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GiveSmart Review
May 23, 2024

GiveSmart Review

Jaz Henn-Robinson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with GiveSmart

We use GiveSmart for our fundraising events. It is the platform that our donors pay through for all available auctions, raffles, or donations during our events. It also makes it possible for people to bid on items or send donations without being able to attend the events.
  • Text reminders to fundraiser attendees
  • Pre-sign up of credit card info for easy checkout during events
  • Tallying of funds received for easy auditing after events
  • We have had issues getting the credit card swipers we ordered through GiveSmart to work during events
  • Those who are not as tech savvy are not inclined to purchase things through their phones
  • When purchasing raffle tickets, there is no easy way to tell who has purchased them online. They need a physical ticket in order to participate in the raffles, and that can get confusing.
  • Collecting contact info from donors is helpful for future outreach, and requires no effort on our part since it is part of the sign up process
  • The automatic texts when someone outbids your auction item help up the overall price of the items, no effort required
  • Being able to see where all the donations came from after an event is helpful insight on our donor relations.
Like I said previously, it works great when everything is virtual, and when you have donors that understand how to work their phone or apps/websites. Some people are unwilling to give their info and would rather pay everything in cash, so these people require extra effort on the organizations end to manually track everything they do all night. When you have a small organization and several donors acting that way, it can quickly overwhelm your staff and/or volunteers, and provide a lot of lag time to the donors who wish to just pay and move on to the next thing.
I have had a pleasant experience with the support staff. I had some cover photos for event pages that would not upload for whatever reason, and they were able to figure it out on their end for me. I've also had them help with changing volunteer access. The only time the support was unhelpful was when it came to the credit card swipers. There was just not much they could tell us and my hunch is that it was a wifi problem, which is not GiveSmart's fault.
I feel that the customization is lacking. There is a strict layout to the GiveSmart platform. It has it's perks because it is already a functioning page without doing much, but it does not feel like it has our organization's imprint on it as much as I would like, and I have often had issues with uploading images from Canva in an attempt to customize further (size issues, etc.).
I do not believe we have utilized any of these services.

Do you think GiveSmart delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with GiveSmart's feature set?

Yes

Did GiveSmart live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of GiveSmart go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy GiveSmart again?

Yes

It depends what type of event you're using it for. GiveSmart is great for getting everyone registered online with little hassle on the back end, good for collecting info like email addresses from attendees, good for sending text updates to attendees, and if you have the right crowd it can be great to silent auctions. However, if you have a more mixed crowd or one that likes to pay in cash, the disconnect between cash payments and GiveSmart logging the payments is cumbersome, and not very user friendly. It's not great for in-person raffle items - it would maybe work well if all raffling was done via GiveSmart but when you have physical tickets that you're buying online it gets confusing quickly. We also had an issue at a golf event where people could purchase mulligans via GiveSmart, but we had no way of recording when they were being used on the course. Basically, if you have an entirely virtual event I think GiveSmart would work great for you, but in our experience we have donors that like to do things in person and with cash, and that's where it gets tricky.