Communique Conferencing vs. Greater Giving

The platform is well suited for delivering a unique and elevated experience for guests. Also, events with 200+ attendees. I would not recommend using Communique for simple and very small events. There are dozens of cheap options for these.

Greater Giving is well suited for an organization that is looking to save money on their event software and need a full service solution. It is not as sophisticated as others on the market, but it will allow you to get everything you need done for a reasonable price. This is meant to be used by nonprofit event professionals.

Incentivized

• Delivering a unique and elevated experience by using a platform with a unique look and feel.
• The platform capsulizes everything and makes information easily accessible.
• It's the team support that keeps us coming back. We have a dream team which is why our events go off so well without a hitch.

• Greater Giving is very user-friendly for both staff and volunteers
• Greater Giving sales and receipt generating features are well received by the guest at our event
• Greater Giving provides excellent customer support - in particular, their "night of" event support

Incentivized

• Nice to add personal agenda, which is on the roadmap this year

• Love to see more places to log expenses, so you can run a total report of net income.
• It's often a bit wide for my screen, which I can work around.

Incentivized

Usability is critical with virtual events both for our team to set up and administer as well as for our attendees. Communique Conferencing is easy for our team to administer. We survey our attendees during and after virtual events. The feedback regarding usability is very positive.

Greater Giving is very intuitive. It’s easy to set up in the backend and change as needed. Anytime we couldn’t figure something out on our own, our customer service representative was always available and super helpful!

Incentivized

The Communique project team is

• Knowledgeable
• Responsive
• Willing to go above and beyond to make our events successful

Online support was one of the worst customer service experiences I've ever had (I would give them a 1). Phone support and implementation support were very nice and knowledgeable.

We found out the hard way that there's a lot of smoke and mirrors in the virtual event space. We had no idea the level of proper vetting we should have done before hosting a client event with our reputation on the line.

• Support: The PM was located in our time zone and way more responsive.
• Platform: It's hard to assess platforms on one 60-minute demo. When it came down to hosting a virtual event there were a lot of limitations with the other platforms (e.g., no ability for booth reps to proactively chat with visitors, no ability to search for other attendees, no ability to send broadcast messages to communicate to attendees during live days, etc.). Communique Conferencing had all of these and was easy for attendees to use.
• Data security: We are a financial firm, so data security is huge. We did not realize the lack of basic attendee data security with some of the other platforms until our IT team performed and assessment. Communique Conferencing was one of the only platforms that passed.

We currently use Eventbrite for our pre-event ticket and sponsorship sales as they have a much more streamlined webpage that is customizable, they allow us to pass on the fees to our purchasers, AND they do not charge an annual fee on top of the processing fees. However, they do not have the ability to let you swipe a credit card in advance - you need a membership to Bidding for Good to do so. We tried using Eventbrite and Bidding for Good for only 1 event before we switched back to Greater Giving. Neither platform allowed you to send out tax receipts and the on-site event management was subpar compared to the ease of Greater Giving.

Incentivized

• Higher attendance - Extend the geographic reach of our events
• Wow factor - Position our firm as leading edge
• Thought leadership - The webinar component helps deliver engaging presentations
• Analytics - Everything is tracked for amazing metrics

• Having one system that can manage online donations, ticket purchases, online auction, donor tax letters, etc. has created efficiency for my org.
• Reports are flawed and lack of data integration with other systems causes me to do a lot of unnecessary manual work.