Good Software, GREAT service.
We use GiveSmart for online donations, fundraising campaigns, and fundraising events. We needed a software that allowed us to engage our …
Overview
What is GiveSmart?
GiveSmart, a Community Brands company, offers a full-service event management platform supporting event website, event registration, attendee tracking, donor management and data insights, and full customer service for entities wishing to raise funds via an auction or charity event. The…
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What is GiveSmart?
GiveSmart, a Community Brands company, offers a full-service event management platform supporting event website, event registration, attendee tracking, donor management and data insights, and full customer service for entities wishing to raise funds via an auction or charity event. The platform…
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For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.givesmart.com/plans/
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- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Details
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- Integrations
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- FAQs
What is GiveSmart?
GiveSmart is an online fundraising and donor management platform designed to elevate fundraisers. From mobile-friendly silent auctions to dynamic peer-to-peer events and guest management to donor engagement, the solution helps to turn mission into something that moves donors.
The vendor states that their software has helped thousands of nonprofits raise $6.2+ billion. The full GiveSmart suite of solutions and expert support helps exceed fundraising, event, and donor management goals, and helps users focus resources and make an impact all year round.
GiveSmart Screenshots
GiveSmart Integrations
GiveSmart Competitors
GiveSmart Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
| Supported Countries | Canada, United States |
Frequently Asked Questions
GiveSmart, a Community Brands company, offers a full-service event management platform supporting event website, event registration, attendee tracking, donor management and data insights, and full customer service for entities wishing to raise funds via an auction or charity event. The platform also integrates technology from Community Brands brand Gesture to provide a comprehensive suite of services.
GiveSmart replaces the former 501 Auctions, a platform to support charity auctions, mobile bidding, and general event management with automation for nonprofit fundraising.
Reviewers rate Usability highest, with a score of 8.5.
The most common users of GiveSmart are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Reviews and Ratings
(198)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
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October 19, 2022
Not what I expected--not sure if that's good or bad.
We used it for an annual fundraiser, live-giving opportunity, communication with guests, auction, and ticket sales. We have historically used a "paper" system that was very antiquated and cumbersome.
- Reports.
- Options for customization of the "web pages"--very limited.
- Tech support.
- Training videos/hands on training for new users.
October 15, 2022
Easily customizable payment platform.
We sell tickets and sponsorships and collect donations for our fundraising and programmatic events on GiveSmart.
- Seating management.
- Attractive pages.
- Easy to customize pages.
- Text messages in GiveSmart Fundraising are REALLY easy to send.
- GiveSmart Fundraise is NOT intuitive AT ALL. The ribbon at the top was much easier to use in the former version.
- Hard to run reports to see answers to custom questions in GiveSmart Fundraise, ie- terms and conditions check box.
- GiveSmart seating doesn't print properly. It is an improvement that it prints at all, though.
- P2P users really want to see who else is on the team they are joining and cannot.
- GiveSmart Fundraising wasn't very easy to set up.
- Cannot see a report on GiveSmart Fundraise without downloading first. Should be able to preview like in GiveSmart events.
October 14, 2022
Fit Our Needs and Our Budget
I use it for our silent auction so that bidders unable to attend a gala in person are able to bid on items from home. I also used it for our walk for registration and fundraising.
- Auction management
- Fundraising pages for Peer to Peer fundraising
- Easy to use, both in set up and reporting
- Helpful customer service
- Integrates with our database, eTapestry
- I would like to see a search function you can do on fundraisers without pulling a report
October 13, 2022
Costly Disappointment at Best
We used GiveSmart for fundraising and silent auction in annual virtual event.
- Silent Auction Management
- Integration
- Technical Support
October 13, 2022
Basic User for Public Education
I use GiveSmart Fundraise and GiveSmart Event to manage to fundraise for Delivering Bags of Hope. GiveSmart was used for donations, tickets, and a silent auction for our 2022 funding year. The use of the silent auction service on GiveSmart Event was easy to learn and it make closing out of our auction a breeze.
- Auction Services
- Event fundraising
- Text for tickets and to donate
- Integration of all platforms
- Training when purchasing a new module
October 13, 2022
Good platform - works great for auctions, text/mobile giving but needs work with training platform
We use this product for mobile donations (through MobileCause) and our online auctions.
- searching transactions
- reporting
- auction set up and post auction reporting
- better training
- videos that move through the process from beginning to completion
September 16, 2022
GiveSmart as instrumental to success of ministries and programs
We use GiveSmart to seek out donations from attendees at one of our biggest events of the year. The event is funding entirely from donations from participants (80%) and corporate sponsors (20%). Without GiveSmart, it would much more challenging to meet our annual goals and be able to continue offering the event.
- Text to give option that allows for credit card giving.
- Text to give option that sends reminders to incomplete forms.
- Fundraising Thermometer to help engage participants in the process.
- Ability to keep good records of donors and collect appropriate personal information that is used in thank you cards.
- No suggestions here. It's a great program!
We use GiveSmart for our silent auction at our largest event of the year, the Annual Gala. This has helped save time with the auction setup and checkout. We now also use it at our Golf Tournament. It helps with saving time by selling raffle tickets.
