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
Tiltify Catalyst
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Tiltify Catalyst is a community-driven peer-to-peer fundraising platform designed to help nonprofits turn supporters into active fundraisers and expand donor reach. Built for modern fundraising strategies, Catalyst supports DIY fundraising, team campaigns, fitness challenges, corporate engagement initiatives, livestream fundraising, and large-scale peer-to-peer events. Catalyst prioritizes the volunteer fundraiser experience with built-in engagement tools that…
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.
I mean, I love having any and all non-profits use Tiltify! From a fundraising standpoint —having all my favorite orgs easily accessible for fundraising across my platforms is SO NICE. That said, I've also worked with orgs that are just getting into the space, and they really struggled with getting set up due to a lack of resources. Yes, I can walk them through everything and encourage the use of all of Tiltify's features, but there isn't a readily available/accessible source to learn what's available to them and how it works.
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.
(1) How Tos for the charity, please! Donors/fundraisers have them available, which we LOVE, but not having a "How Set Up An Event" or "How To Use Your Reporting" for the non-profits, I feel, is a bit of an oversight, as, you know, they're users too!
(2) Event Page Design: Under the Fundraiser Rewards section, there is a tiny corner of pixels that pokes out from behind the "Top 100" or "Raise $200.00" labels, and it BOTHERS ME TO NO END. I understand the labels over the rewards images have curved corners, and the rewards have the hard 90-degree corners, which is why it happened. It's just like when someone goes to erase what's on a whiteboard but leaves a single line in the middle. My current solution has been to just cut that corner off my rewards images prior to upload —anyways, super tiny and just a pet peeve.
(3) Event Page Design: You've given us so many customization options, and I'm not taking those for granted. I would love the option to change the color of the buttons, just as we can change the color of each individual section.
(4) Branding, Social Links: Two things. "Twitter" is still on there (I know it's annoying, but "X"). Would love a "Bluesky" option.
(5) Event Options, Lifetime donor rewards: Is there something we could get for Lifetime Fundraiser rewards?
(6) Reports: When I download the Donations report is has the Date & Time of donation in a single column. I don't know how other people use this report, but I usually have to download the donations, create a new column, delineate the data for date/time, then pivot table from there. Plus, the "time" data we receive is delivered in a way that's borderline unusable. Example: 2023-12-31 07:46:07.667963Z -- *I* know to read this as December 31, 2023 @ 7:46:07 AM , but do we *really* need the ".667963Z" ? All it does is mess up any automated data analysis.
(7) Repots: Could we get a disclaimer at the top of the page that says if you don't toggle the UTC, the reports pulled will be from the time zone of the user pulling them? It took *way* too long to figure out why the report pulled by my colleague in Pacific time was different than the report pulled in Central time.
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.
Again, as someone who has been on this platform for a very long time, I find it easy to use. Where I find myself mostly having issues: Navigation. I have built out 40+ events & campaigns over the years (both on the fundraiser & charity side) and still find myself getting lost in the language hierarchy and difference between Setup/Event detail/Brand & marketing/Options (like those all feel semantically the same??).
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.
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!
