Item: GiveSmart
Rating: 10
Author: Susan Fleming

Overall Satisfaction with GiveSmart

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Online silent auction
Ticket sales
Table seating
Text messaging and giving options

Cons

More features to customize the home page
More reports, especially those that can be customized
Ability to customize donor info in [the] silent auction - ability to create custom fields for us to track more info about our donors who give items for the silent auction

Return on Investment

Increased participation in [the] silent auction, especially from people who don't attend [the] event
Increased fundraising revenue from around $20K to $50K in the silent auction
Improved communication with event participants - we use the text feature to send out [the] event info

We use Qgiv for donation pages and for our large-scale event where we need to sell upwards of 2000 tickets. Qgiv pages are easier to use and more customizable than GiveSmart. Qgiv is very easy for any employee/new employee to learn and use. Qgiv is more useful for general fundraising and is not so focused on silent auction/gala. GiveSmart is much better than Qgiv's silent auction feature.

Usability

Great for silent auction/live auction & gala events. Not so great as a general fundraising page creator, or to add simple fundraising forms to our website.

Support Rating

The support has been great over the years. Agents respond quickly and are helpful with answers. The ability to have GiveSmart helpers at my event has been invaluable and this gives GiveSmart an advantage over other [platforms]. Having an event manager to work with through the process is [an] exceptionally good feature.

Other Software Used

Qgiv, Blackbaud NetCommunity, Asana

Likelihood to Recommend

[GiveSmart is] best at silent and live auction and ticketing. Could be better by having a home page that is more customizable. In the past, we have created a separate landing page for our event so that we can really customize it with lots of pictures that drive home the theme, add in photos of meal selections, have a preview video, add photos and descriptions of Live auction items and links to live auction item donors. This had improved a lot over the years and this year we will actually just use the GiveSmart as our home page, but to me, it does seem like it still looks a little basic compared to one designed specifically for an event.

Comments

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Love my GiveSmart!