- Donations
- Silent Auction
- Training
- Checking in before a fundraising event to ensure you are good to go before the event.
I use GiveSmart for our Arbor Day of Giving campaign, which is different than Giving Tuesday. Instead of Giving Tuesday, our day of giving is Arbor Day.
- User Friendly
- Chat feature works really well-very helpful and efficient
- Customer service reps are always willing to help and train
- Text option with the feature of scrolling donor names so donors can add text, such as "this is in memory of"
- More color coding options for sections and buttons.
January 15, 2022
A very clean looking user experience
My organization uses GiveSmart for our annual Gala and Golf Tournament. We use it for guest registration, listing, and allowing donors to bid on silent and live auction items, instant items, and check out.
- Customer service
- Easy to use
- Ability to have a concierge at an event for troubleshooting
August 15, 2021
Look Smart: Customization For a Gala With GiveSmart
We use GiveSmart for live auction, silent auctions, and mission appeals at our golf tournament and galas. At this year's gala, we tried to centralize all of our revenue on the GiveSmart site, so that our guests could access all our content and merchandise on the sidebar of the presentation stream. Since we utilize it exclusively for fundraising, the development team is much more familiar with GiveSmart than the programs team and executives. It makes giving more accessible and helps capture more of the interest in our silent auction items.
- Simplicity. GiveSmart brings the event to our guests, and I struggle to imagine how we could make it easier for them.
- Reporting. You can break your revenue down by many parameters.
- Customizability. We found ourselves able to include a virtual version of most elements of our gala, including the written program.
- The site is largely customizable, but that reaches its limit in the html/CSS. Your whole site will pull from a style sheet housed elsewhere, and while my html abilities are limited, I suspect that the user cannot override the stylesheet.
- We asked for a vanity link to some of our sub-pages, but the way GiveSmart works, it generates a unique link for each user so that they can click and be already logged in. So users cannot really generate a print-friendly link to the stream page or the auction page. That became an issue when we wanted to include a hyperlink to our stream on menus included in our deliveries. We opted to include the home page and link from the homepage to the stream, which worked fine.
- The user cannot edit the tabs along the top of the site.
June 05, 2021
Making$$$
We use GiveSmart for our Annual Fundraising Event Hats & Heels. We utilize the Registration, Auction, Instant Sales and Donation functions.
- The online bidding for auction items. Having the ability to pre-bid silent auction items, show photos and videos of them has doubled our revenues.
- During the pandemic, we were able to more easily pivot to virtual events. Their features supported everything we needed for donations and auction items.
- We have also been able to institute monthly virtual appeals for on-going donations, especially with the ability for donors to make ongoing donations.
- We have a wide range of sponsors and would like to have the ability to showcase them at the various levels rather than all grouped together with only the distinction of premium or standard.
- We send tax letters out to all of our participants, donors, etc. Would love the ability to e-mail those letters rather than having to print and mail them.
June 05, 2021
User Friendly
GiveSmart is used as a fund raising tool for our annual gala.
- Easy and helpful reports.
- Generate receipts.
- Live chat is always able to help me with questions.
- User friendly.
- Ability to use the same credit card for different purchases multiple times.
June 05, 2021
GiveSmart is a worthwhile investment, with just a little room for improvement— just like the rest of us.
Our organization used The GiveSmart platform in our annual fundraising efforts. We have used them to help host our annual gala— hybrid (online and live), for a couple of years, and strictly online during COVID-19. It is used primarily by 3 or 4 of us to run our silent auction during the event. It also helps with communication during the event. Using GS has created ease in auction bookkeeping, payments, and generating post-event thank you/tax letters.
- Bookkeeping
- Uploading items and pictures.
- Generating thank you/tax letters.
- Making email and text communication easy.
- Need to add more options for video links.
- Some information in reports could be easier to find.
- Every year we have had at least one new contact— stability in staff would be helpful.
June 03, 2021
GiveSmart makes me feel SMART!
We are using it to fundraise for our political organization. We plan to have a marque event every year. It's used by a handful of people in my organization. Since Covid became an issue with in-person fundraising we decided to move to a virtual platform. It was very successful for our first attempt.
- Training was excellent. On demand as well as weekly lessons.
- Very easy to get in touch with the company for questions.
- Very Easy to use.
- Easy Instructions.
- Intuitive for non technical people to figure out.
- Uploaded pictures were easy but, figuring out the right format for those pictures was not.
- When to close out the auction needs better explanation.
- More choices in designing our brand.
June 03, 2021
GiveSmart is Smart but not a Genius
We use this platform for event-related fundraising: ticketing, invoicing, raffle, and silent auction features.
- Creating the tickets is very easy
- The platform works for both virtual and in-person events
- The silent auction is easy to set up
- Text and mobile features are nice for communicating with guests
- I can't always reach someone immediately for service and have had to leave a message and wait for a callback
- My personal account rep often takes several days to respond to emails
- The display page has limited design options in format, font, text size, color, etc.
