GiveSmart vs. Splash Event Marketing Platform

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
GiveSmart
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
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…N/A
Splash
Score 7.6 out of 10
N/A
Splash aims to get event programs in front of the right people by helping users create engaging, branded experiences and optimize conversions at each stage of the event lifecycle. Leverage accurate, visible data for seamless follow-ups and reporting. Empower teams to execute events that bring in more leads, shorten the sales cycle, drive new business, and strengthen customer relationships. Splash is an event marketing platform that helps teams do all of this by building and hosting…
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Pricing
GiveSmartSplash Event Marketing Platform
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Free: For Personal Use and Occasional Small Business Events
$0.00
Basic: For Individuals and Small Teams
$12,500.00
per year
Pro: For More Design and Access Control
$19,500.00
per year
Enterprise: For Solutions and Workflows at Scale
Let's Talk
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GiveSmartSplash
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional DetailsTo understand more about what features are included in each Splash plan, head over to our website for a full breakdown.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GiveSmartSplash Event Marketing Platform
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
GiveSmartSplash Event Marketing Platform
Small Businesses
OneCause
OneCause
Score 9.2 out of 10
OneCause
OneCause
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
OneCause
OneCause
Score 9.2 out of 10
Cvent Event Diagramming
Cvent Event Diagramming
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Blackbaud CRM
Blackbaud CRM
Score 7.5 out of 10
Cvent Event Diagramming
Cvent Event Diagramming
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GiveSmartSplash Event Marketing Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
8.3
(150 ratings)
9.0
(48 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.7
(7 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(149 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.3
(149 ratings)
9.1
(4 ratings)
Online Training
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.1
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
4.5
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
GiveSmartSplash Event Marketing Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
Community Brands
Having access to the unique setup with our package was super helpful. This service pairs you with a GiveSmart professional who helps walk you through the setup for your campaign. Our professionalism was a huge help to our team in troubleshooting and configuration, and it helped us think through creative ways to make our fundraisers more effective and efficient.
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Splash
Compared to platforms like Eventbrite, I have a hard time recommending Splash to anyone and think if we weren't forced into using it because of our involvement with Hubspot User Groups, we would not be using it. I think if the usability and other bugs could be improved along with support, then Splash could be great for small to mid-sized businesses that occasionally run events that they need 1) hosted all in one place and 2) consistent, custom branding. Or if you're running small events where you simply need a custom designed sign-up page, a reminder email and a check-in app, Splash could work for you. While they're not transparent about their business pricing, I'd have to see that before deciding whether it is truly worth it for this purpose.
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Pros
Community Brands
  • The event pages are excellent. They offer just the right amount of flexibility while making sure the user gets a clean experience. My only qualm with them is that they are housed on the GiveSmart URL and there is no way to house them on our URL.
  • It processes payments smoothly and efficiently with no hassle for donors.
  • It has some basic reporting on campaign transactions.
  • It has some very solid P2P fundraising features.
  • Their customer service team does an excellent job of working with clients (Shoutout to our amazing Customer success manager Carissa Jay!).
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Splash
  • Branded Templates: With the Pro account, Splash takes your brand guidelines, fonts, logos, colors and creates customized event templates for your most frequent types of events making it easy to create new events that align with the experience of your brand.
  • Customer Service: Any time I have a problem, my Account Manager (Matt!) always has a solution. Whether it be a glitch in the page, an integration problem, or suggesting new ways to use the system. I'm never left stranded, which when you work in eight time zones, matters.
  • Ease of Backend Use: I've used other start-up event management softwares which are painful to use on the back end, buggy, and not intuitive for a non-coder. Splash is extremely easy to use and customize, which makes working with the system enjoyable.
  • Low Ticketing Fees: One of the main reasons we decided to upgrade to the Pro account is because we were hosting more ticketed events. As a non-profit, ticketing fees make a difference to our donations. Not only did Splash provide the other benefits mentioned above, they were the most competitive on credit card fees and integrated into our donation software system.
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Cons
Community Brands
  • Statement/Receipt email in events - would love the capability to email out receipts /auction donor thank you's en mass
  • Improving - but transferring event donations/tax deductible amount to donor database (delineate the tax deductible amount from tickets, purchases, etc)
  • I would like to have one customer support system for all three platforms - I feel like I get referred to other people frequently (events has the chat for help, others do not) so hesitant to reach out because I don't know if I am reaching out to the right person
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Splash
  • When designing a landing page for an event, the functionality of the layout page is quite finicky. I would love to see the ability to add features to certain text boxes become more fluid.
  • The formatting across the layout page is not always consistent, specifically text sizing.
  • I had an issue with an account, and the support team took an extremely long time (2+ months) to produce a remedy for the issue I was experiencing.
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Likelihood to Renew
Community Brands
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
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Splash
No answers on this topic
Usability
Community Brands
I do not have to create new campaigns often, but when I do, I still have a hard time determining how it is done as well as the use of the Keyword. Eventually, I am able to create what I need.
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Splash
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
Community Brands
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/
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Splash
No answers on this topic
Performance
Community Brands
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.
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Splash
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Community Brands
They are well able to answer the questions. Sometimes, they reply to me customer support emails with an article that I did not find in their help section. That works for me! If I am on a call with them, they have walked me through the situation, which was helpful as well
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Splash
We love working with our account manager and priority support to answer questions efficiently and speedily. Our account manager works with us on larger and bigger picture initiatives for our instance, where the priority support is always there when you're stuck with a feature or setup, it's been great to share this resource with our global network of hosts internal and external to the company.
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Online Training
Community Brands
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.
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Splash
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Community Brands
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.
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Splash
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Community Brands
Ultimately, we chose GiveSmart because it was the upgraded version of the Abila software we had already been using for years. Our donor records get a unique update each year that most donor CRM organizations don't know how to handle. We also liked how they offered the three modules: DonorCRM, Fundraise, and Events. Many other companies only offer one or two of those functions.
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Splash
[We selected Splash based on] Looks and functionality. It's the best of both worlds. Every other tool we found was good at one but not the other. I hope Splash stays on the path it's on as it really makes all the right improvements to be such a powerhouse tool.
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Scalability
Community Brands
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.
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Splash
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Community Brands
  • I really can't give hard numbers as we are a smaller non-profit, but we like the service being provided - it's easy to use, easy to reconcile, easy to use their backend processing service CardPointe, it's just easy.
  • We have used this service a lot over the years - from event registration to website donation processing to information gathering, so for us, it is well worth the investment each year.
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Splash
  • It helps me manage a number of events that I would not otherwise be able to make invitations for, manage rsvps, and do check ins. We used a more expensive product previously but it had fewer features so this is definitely an upgrade.
  • Using Splash saves me time from needing to follow up with guests. I also love the "send later" feature for email.
  • The support staff make this product super valuable as I am able to accomplish more with their help.
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ScreenShots

GiveSmart Screenshots

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Splash Screenshots

Screenshot of Fully customized, beautiful, and on-brand event websites and emails (plus automatic event invites, reminders, and follow up email sequences).Screenshot of Use Splash's free app to run the door like a pro. Fast search and one-click check-in keeps the traffic flowing, which frees you up to quickly capture info from walk-ins all while syncing your list across devices and to your CRM in real-time.Screenshot of Send smarter, more targeted invites with advanced tag management & list building and bi-directional sync with Salesforce.Screenshot of Close the loop on your in-person programs and automate your workflow with Oracle Eloqua, Salesforce, Slack, Marketo, Hubspot, Mailchimp, Greenhouse, Zapier, and more.Screenshot of Real-time data visualizations let you quickly assess event performance and evaluate progress toward your goals.