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
WebinarJam
Score8.9 out of 10
N/A
WebinarJam is designed to allow users to host online events with HD streaming, interactive features like polls and chat, integrations, analytics, and payment processing that are intended to help maximize online growth.
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
We have used WebinarJam for many reasons. Our main reason is to host large free webinars but we have also used it for smaller live training courses that people paid for, we have held private training classes for companies, and so on. I guess you could get creative and use it for a conference-style virtual event but wouldn't really recommend it for that. You could use it for internal training within an organization and things but I still feel it best suited for webinars and marketing purposes.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
ADMIN/USER STRENGTHS: Easy to use the dashboard to start a webinar on demand, or schedule one in the future. Each step has a video tutorial made to set you up for success, understanding each set-up step along the way. If I want to practice a session live, I can set up a webinar instantly (called Right Now-takes 6 clicks and 30 seconds to set this up), and stream it through my YouTube Channel, or schedule a full campaign for a later date (takes about 10 minutes) and drive people to attend. I can set up one date, or multiple dates. It's very easy to follow the nine initial steps to (configuration, schedule, registration, notifications, integration, thank you, live, replay and finish) setting up your webinar. Once you have created a campaign, you can always clone them for future use.
ADMIN/USER STRENGTH: You can inject a pre-recorded video seamlessly. Let's say you did an incredible sales pitch on one of your webinars, you can inject this into future webinars to ensure a perfect presentation.
ADMIN/USER STRENGTH: Poll your customers BEFORE the webinar, on the registration page to find out what they are looking for, why they have signed up, to be sure the presenter covers each participant's needs.
ADMIN/USER STRENGTH: Autoresponder reminders can come from Webinar Jam (this is what I have always done to keep it simple) or integrate it with the top systems (AWeber, Active Campaign, Infusionsoft, IContact, MailChimp, ConvertKit, Drip, Kartra, Zapier).
ADMIN/USER STRENGTH: I can set up a replay for those who missed the event, or even a replica replay where I can go into the video, fix up my sales presentation, and add a new video for people to see. I can also see who watches the replay.
ADMIN/USER STRENGTH: In the analytics page I can see the numbers of people who visited the webinar registration page (to get an idea of how popular my topic was/change headings or topics if it's low, keep presenting if there's a high number), registrants, people in the room when I go live, and numbers for those who watched the replays. I can connect my autoresponder to communicate with people who missed the webinar/replay vs those who attended and even can see when people dropped off so I know if they were engaged for the entire webinar.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
One of the biggest problems we have is that WebinarJam was sold to us as a lifetime license, and it was supposed to include broadcasting on Facebook. For reasons that were never clear, they stopped providing that functionality, which greatly reduced our use for the product.
WebinarJam started out life as an innovative product, full of promise. Things changed within the organization, key staff and players changed, and it seems that key players just moved on to other projects. Users were required to pay for upgrades in order to get the best use out of the product.
A big problem that was never really solved was the Lag/Delay between realtime and what the users were seeing and hearing.
We really wanted to be able to administer Surveys to people during webinars and be able to store their responses and export them to a database. We were told there was no way to do that.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The platform is really hard to use and they have a habit of pushing out updates without telling their users first. The last update completely reverted all of our customizations back to the default EverWebinar layout. I only found out about this after a lead kindly send an email to the firm letting us know that [our] registration confirmation page was showing lorem ipsum script. Customization is lacking as well
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/
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The support overall is good. In the early days, it wasn't the best but they have definitely stepped it up lately. If you have questions about the platform, issues, setup, etc, and don't mind waiting 24 hours to get a response then it's good. They may have faster response times now but when they updated to 4.0 it took a while as they were getting hammered with emails cause there were issues. It seems like they have worked out some of the kinks so I imagine their support can respond much faster now. There is no phone number to call so there is no way to get immediate help or answers which can be frustrating when you have issues right before or during your webinar
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I prefer WebinarJam due to its super-easy setup and great integration options. It works well with other tools like ClickFunnels, Hubspot and Mailchimp. From the tools we tried, this one seems to work the best for our company and clients!
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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!
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
WebinarJam has allowed us to present to multiple audiences at our prospective customers, rather than just a few individuals which made it difficult to get to the next sales step. By engaging a larger audience, we were able to drive more attention to our product and made follow up with the customer much easier.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