- An attendee cannot order themselves if they want to pay by check. An organization should be able to decide if they want to take the risk instead of only allowing the administrator to purchase by check. If our users could choose a check option and we could verify receipt of the check, this would be much better for us.
June 03, 2021
We would not have been as successful this year without the virtual options from GiveSmart during the pandemic.
We are using GiveSmart for most of our virtual and hybrid auction & event registration needs for our fundraising efforts.
- Easy to set-up for the auction
- Easy to use for users
- Customer Service is very responsive and supportive
- Better way to merge items uploaded that later want to package together
- Better instruction on when promoting multiple of an item to separate those on the screen from those auction items. Such as gift cards or wine pulls
We use GiveSmart to facilitate a major fundraising event and a few additional campaigns throughout the year. GiveSmart is robust in features and allows us to handle ticketing, auction and instant purchase items, and marketing and communication needs.
- GiveSmart offers supportive training videos that are easy to share with staff.
- GiveSmart makes the deposit of funds regularly rather than at the end of an event.
- GiveSmart is easy to use for event participants.
- The cost vs. benefit ratio is not preventative, and is a competitive product.
- The customer service has been terrific!
- It would help our organization to have some flexibility in some of the fields. In particular, in the field of the Donate an ITEM button, we would like to alter the words to reflect that works of art are being uploaded to the instant buy. We would rather it say Upload Art Work.
- Also, it would be helpful to have flexibility in the field that appears as a banner when an item is available, we would like to have a banner read, "Accepted by Jury."
June 03, 2021
Happy with GiveSmart
We use it for Events like our Galas. We use it for ticketing, for Silent and Live Auctions, some messaging, and for donor information for these events. Another organization was doing a fundraiser totally for us and we were able to set up an online auction for that event as well.
- Ease of item entry for auction items - very straight forward and clear direction
- Ticketing - I don't do this part, but I know that we are happy with this function
- Tracking Users in the system - both through search and through reporting
- Reporting of revenue - the way you can look at the data from several angles
- Item Sheets...this is where I would ask for some upgrading. I like the way they are exported to a formatted sheet - but they way too limited on how much info from the description comes across. Causes a ton more work to get item sheets with enough information on them.
- Editing the item description - would like to see an 'underline' feature - and if possible a font color option
- Before our auction goes live, and all the items are hidden as I am developing the auction and entering items, I can't use the arrow to go to the next or previous item. During the editing process, that would be VERY handy to be able to do.
- Please bring back the option to have GiveSmart personnel at our event.
June 03, 2021
Build, Customize and Go!
We use it to build our event sales, auctions, and financial needs. We use it for ticket sales, auction items, messaging during events, and event records. It is used by several of the employees across the organization. It addresses the need to have all components in our events in one customizable software program and enables us to keep financial and other records separate.
- The software is very customizable for your specific needs.
- The help desk is very responsive.
- The event messaging system keeps our sponsors updated.
- I would like to see the app stay open longer so users don't have to re-sign in.
- I think the first time window should say create an account rather than sign.
- The auto assigned user and passwords are too long.
- We had some internet/wifi issues and the "Oh Snap" came up but the person was still charged and sometimes twice when they tried again.
June 03, 2021
Easy to use and master!
Whole organization - we use it for multiple events, auctions, ticketed and non-ticketed events, golf tournaments, etc. It very user-friendly and solves a lot of our problems and makes auctions very easy to manage and participate in.
- Auction Management
- Communications
- Reporting
- Reporting for fees
June 03, 2021
Easy to Customize and Optimize
GiveSmart was used for event ticket sales and silent auction.
- Simple layout
- Easy to customize
- Staff was helpful
- N/A
June 03, 2021
Quick and easy
The entire organization uses GiveSmart for our texting and online auctions.
- Texting our members
- Online auction
- Visibility to sponsors
- We are happy with all aspects of GiveSmart
June 03, 2021
Virtually all you need!
GiveSmart is an essential event management system we utilize with multiple events. It has integrated flawlessly into our virtual and now hybrid events in a way that allowed our organization to capture donor dollars from a distance. The platform is intuitive and can be customized to meet the needs of each event. The registration and checkout process is easily taught to volunteers. The system is user-friendly from ticket purchase, online bidding, and donation administration it is a must-have for non-profit organizations!
- Customizable event landing page
- Registration and ticketing system
- Online mobile bidding
- Chargeback notification
- Fee transparency per transaction
- Batch reports not specific to each event
Nordson used the GiveSmart platform for our annual employee giving campaign. We had to quickly switch from in-person events to online due to COVID-19. Multiple locations within the United States used the site to hold events and online auctions. This product was used by our production and office employees to raise funds for our communities.
- Ease of set-up.
- Ability to track users use of the platform.
- Ability to communicate to users via text message.
- Translations of the site to other languages.
- Customer care kept blaming issues on user error. There was no way to share my screen when I had an issue that I needed resolved. Sometimes trying to communicate your issue in words in slower than just showing the issue.
- Being able to interface your site within our employee giving platform to avoid multiple log-ins for employees.