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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OneCause
Score 9.2 out of 10
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OneCause supports fundraising with online and event fundraising solutions that help nonprofits reach more and raise more. Since 2008, OneCause states they have helped 14,000 cause-driven organizations to raise over $8B through more than 90,000 fundraising events and campaigns.
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 …
OneCause and GiveSmart are pretty similar companies. What it came down to at the end was the ease of access to our donors... GiveSmart has the capability of "split-screen" streaming; meaning donors can watch the live stream on one side of the window and participate in bidding …
I checked out Handbid, OneCause and another I cannot recall. A lot of the reason I chose GiveSmart is because I had experience with them before. I had a great experience in 2013 when I had used it with another client. Since 2013 the platform has improved tremendously! The sales …
We were looking into using OneCause, then realized that GiveSmart is very comparable and we were already using the platform. Current participants would then would not need to set up a new user profile for our upcoming events. We had not been taking advantage of the full …
My use of GiveSmart as a donor greatly influenced my decision to purchase. OneCause seemed to have better integration of the platform that MobileCause hopes to fill in.
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 …
OneCause has much of the same functionality, but GiveSmart was less expensive, which is why we went with them. Classy looks much more polished and has a lot more customization options - both on the user-facing end and the reporting/data/back end - but does not let us have user …
It was quite simple to initially set up the fundraising event page. It gave us options in design and reach. GiveSmart provides thorough spreadsheets which makes reconciling between our platform easy. Customer support was simple to access and available when they were needed. In …
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.
Lacked intuitive utilization capabilities also silent auction photos and ease of use were substantially lacking. Onsite support team was another factor.
Good value for the money and good customer support. Even when direct account manager was unable to respond quickly, her manger was also available and willing to help us as needed. We used GiveSmart for one year and moved to OneCause BidPal, as they were able to provide …
I have also used Bidding for Good -- a FrontStream product. The main reason I choose OneCause over the others is the customer service and the in-person staffing option. And you are focused on providing event-based services -- GiveSmart is trying to be everything and it's too …
We looked at Auctria and GiveSmart, though we didn't go into great detail with either. We ultimately selected OneCause based on the recommendation of another local school that used it for its auction software. The customer service and support as we made this decision and …
We had used GiveSmart in the past and had issues with connectivity during our event, when our contract was up we decided to investigate other platforms, we looked at more than just those 3, but can't recall the others. Givebutter - I absolutely LOVE Givebutter, so simple to …
We absolutely love 4agood cause for day to day/peer to peer fundraising however, it just was not as robust when it came to event needs which required us to use outside software for those reasons. GiveSmart was good, however a change in their packages required outside sourcing …
OneCause is the best event software I've tried yet in terms of supporting a number of auction related features. Our event has very specific needs and OneCause seemed to check enough boxes to fit those needs. I do think in an ideal world we would use an auction/event software …
OneCause is a great software that offers some wonderful things that other softwares cannot. It is user-friendly, adaptable, and has much more customization and event offerings than other softwares.
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.
After having used Greater Giving before switching to OneCause, I'd highly recommend OneCause for any event or fundraising management. The ability to see a company's support over multiple events is great for a snapshot or quick numbers for reporting. It's easier to navigate than most systems, and truly is a one-stop shop for your needs. I look forward to using OneCause for all our future events.
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.
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.
Auto-numbering items in auctions need to be editable. Right now, when you add items, they are numbered consecutively, and you can't edit them. I want all of my items to be numbered together by item type. We always have last-minute additions, but there is no ability to renumber.
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
We are a very small non-profit and are actually looking to use another service just to cut costs, but we may not stay with them and will coming running back to OneCause if we can't make the other option work! The ONLY reason to move would be to reduce the over-head cost of the platform.
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.
Use of the software is generally fine, but the setup and implementation are not always intuitive. Though the knowledgebase is robust and covers a lot of areas (and the support team is pleasant and knowledgeable), the event setup process (particularly when setting up payment and bank information) can be a bit cumbersome and should really be streamlined
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.
OneCause has the BEST customer support I have ever experienced. They are patient, and knowledgeable and always help me when I contact them. Whenever I have inquired how to use a feature or asked about how to do something, they give me the answer but also go above and beyond with additional info that I ended up also using.
We hired OneCause to guide us through our first event after we signed up with them. The staff they sent were pros. They gave us professional guidance and support. Once we had been shown the ropes, we knew we could take the reins and confidently run our next 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 don't know if my insights are key but I can say that implementation was done in-house without any outside support for the solution. The staff influencing the solution had very little technical expertise and ability as well which showed just how easily the software was to implement.
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.
We used Auction Star one time. It was not as user-friendly for our donors. Prior to that, we planned event logistics and auction components without any specialized software. Everything was done in Excel and Word. OneCause allowed us to organize tables, registration and auction packages a lot faster and more effectively.
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!
Definitely saved us a fair amount of time in terms of individual ticket sales and managing guests on the back end. Did not save us that much time for sponsored tables as most of our guests did not purchase their sponsorships through the site.
OneCause doesn't seem to have a function for entering a "Reserve Value" for auction items--i.e., while it allows for a minimum bid, it doesn't allow for having a minimum sale value, which meant that a few of our auction items sold for far lower than their value, which was unfortunate.
Having the support package on the night of was critical for our organization, particularly as ALL of the full-time staff had very limited experience working with OneCause/Bidpal. Knowing that there were experts there to help liaise with the auctioneer and to troubleshoot with any guests experiencing issues was really essential.
