GiveSmart

We started to use GiveSmart last year primarily as a silent auction platform for an event that we switch from in-person to virtual, but going forward we will begin using the platform's full capabilities. It has been very useful for contactless uses in the time of Covid to make all participants feel safe.

Our non-profit utilizes GiveSmart for smaller fundraising opportunities throughout the year, along with our major giving event that includes a silent auction and ticketing. It allows attendees and donors to manage their experience through a mobile device and easily participate in the giving experience. The reporting helps me, from a development experience, recap the donation and silent auction successes, as well as determine attendees for events compared to actual sales.

We use it primarily for event management and had it for a virtual gala in February.

Our organization uses GiveSmart to help manage our annual gala. It is used by the auction committee under the school’s development team.

We use it for our virtual and hybrid fundraising events in our development department. We found it extremely helpful when our in-person events were canceled due to the pandemic.

We initially purchased the GiveSmart package to conduct a virtual fundraiser for our advancement department. This is the fundraising arm of our school, which needed a quick solution for making a pivot from a traditional spring in-person fundraiser to a virtual only fundraiser. Over the course of the year, we have continued to use the platform for advancement/marketing, but now other departments have also begun to use it. This winter, our athletic department used it to run an online fundraiser where alumni could vote for their favorite coaches of school history. Athletic Department team members liked it so much, they have begun to use it as a way to register families for summer sports camps.
The main business problem it addresses for us is the ability to communicate with and perform transactions for several thousand alumni and families - we needed something easy to use, easy to make online donations and credit card transactions and easy to create several different types of events through.

Our school uses GiveSmart for our annual auction and dinner in November. The Advancement office uses GiveSmart for auction management.

In the past year, GiveSmart has been used twice: first to facilitate an online auction, art sale, and holiday gift sale; and second as a fundraising vehicle for our chemistry lab. In the past, it has been used to host a silent auction for our annual gala. Currently, I am the sole user of the platform, but it has been used by another administrator and volunteers of our gala within the Advancement office. It is an excellent platform to share with our community.

GiveSmart was used for our very successful Mother's Day Virtual Auction event. It is used by Hour Development Department for fundraising efforts. It helped us to create a Mother's Day online event in place of Hour in-person luncheon.

We needed an online/mobile bidding software to handle our silent auction and other fundraising events. We created a special program that need remote users to access a silent auction instead of the traditional paper and pen. We also wanted to be able to open the auction to have as many possible eyes on our items we were auctioning off.

I am a parent volunteer and both of my sons' schools. I've brought the GS platform to both schools to use for fundraising. At both schools, we have annual galas, golf outings, smaller fundraising events, etc. I'm always pushing the school to use GS for as much as we can; there is no reason not to. It's a great tool and it's a great tool for the next crop of fundraisers after we move on.

We use GiveSmart to support various types of fundraising activities, including galas, auctions, Day of Giving and special projects. It is only used within the Development Office. However, the data analyses that come from the reports it produces are shared with the school's leadership team for planning purposes. It also assists us in expanding our prospect database.

We use GiveSmart as an event/fundraising tool within the Development office for our two parent group fundraisers. It allows us to manage registration and auction in one location. The setup is used exclusively by Development but registration/end user is across the whole organization and community.

While GiveSmart is obviously good at what it does, it is not designed for a small community non-profit. It offers an excessive amount of information that has no bearing on a small group like ours. I sought out one of your customers, the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, to find a company to help us put on an online auction. Our events are always in-person, but that changed with the pandemic. My cochair Karen Starkey and I learned as much as we could in order to put on the auction, and it was a huge success, thank you! But it was extremely labor intensive for an organization that is unlikely to merge membership information.

We are a small but "mighty" board attempting to raise money to create a pediatric respite/end of life care facility by 2025.

DIFFA Chicago uses GiveSmart for our fundraising events to reach our audience during the pandemic and also as a supplemental and experiential platform through the years at live/in-person events.

Sarasota Opera uses GiveSmart as a tool to help in fundraising events. We purchased it to support our virtual 2021 gala and will likely use it to support our in-person 2022 gala as well as a couple other smaller events throughout the year.

At first, we just leveraged GiveSmart for our Annual Gala, but starting in 2020 we expanded our use to also accommodate our Annual Fund campaign giving when we began focusing on streamlining and professionalizing our online giving efforts. This year, we used it for both of those functions and also for a one-off fundraising campaign we're hosting. GiveSmart is only being used by our Development Department, which manages all of our fundraising efforts.

GiveSmart is a great option for us right now, because we are saddled with a terrible database solution to house our donor information. It does not have any event management functionality and its options for online giving are unsophisticated and clunky. Until we acquire a more sophisticated donor database, GiveSmart is the best option we have found for effectively conducting our fundraising business as it pertains to events and managing our online giving beyond our Gala.

We utilize GiveSmart as a key event management tool that houses everything pertaining to auctions, donations, and any other activities we are looking to track or sell. Currently, we primarily use GiveSmart for our distinguished events, but our walk/runs and other smaller events have successfully dabbled in utilizing the software as well. Our entire organization has access to a couple of options for event management software. GiveSmart has given us the ability to simplify our auction setup, allows us to raise significantly more money because of the many features, and the customer service is top notch. It keeps us organized and ensures the day-of-event runs smoothly.

Currently, we use GiveSmart for one fundraising event at ACT of Connecticut. It is a Gala. We use the product for registration and our auction.

We use this platform for all of our auction, donation and fundraising activation management. We utilize this for six plus fundraising events throughout the year. We work closely with this staff to set fundraising goals and implement strategies to execute these initiatives. This allows the organization to safely facilitate payments.

I joined our Rotary Club in June of 2020, during the lockdown phase of the pandemic. The club is small and they had always had 1 large fundraiser, a wine tasting during the holidays. With the pandemic, many of the folks thought we wouldn’t be able to raise money. I was made Director of Fundraising and with my committee’s assistance, one of whom owns a restaurant and lounge, we ended up selling sponsorships and wines. We needed a platform to make sales online and to track and display ads for our sponsors. GiveSmart was perfect. We ended up making close to $15,000 more than we had hoped for. We are going to keep the platform for this next year and are planning a few fundraisers that can be handled entirely online and a few that will involve in person aspects now that the pandemic is lifting. One will be a concert in which we can sell tickets using the platform, another will be similar to the wine sale but will also add an in person wine tasting event. Although I am the primary user, I do register a couple of other members to be administrators, for back up. Their tech savvy levels vary, but it is a user friendly platform and what isn’t easy, you can find a video tutorial, or write up in the help section for it. The staff are also excellent at getting beck to me quickly if problems arise.

The Development Department is using it to raise money for the school's Annual Fund through the auction and raffle component.

GiveSmart is being used across our entire organization. I am the key administrator that manages the software and teaches sub users when assistance is needed. We use GiveSmart for multiple annual events and we have raised more than a quarter of a million dollars with the software. We have also used GiveSmart for peer-to-peer fundraising in the last year in various roles and it has been very successful. Many of our users are spread out across the country.

We use it for event management and fundraising. It helps us organize our donors, auction items, and execute both live and virtual events. We have used the ticketing function, live auction, silent auction, and raffle.