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Look Smart: Customization For a Gala With GiveSmart
Updated August 15, 2021

Look Smart: Customization For a Gala With GiveSmart

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

Overall Satisfaction with GiveSmart

We use GiveSmart for live auction, silent auctions, and mission appeals at our golf tournament and galas. At this year's gala, we tried to centralize all of our revenue on the GiveSmart site, so that our guests could access all our content and merchandise on the sidebar of the presentation stream. Since we utilize it exclusively for fundraising, the development team is much more familiar with GiveSmart than the programs team and executives. It makes giving more accessible and helps capture more of the interest in our silent auction items.
  • Simplicity. GiveSmart brings the event to our guests, and I struggle to imagine how we could make it easier for them.
  • Reporting. You can break your revenue down by many parameters.
  • Customizability. We found ourselves able to include a virtual version of most elements of our gala, including the written program.
  • The site is largely customizable, but that reaches its limit in the html/CSS. Your whole site will pull from a style sheet housed elsewhere, and while my html abilities are limited, I suspect that the user cannot override the stylesheet.
  • We asked for a vanity link to some of our sub-pages, but the way GiveSmart works, it generates a unique link for each user so that they can click and be already logged in. So users cannot really generate a print-friendly link to the stream page or the auction page. That became an issue when we wanted to include a hyperlink to our stream on menus included in our deliveries. We opted to include the home page and link from the homepage to the stream, which worked fine.
  • The user cannot edit the tabs along the top of the site.
  • The examples kind of cover it! We have almost certainly unlocked more revenue by making bidding and donating easier. The extent of this is difficult to quantify.
  • It frees up staff time by facilitating payment processing. It is remarkably easy to process checkouts and refunds/returns.
  • It gives us a lot of insight into what works and how our donors want to give through reports.
GiveSmart does not have nearly all the functionality that Salesforce does for maintaining diverse contacts, accounts, giving records, and campaign hierarchies. But it does not have to. It excels at day-of event fundraising, in a user-friendly way that the bulky Salesforce never could.
Neon (Rallybound) gives us the latitude and altitude to manage many peer-to-peer fundraisers for our walks. GiveSmart is headed that way, but the backend interface is much more crowded.
To echo points made earlier in this review, this is GiveSmart's competitive advantage. Our donors, who might or might not be technologically savvy, can usually navigate the site with ease from the links texted to their phones. On the backend, usability is a little less seamless, but we can almost always find what we are looking for.
The customer and technical support team is great! This year, we had a question about vanity URLs. While we were not able to do what we had hoped, the team was helpful in connecting us to the people who had a straight answer for us. The onsite staff have always been competent and concerned with our overall fundraising goals.
We were excited that we were able to customize the webpage colors to match our retro eighties event theme. We uploaded a cover banner image. We embedded our written event program as a pdf for browsing on the home page, embedded a themed Spotify playlist, and linked out to one of our small business profit-sharing companies. This spared our guests from juggling multiple websites to experience our event fully.
Salesforce.org Philanthropy Cloud, Neon Fundraise (formerly Rallybound), Hopin
GiveSmart is good for events over one hundred people at which you expect guests to donate throughout their time there. For us, that includes galas and golf tournaments. These events have multiple revenue streams; GiveSmart grants the opportunity to browse all those ways to give in one place.

We do not utilize GiveSmart for our Walks, which are peer-to-peer affairs. GiveSmart is beginning to create the capacity for peer-to-peer fundraising within its campaigns, but our walk process involves so much management and so many teams that we need a platform that can more seamlessly accommodate all of those in a broader fashion.