Great Product with Room for Improvement
May 26, 2021
Great Product with Room for Improvement
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with GiveSmart
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.
- Customization of event site is fairly decent, although with some areas that could be improved.
- Support is very helpful.
- The product is very good for the price.
- The sections of the event site that have character counts don't always display what the count is, and none of them tell you how many characters you've used or how many characters different formatting takes up.
- Better reports...right now there are too many reports. A reporting system that prioritizes quality over quantity would be better. An aggregate report might be useful. I know our staff had to run several different reports to put a picture together.
- Integrated communications need a lot of improvement. GiveSmart cannot tell you if an email sent from within the platform was delivered or not. So, if you're using GiveSmart email to communicate with your donors, you don't know if you're reaching everyone. We found this out the day of our event, which caused unneeded stress. There also needs to be a confirmation step before an email sends.
- Our virtual event did not have financial success. A large part of that is because we did this in April 2021 when interest in virtual events was on the wane. We also encountered some staff departures at inopportune times. However, there is some opacity on the user end that I think was felt by our donors that stemmed from the platform being built for in-person rather than virtual. Having said that, GiveSmart is not the reason our event was not as successful as we had hoped.
As stated previously, the customization is good, but could be better/more consistent. It is flexible, but even just a little more flexibility would be helpful. Content sections could be more customizable...more fonts, etc. Using images can be problematic if you don't have a designer to design a piece.