Certain is a leading provider of enterprise Event Automation software to Fortune 1000 companies. The vendor’s value proposition is that Certain gives users everything they need to plan events, engage attendees, and achieve sales and marketing results. The vendor says their software helps data-driven marketers and event professionals capture and integrate rich buying signals and attendee insights into omni-channel marketing campaigns to improve sales and marketing results and deliver credible…
$9,990
per year
GoFundMe Pro
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
GoFundMe Pro is nonprofit fundraising software designed to help organizations fundraise in any way they want, wherever they want. GoFundMe Pro aims to unlock new opportunities to inspire giving, reach broader audiences, and drive greater impact. GoFundMe states they have supported over $40 billion in giving since 2010.
Certain is great for easy-to-use registration sites. It collects all information and user can upload reports easily. It's great to copy the event if you are doing an annual one where the information doesn't drastically change. I love being able to create the link in under an hour and send it out to all attendees. I can also send one large email out to all participants
Well suited for organizations with large fundraising programs or many recurring donors, especially those who have the staffing to devote to reporting and fundraising data analysis. Variety of payment options is good for mobile-first or younger audiences who may be taking more frequent advantage of payment methods like Venmo and Apple Pay. Most useful if it is used in tandem as an event registration/event hosting platform (Classy Event Registration or Classy Live) as attendee data and fundraising is kept in a single place. Less appropriate for smaller organizations, or folks that will not be doing crowdfunding/peer-to-peer/events. There are other platforms that do standard donation pages well that have fewer bells and whistles but are accordingly cheaper.
Dashboards: It's quite important for leadership to get a visual of what their event registrants look like (with graphs, for example). Now, Certain does not present a feature to create dashboards, so we have to export their reports and create our dashboards ourselves.
UX when setting up an event: Now this can be quite complex, as it's not as easy to use or intuitive. Many different tabs with many different sub-items can present a confusing experience for newcomers when building an event.
Campaigns lack customization options which can be limiting- while you can add code to make some changes, there is a basic framework that you can't always override.
Slow to roll out some donor payment options like Venmo.
Not inexpensive price point and on an annual contract, so the software is definitely an investment.
VERY easy to use, but lacks flexibility. But very easy to learn and master, even for someone with technical skills. They offer live chat which is a great help for on-demand support. At higher call volumes, you may wait 10 minutes, but I’ve never waited for more than that and the support if 90% of the time very helpful.
Classy's team was very helpful as we transitioned over, and helped us get everything set up quite easily. The few times we've had issues or questions, their online chat feature has been a quick way to get answers. On Giving Tuesday last year, the site went down, but Classy was quick with communication to its clients and had the problem resolved in about an hour. I know that if we have any problems or questions, the company and its team will be responsive and helpful. That makes a difference to me and our small team. We don't have time to troubleshoot or stay on hold for a long time waiting for support.
Sympla or Eventbrite are great for smaller events that don't require a lot of information from your audience or extensive communication from your event owner. They are better suited for those events, since they are easy and quick to set up. Certain comes in for your tradeshows or recurring events, since it presents a calendar view of your field marketing events, as well as full form customization, automation of email sequences, reporting, etc. It's more complex to use, so you might as well hand it over to people who are well used to setting up events.
I have not used any other platforms like Classy. Given I came into this organization after Classy was already chosen, I was pleased with how easy it was to learn the platform and how user-friendly the entire thing is. Although I haven't used any other platforms like it, I would highly recommend it.
Certain helps to deliver a great customer experience, since it facilitates automatic email delivery and your company can keep them connected well before or well after an event.
Certain presents a wide variety of reports, which perfectly addresses any request for visibility coming from your organization.
Certain's configuration settings are quite complex, so our newcomers are not comfortable using the software at first.
In case you need a more visual representation of your audience, Certain, unfortunately, does not generate dashboards.
This has been nothing but positive. We use the basic version so there is no fee associated with it other than a percentage of each transaction. So everything that comes in is added revenue where the only investment is staff time, but there is no monetary investment.
