iWave offers their nonprofit fundraising intelligence platform, for performing prospect research online with VeriGift, the company's donor and donation database.
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OneCause
Score 9.2 out of 10
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OneCause, headquartered in Indianapolis, offers their fundraising solutions supporting mobile bidding for auctions or peer-to-peer giving, Text2Give, and support for ticket sales for fundraising events. OneCause pricing plans support various service levels, including feature breadth for large giving organizations or smaller entities.
iWave is well suite for gathering a better idea of who you should focus on for major giving efforts. While it gives you a lot of good information, some of that information feels not very important and therefore, clogs up the data you actually need. iWave should not be used for something like direct mail list making. iWave seems to really be focused on the major donor aspect and it is not a tool to be used to help with regular annual giving
After having used Greater Giving before switching to OneCause, I'd highly recommend OneCause for any event or fundraising management. The ability to see a company's support over multiple events is great for a snapshot or quick numbers for reporting. It's easier to navigate than most systems, and truly is a one-stop shop for your needs. I look forward to using OneCause for all our future events.
The 360search allows you to do a comprehensive search across the multiple data sources at the same time.
You can stay organized during your research with the user-friendly and customizable Profiles and Labels.
The PROscreen ranking system allows you to get a quick snapshot of the alignment of a particular donor with your mission in an easy to read format that can be exported for another colleague with little extra explanation needed.
It's honestly tough to say what needs to be improved on a platform that I am a big fan of. The only time I am ever frustrated has more to do with the fact that some individuals are very adept at masking their charitable activities from public databases, and given that iWave can only show you what is publicly documented information I wouldn't consider that a liability of the product... rather it's a challenge of the field.
Some areas of improvement could include more online filtering and searching of Foundation grant histories. My current workaround is to download the entire grant history as a CSV (another good feature of iWave), and use Excel to sort and filter my results.
Auto-numbering items in auctions need to be editable. Right now, when you add items, they are numbered consecutively, and you can't edit them. I want all of my items to be numbered together by item type. We always have last-minute additions, but there is no ability to renumber.
We are a very small non-profit and are actually looking to use another service just to cut costs, but we may not stay with them and will coming running back to OneCause if we can't make the other option work! The ONLY reason to move would be to reduce the over-head cost of the platform.
Use of the software is generally fine, but the setup and implementation are not always intuitive. Though the knowledgebase is robust and covers a lot of areas (and the support team is pleasant and knowledgeable), the event setup process (particularly when setting up payment and bank information) can be a bit cumbersome and should really be streamlined
iWave customer support is more responsive than most software platforms I currently use. My requests are always handled promptly, and support is incredibly responsive, friendly, and patient. Plus, I can always get someone on the phone immediately if I need a problem resolved right then and there. In addition to the live and personal support, the iWave knowledge base is frequently update with new content, including video webinars that help you become a more powerful user of the software.
OneCause has the BEST customer support I have ever experienced. They are patient, and knowledgeable and always help me when I contact them. Whenever I have inquired how to use a feature or asked about how to do something, they give me the answer but also go above and beyond with additional info that I ended up also using.
Very thorough and made sure I understood the process. Staff were very patient as well listening to my questions and understanding certain procedures. As an older person, I can be scared of technology, but this process was very easy to understand and I feel very confident using it.
I don't know if my insights are key but I can say that implementation was done in-house without any outside support for the solution. The staff influencing the solution had very little technical expertise and ability as well which showed just how easily the software was to implement.
iWave is affordable, offers current data, and is continually adding new data sources. They are the only product that offers international prospect information, which is helpful as our institution borders Canada. I was impressed when our sale representative went out of his way to teach me about how I could screen Canadian prospects in a way that helped us calculate an estimated real estate value for our prospects. We had no other way of getting this information as Canada does not provide the information publicly like tax assessor offices do in the United States.
We used Auction Star one time. It was not as user-friendly for our donors. Prior to that, we planned event logistics and auction components without any specialized software. Everything was done in Excel and Word. OneCause allowed us to organize tables, registration and auction packages a lot faster and more effectively.
We have consistently been able to increase our annual donations year over year since using iWave. There was an 11% increase just between our last fiscal year and the previous fiscal year.
Time spent on researching donors has decreased since all of the information needed is on one website rather than searching all over the internet for the information needed.
Definitely saved us a fair amount of time in terms of individual ticket sales and managing guests on the back end. Did not save us that much time for sponsored tables as most of our guests did not purchase their sponsorships through the site.
OneCause doesn't seem to have a function for entering a "Reserve Value" for auction items--i.e., while it allows for a minimum bid, it doesn't allow for having a minimum sale value, which meant that a few of our auction items sold for far lower than their value, which was unfortunate.
Having the support package on the night of was critical for our organization, particularly as ALL of the full-time staff had very limited experience working with OneCause/Bidpal. Knowing that there were experts there to help liaise with the auctioneer and to troubleshoot with any guests experiencing issues was really essential.
