GiveSmart is a fundraising, event, and donor management platform. GiveSmart helps organizations to connect more with donors through engaging auctions, events, and digital campaigns.
$2,395
per year
Poll Everywhere
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Poll Everywhere is an event management software system offered by Poll Everywhere.
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.
The reasons to use Poll Everywhere: 1. Get rid of those clickers! They eat batteries, need constant maintenance, and ofter walk off at a monetary loss. 2. The pricing model is really easy to manage, the campus/company license will pay for itself even if you only have 5-10 active users. 3. Stop fighting mobile devices in your classroom and start leveraging them. Students can't mess around on social media, texting etc if they are in the PE app. Then situations where Poll Everywhere wouldn't work as well: 1. Not great for multiple part, asynchronous polling, or data collection 2. Areas where there is a limited or absent internet connection. 3. Situations where an audience would lack basic technology such as a cell phone or laptop.
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.
It's deceptively simple to use. Showing how to use the features, create & modify questions, and viewing polling data, is much easier than it first seems.
There are a surprising amount of alternate ways to poll users and present questions in more ways than just "Question and 2-4 possible answers." It's pretty easy to customize.
It's very, very, very easy to use as an attendee. There's not anything complex or invasive in order to sign in and vote in polls.
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.
Other than Google Forms (which I utilize heavily, but for different reasons and during different areas) I find Poll Everywhere to be the best at what it offers and does. Options to lock questions, hide or show responses, varying questions/response types, and the ability to let users respond via text message on their phone or through the website/app increase the functionality of the program. The is also the ability to be creative and change poll/question backgrounds, colors and layouts as well as attach/embed images.
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!
