Item: GiveSmart
Rating: 9
Author: Lindsey Smith

Overall Satisfaction with GiveSmart

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Online Auction Hosting - They make holding an auction super painless!
"Single Screen" Streaming - Stream your event and allow access for participants to donate/bid during, without clicking away!
Table Management - You can easily assign tables to any user and even send an email/text alerting participants of their table number.

Cons

Personalization of Your Webpage - I wish there were more options to customize the look and feel of the campaign's webpage.
Custom Link - I understand there might be no way of getting around this, but some of our donors did not like the long links to the event page or presentation page.
Adding Users - Currently, there is no way to import users into GiveSmart. Which did end up creating an issue for us as we have corporate donors who did not purchase tickets, but still needed to become a GiveSmart "user."

Return on Investment

Positive Impact - Improved Internal Efficiency: Was able to create and manage a silent auction with ease instead of doing it by hand/paper.
Positive Impact - Increased Donor Reach: We were able to capture names and information on donors who attended that would not normally provide such information.

Alternatives Considered

OneCause

OneCause and GiveSmart are pretty similar companies. What it came down to at the end was the ease of access to our donors... GiveSmart has the capability of "split-screen" streaming; meaning donors can watch the live stream on one side of the window and participate in bidding and donating on the other side. Whereas with OneCause, donors would have to click off the stream to give.

Usability

GiveSmart is one of the most user-friendly software applications I have ever used. When you first log in, it gives you these red dots over each hyperlink that tells you what you're about to click on and how the feature is used. There are also instructions everywhere you look that guide you in the right direction.

Support Rating

GiveSmart offers live chat to all of their technical support team. You may also call the hotline. In our case, we paid for additional support by adding a customer success manager. She was pretty useful in helping with things outside of the technical and knew a lot about events. GiveSmart also offers technical support for the day of your event, so you're not the one running the software and worrying about hiccups day of the event.

Customization

GiveSmart provides color customization as well as customization of the "background" of your webpage. You can also change the order of the blocks of content on the website and add additional blocks of content if you wish. I do, however, wish there were more options for those with a website development background or even just more advanced options for those who feel comfortable redesigning a webpage.

Other Software Used

Bloomerang

Likelihood to Recommend

GiveSmart is perfect for those hosting an event that they want to stream or that has an auction. The software can ticket guests, manage their seating arrangements, check guests in and out with easy payment options, etc. I can't say enough how fantastic of software this is! However, you may want to use caution if you have guests attending who are not planning to purchase a ticket but do plan to donate/bid/stream. You want them in the system, so you have to put them in manually instead of just importing them, which kind of stinks.

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