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.
OneCause is the best event software I've tried yet in terms of supporting a number of auction related features. Our event has very specific needs and OneCause seemed to check enough boxes to fit those needs. I do think in an ideal world we would use an auction/event software …
I have also used Bidding for Good -- a FrontStream product. The main reason I choose OneCause over the others is the customer service and the in-person staffing option. And you are focused on providing event-based services -- GiveSmart is trying to be everything and it's too …
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.
For smaller organizations who don't have extensive data needs (i.e. not many audiences to segment) and who don't need robust reporting, this works great.
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.
More restrictions regarding image upload. Currently, you can upload any size and insert it. The email will not send correctly but you do not receive an error message.
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!
Support response has been swift and knowledgable, though not always the answer I've wanted. One huge design flaw is if I add a new Salesforce field to sync, Salsa Engage will not sync it unless it has changed since the last sync, requiring me to fake an update for an entire database or re-sync the whole enchilada. Better to recognize it's a new Salesforce field and perform the sync en masse.
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.
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.
