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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Pushpay
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Pushpay delivers digital solutions to help churches achieve their missions. Their ChurchStaq, ParishStaq, and Resi Media suites aim to simplify engagement, giving, administration, and video streaming—enabling their 14,500+ customers to increase generosity, drive participation, and build stronger community relationships.
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
Pushpay has been fantastic for us in the implementation of events, especially in the processing of registration forms and collecting fees. Pushpay has also been great in helping us receive donations and contributions to the church. Additionally, I have also used Pushpay (specifically, the CRM database) to help in our process of Church Membership (receiving applications, registering attendance at our membership classes, etc).
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.
It is easy to understand and user friendly. Even the upload format for screenings is simple. You are able to alter scoring levels and layers to tailor to your organization's hierarchy. The new color scheme for Kindsight is a bit harder to see but there is workarounds by using an extension within your web browser for that
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.
The access to support is excellent; however, the turnover with assigned account managers has been high over the years, which makes it challenging to build a lasting rapport. There have been some technical and functionality issues communicated over the years which have been received by the account manager. At the time, with responses such as "yes, we know it's an issue, and we're working on that, but we don't have a timeframe." These problems are never resolved, nor are progress reports or follow up ever addressed, then the account manager changes and the cycle starts again.
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 had previously used a program called eGiving to receive online payments and contributions, and we have previously used PowerChurch as our CRM, and Pushpay (including its Church Community Builder program) far excels both of these other programs. Pushpay is more user-friendly, and its financial program and its CRM program work much more effectively with one another.
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.
Pushpay served as a fine giving platform and allowed for our church to move digitally well.
However, the inordinate fees and costs of their platform ate away at much too large of our donations. With the other platforms out there, it doesn't make sense for us to lock into contracts with excessively high fees.
