a negative impact on our donor relations staff, the technical team tasked to deploy it, and upper management who watched the deployment fail.
• Overall, this product is too dependent on too many Microsoft Cloud services to really deploy with any sort of clear expectation to management of what the "hidden" costs would be.

Incentivized