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.
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Poll Everywhere
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Poll Everywhere is an event management software system offered by Poll Everywhere.
The OneCause auction platform works well for events of seemingly varying sizes (we are a mid-sized organization, but it seems to scale well). You can run a variety of things within the platform (live auction, silent auction, fund appeal, raffle, etc.), but one should be aware that there are limits to the software and we were forced to worked around these limitations.
The reasons to use Poll Everywhere: 1. Get rid of those clickers! They eat batteries, need constant maintenance, and ofter walk off at a monetary loss. 2. The pricing model is really easy to manage, the campus/company license will pay for itself even if you only have 5-10 active users. 3. Stop fighting mobile devices in your classroom and start leveraging them. Students can't mess around on social media, texting etc if they are in the PE app. Then situations where Poll Everywhere wouldn't work as well: 1. Not great for multiple part, asynchronous polling, or data collection 2. Areas where there is a limited or absent internet connection. 3. Situations where an audience would lack basic technology such as a cell phone or laptop.
It's deceptively simple to use. Showing how to use the features, create & modify questions, and viewing polling data, is much easier than it first seems.
There are a surprising amount of alternate ways to poll users and present questions in more ways than just "Question and 2-4 possible answers." It's pretty easy to customize.
It's very, very, very easy to use as an attendee. There's not anything complex or invasive in order to sign in and vote in polls.
Options to personalize the text descriptions used in the registration process. Some of the wording is confusing and there's no option to edit those text boxes.
The set-up for the silent auction options is not exactly the easiest to follow for new users. Having some concrete examples or use cases to consult when first setting up would be helpful.
It would be great to have a "check for errors" functionality when you're going through the auction set-up. For example, for some reason when our live auction was set up, two items didn't have "Apply Sales Tax" checked and so they got erroneously listed without the sales tax. Given that ALL the other items had sales tax applied, it seems like it should be easy to have something run in the background that flags potential errors for review.
I give it this rating because when I first started using OneCause, I was concerned it might be complicated and I could make mistakes that would negatively impact our organization. OneCause's usability has made me feel confident and stress-free in every event we use it for because it is easy to use.
They have a fantastic tech support team who typically responds to your questions and concerns within minutes. They are available for emails, phone calls, and have also created videos that walked me through my problems. When you initially get started with their peer2peer platform, they provide you with a consultant whose job is to walk you through setting up your first campaign. You al so receive a specific to you Customer Success Manager who is there for any and all questions and will help you until you find the answers needed!
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.
We had used GiveSmart in the past and had issues with connectivity during our event, when our contract was up we decided to investigate other platforms, we looked at more than just those 3, but can't recall the others. Givebutter - I absolutely LOVE Givebutter, so simple to use, but it does not offer an auction component and we didn't want to have 2 different systems to use. Classy - this platform seemed nice but extremely pricy and we still had to do "add-ons". We could not afford it. We went with OneCause in the end because of the simplicity, and training provided and wanted to give the product a try over sticking with GiveSmart. We are so happy to have made the switch.
Other than Google Forms (which I utilize heavily, but for different reasons and during different areas) I find Poll Everywhere to be the best at what it offers and does. Options to lock questions, hide or show responses, varying questions/response types, and the ability to let users respond via text message on their phone or through the website/app increase the functionality of the program. The is also the ability to be creative and change poll/question backgrounds, colors and layouts as well as attach/embed images.
Once we joined OneCause for our event fundraising platform we never looked back. Each year we've experienced growth with not only the funds raised but also in the improvement of the event execution.
We've learned a tremendous amount for in-person fundraising success through the OneCause team and that has led us to explore virtual and campaign options.
The onsite event support has proven so valuable to our event success we have begun budgeting to have that same level of support at all our in-person events. The OneCause event team guides you well during the planning phase and then provides top-notch support and peace of mind the night/day of the event.
