Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review If you only want to track donations, I'd go with something simpler. If you want to track donations and programs and connections between them, there may be nothing better. If you have no technical abilities and no budget, restricted yourself solely to what it does as described exactly in the manual. If you can't devote about 0.25FTE to the constant maintenance and upgrades, don't go with it.
Read full review Pros Easy online bidding process for our participants (especially using the older software). Detailed tracking and organization for our auction staff to manage everything in one place. Excellent and proactive customer service in the months leading up to the event and in-person at the event itself. Read full review NPSP is designed to help with donor management. There are free add-ons for volunteer management. There is a new Program Management Module to better manage program participation and attendance. Campaigns help organize and report on marketing efforts though we use a third-party solution to send out marketing materials. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Learning curve - very powerful, but takes time to learn Batch processing - takes time and advanced skills to reach efficiency for data entry and certain operations which you want to do in batch Mass email is extremely limited - must choose a third party tool which adds complexity and cost to the system Read full review Likelihood to Renew It is ultimately not my call, and we are switching Donor CRMs/fundraising platforms so not sure what that will mean for OneCause.
Read full review There is really no other tool to compare and especially since Salesforce for Nonprofits is free!!
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review I think Salesforce has so much functionality that it makes it difficult in terms of overall usability. Once you can figure it out, it's a 10/10, it's just getting there. If you're willing to do the work to figure it out then you're golden. For what it's worth, I don't know if you're going to find something with this level of functionality that's easier to figure out
Read full review Reliability and Availability Support staff is there to help out and it is nice knowing there are available on event day as well
Read full review Performance This feature is amazing. Nice to have reports immediately when the event (auction) is over
Read full review Support Rating 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!
Read full review I have never had bad conversations with any support people with Salesforce but we also have not used them very much. I put it a little less because we are struggling to switch to lightning (some of our custom features do not migrate well) and it feels like the help and support for a little organization is not incredibly helpful unless we want to spend a lot of money.
Read full review In-Person Training 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.
Read full review Online Training Very thorough and nice to have a refresher when needed. Nice to see when I haven't used in a little while and refresh my mind how to update.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review As a cloud native organization with no previous Microsoft infrastructure, Salesforce was a more logical and effective option for us. The suite of products was also far more comprehensive and required less customization. We were able to adopt a "configure not code" approach to our development of systems to support our mission that lowered the cost of upgrades.
Read full review Scalability The product has everything I need
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Salesforce has allowed us to easily track donor communications in one area, which I believe has improved our donor communication overall. Salesforce for Nonprofits has made it easier on my org to track and pull donation-related information and has reduced the amount of time we need to do these regular tasks. Read full review ScreenShots Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud Screenshots