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Flexible and functional for smaller organizations
May 19, 2021

Flexible and functional for smaller organizations

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with GiveSmart

We use GiveSmart primarily to run our auction fundraiser in the spring. However, we've found it extremely useful in smaller events as well that incorporate a raffle component. We've also used the vote function to fundraise and utilized it as an online marketplace for our annual holiday market to cope with COVID.
  • Pretty customizable in terms of displays, pages, items, etc. which is great if you're a small organization like us that needs a lot of bang for our buck.
  • Fairly intuitive platform, so if you're moderately tech-savvy you shouldn't have an issue learning how to use it.
  • For donation items and instant items, it's a bit confusing on the purchaser side. When you click to donate or buy them, they are not paying for the items right at that moment. Instead, they're added to a sort of invisible cart and many of our people don't realize they need to take an additional step to check out. This has caused us to lose donations (not a ton, but at least once or twice!).
  • You can't customize the confirmation email/receipt that purchasers/donors receive upon checkout and you can't send them an actual tax [acknowledgment] through email at this time.
  • Doesn't integrate with our CRM, so the reconciliation is usually a bit cumbersome with manual imports and trying to keep track of everything on the accounting side with fees, etc.
  • Increased the revenue on our largest annual fundraising event while being in an all-virtual format. Got us closer to our goal than ever!
  • Able to run smaller online raffles that were complicated to run before.
GiveSmart offers a decent amount of customization and flexibility in use, which is awesome. The one downside of this is that it can become a little confusing and/or you might not even realize you're not getting all you can out of the platform. As a small organization, we don't have time to devote to learning every in and out of the platform, which is unfortunate, but I feel we get a lot out of what we do use!
Almost always available to chat when you have an issue. I've never had to call, so I can't speak to phone support. So far I haven't run into a really disruptive problem and have just chatted when I was unsure of how to use something or had a small issue with a donation or something.
Sadly we don't have an amazing online brand (yet!), so it's really easy for us to make it look like us. I think one improvement could be allowing users to choose from a few different font options or enabling google fonts so that branding can be even more consistent, beyond just a header image and color customization.
I think it's really unmatched in the field currently in terms of auction functionality (except maybe One Cause). But the price is reasonable for a nonprofit that expects to use it for even just one large fundraiser per year. You do get unlimited campaigns for a flat rate, though, so it's great to have if your other online fundraising capabilities are antiquated like ours!