GiveSmart Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Office uses GiveSmart for our events, texting campaigns, and other fundraising (for example we are currently selling commemorative sweatshirts). GiveSmart made it easy for us to pivot from in-person to virtual fundraising. It assists us in being able to set-up a website for any fundraising campaign and quickly sending out mass texts to our constituents. We use GiveSmart for event registration and on-line auctions.

GiveSmart is currently used by the Philanthropy department, for fundraising purposes. Its primary use has been for our annual Gala, especially as we needed to host a virtual gala in 2020. We have used the Silent Auction, Raffle, Registration & Ticket Sales, Sponsorships, and "Buy Now" functions. We are anticipating adding additional campaigns to fundraise among employees, utilizing GiveSmart's Champion pages to allow for crowd-sourced fundraising. GiveSmart allows us to have ongoing fundraising throughout the year via technology such as text to donate and text to bid. It provides excellent reporting features and tracks all event revenue sources.

Hope Chest uses Givesmart as our event portal as our ticketing, donation, and auction platform. It is used by nearly all of the team at Hope Chest to manage event fundraising.

Simmons College of Kentucky used GiveSmart as a streaming and online bidding platform for an event that our Office of Development and Community Engagement held. We were looking for a solution to help us with ticketing guests, collecting guest information, hosting an auction, and streaming the event. The GiveSmart software enabled us to do that. Currently, we are not using it cross-departmentally, though we hope to find new uses for the software.

GiveSmart is used by our Philanthropy/Fundraising dept for our gala fundraising event. We use it mainly for the silent auction feature and for ticket sales and sponsorship sales.

We are using GiveSmart for most of our virtual and hybrid auction & event registration needs for our fundraising efforts.

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 entire organization uses GiveSmart for our texting and online auctions.

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.

We initially used GiveSmart for a virtual event during the pandemic. It was successful so we now offer the option of donating through GiveSmart and it has been very beneficial.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

We are utilizing GiveSmart as a bidding and registration platform for two gala events. In the past, bidding was difficult and our donors weren't able to split their attention between our program and bidding on items. This allows people to register easily and bid from where they're at. It also helps our staff organize items, organize attendees and create a more streamlined experience.