GoFundMe Charity vs. iMIS

GoFundMe is well suited for personal appeals where a story can be told and donors feel an immediate result or effect. It is less appropriate for larger mass appeals that are not targeted directly to a specific cause. For example, not good for companies to ask for funding for operating expenses.

Incentivized

iMIS Engagement Management System is well suited for associations or other non-profits that operate without a lot of bells and whistles. So far in my experience if you want to do more sophisticated operations, marketing in my specific role, then iMIS Engagement Management System may not be the best AMS. It does the basics well but the more high-powered you want to get then the more it's going to cost by having your vendor of choice to work to enhance or upgrade what you have.

Incentivized

• Peer-to-peer fundraising
• Fundraising pages

Incentivized

• One-stop-shop. I love that we have one system that will track our income, manage membership, email contacts, manage our website and pull reports.
• Response time on support tickets. Whenever I have a problem using iMIS, I can either log into their support site to submit a help ticket or send it directly from my email account. Someone normally responds to me within the hour and then I will get a solution within the day no matter the time of day I submit the ticket.
• Easy to use widgets. I love using widgets to pull a page together. They have slideshow widgets that use on a daily basis. There are also forum widgets and widgets to pull an already created query to a page you choose to display this information on.

Incentivized

• Need a clearer picture of your campaign status, especially around publishing (making it live).
• Processing rates are not horrible but not great either - If we used our own processor our fees would be cut in half.

Incentivized

• System Performance: iMIS has always seemed to have had performance issues....sluggish specifically. Though some of that may be in part to some of our customizations, but we don’t think so.
• Integrations with 3rd Party Products: we would like to see more integrations with 3rd party apps.

Incentivized

GoFundMe is very easy to use and does a great job allowing us to share insights and stories to leave a lasting impression on donors. From setting up the account to ending the appeal, the entire process has been very user-friendly. I'm very impressed with the experience so far and plan to continue using it for future campaigns.

Incentivized

Crowdrise has been great with their customer support. They have always been helpful and available. They also have several resources on their website that has been useful to other areas of our non-profit. Their relatability has been positive for us and has made us feel taken care of and considered.

Incentivized

Since GFM was selected for us I can't give the rationale behind that. However, I do think that Qgiv and Salsa are more internally user-friendly and provide at least the same amount of functionality. That being said, the other two (I think) require CRMs to use whereas GFM can just integrate with others, making it a better choice for one-off campaigning.

Incentivized

I think both are great tools. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. I really like the CMS component that comes with iMIS. It is important for an organization to be able to quickly build websites to engage their members. iMIS provides tools to do this out of the box.

Incentivized

• Brought in new donors from outside our solicitation area.
• Appeals to younger audiences.
• Great way to include client testimonials and stories.

Incentivized

• iMIS had a neutral impact on my non-profit organization's overall business objectives. Both the finance and department teams just worked around the limitations that iMIS had.

Incentivized