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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Qgiv
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Qgiv in Florida offers a nonprofit fundraising platform supporting online event registration, handheld kiosks for collecting credit card donations, support for peer-to-peer donations, and other fundraising tools.
$0
per month
Pricing
GiveSmart
Qgiv
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Starter - Donation and Event Registration Forms
$0.00
per month
Mobile Suite
$159.00
per month
Peer-to-Peer Fundraising
$259.00
per month
Auctions
$259.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GiveSmart
Qgiv
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Processing Fees:
3.95% + $0.30 per transaction
+1% for peer-to-peer transactions
+1% for American Express
We use Qgiv for donation pages and for our large-scale event where we need to sell upwards of 2000 tickets. Qgiv pages are easier to use and more customizable than GiveSmart. Qgiv is very easy for any employee/new employee to learn and use. Qgiv is more useful for general …
We liked it for events but didn't need or want them for all the extra bells and whistles they wanted to throw in on the package. They offer a lot of different things compared to others but not every product is top-notch.
GiveSmart has many similar aspects to other programs, but it offers more customer support. There are times when you just can't figure it out, but GiveSmart is there, ready to offer guidance. Without this level of support, an event would not be successful! We look forward to …
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.
Qgiv is great for small businesses or large companies that are looking for a user-friendly software to use to process donations, sale items or simply use a tool for peer-to-peer fundraising. The customer is by far the best service I have ever received and the baseline data is easy to export for donor cultivation purposes
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.
I don't have any suggestions here - they treated me like royalty - anything I didn't understand they walked me through and when I forgot it the next time and had to ask again - they acted like that was common - putting me at ease to call them back any and every time I need them.
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.
Customer support is amazing - they're very prompt, thoughtful in their response, and are clearly trying to help you problem solve, not just find a quick fix.
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.
Qgiv is by far a better product. No hidden fees and the team of developers continue to make updates that are relevant to keeping the software competitive and user-friendly. Also, customer service is a 10 out of 10 when it comes to troubleshooting different software scenarios. Finally, the ability to export and import is a basic and awesome necessity.
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!
For the price, it's a solidly positive ROI for its functionality as a credit card processor. Prior to Qgiv we used MobileCause and I think the impact of the change has been neutral.
Even though the integration with Exceed Beyond isn't perfect, it's still an improvement over entering all the data by hand. Saving time is hard to calculate, but I would say it has probably dropped our donation entry time by at least 10%.
