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
Salsa Labs (discontinued)
Score 7.9 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Salsa was a donor and constituent management system. Salsa Labs was acquired by EveryAction in 2021 and joined with Bonterra. The Salsa CRM product is no longer available for sale.
N/A
Pricing
GiveSmart by Momentive
Salsa Labs (discontinued)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GiveSmart by Momentive
Salsa Labs (discontinued)
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
Optional
Additional Details
—
—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GiveSmart by Momentive
Salsa Labs (discontinued)
Considered Both Products
GiveSmart by Momentive
Verified User
Project Manager
Chose GiveSmart by Momentive
Givesmart does not provide the communications, peer-to-peer fundraising, and event webpage features that Salsa Engage used to have. Salsa CRM allowed us to split donations into multiple campaigns/funds or ledgers. Salsa CRM allowed us to upload copies of gift documents. Salsa …
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.
Salsa Engage provides a robust interface to Salesforce--our primary CRM--allowing non-intervention synchronization to categorize supporters into groups for email communication. As we are only six months into our implementation, we have not found areas where it's not appropriate to use beyond nit-picky synchronization delays and smart group updates.
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.
Autoresponders and automated emails have been really cool and simple to use, that tool in itself has added a lot of value and has been a powerful way to keep supporters engaged.
Donor management is one thing that Salsa CRM gets really technical with. There is so much information that you can have on each donor.
I like the forms and how easy they are to embed on the website, like email sign up forms or donation forms. I can make them look seamless as they sit on the website and gather information and donations.
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.
When we started with Salsa, not every option was available online, some were desktop specific. As it has been some time since I worked with Salsa these have probably been resolved.
The ability to communicate between Salsa CRM and other Salsa software options. Sometimes the crossover was not as efficient as was needed.
Tagging and setting up rules for particular donors was somewhat confusing - meaning, therefore, that the amount of training needed to implement the software was somewhat intensive.
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.
Support response has been swift and knowledgable, though not always the answer I've wanted. One huge design flaw is if I add a new Salesforce field to sync, Salsa Engage will not sync it unless it has changed since the last sync, requiring me to fake an update for an entire database or re-sync the whole enchilada. Better to recognize it's a new Salesforce field and perform the sync en masse.
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.
Salsa Engage is one of the easier products to set up and use, but with that comes limitations. If you want something simple, this works, but if you have more complex needs, then you'd be better off investing in another system that requires more set up work, but provides more customization and robust reporting opportunities.
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!
