GiveSmart, a Community Brands company, offers a full-service event management platform supporting event website, event registration, attendee tracking, donor management and data insights, and full customer service for entities wishing to raise funds via an auction or charity event. The platform also integrates technology from Community Brands brand Gesture to provide a comprehensive suite of services.
GiveSmart replaces the former 501 Auctions, a platform to support charity auctions, mobile…
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Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Salesforce for Nonprofits, the Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud, is a nonprofit constituent relationship management platform from Salesforce, which supports constituent engagement, fundraising, and grants. Nonprofit editions contain Salesforce Lightning Edition along with the former Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) combined.
GiveSmart definitely works for large in-person ticketed events which also involve auctions, paddle raises, and more. The workflow is relatively easy for guests, and especially for volunteers. We especially like how quickly you can add paddle raise donations to specific people's paddle numbers because it allows us to track in real time. The seating functionality has some odd quirks, but overall it works. We opted not to use it for our main donation capture organization-wide because it doesn't look as professional, nor is it as customizable, as some other options on the market.
If you only want to track donations, I'd go with something simpler. If you want to track donations and programs and connections between them, there may be nothing better. If you have no technical abilities and no budget, restricted yourself solely to what it does as described exactly in the manual. If you can't devote about 0.25FTE to the constant maintenance and upgrades, don't go with it.
GiveSmart is a very easy-to-use platform that provides robust instruction on use but is so user-friendly that the instructions are mostly not necessary. I find it easy to update, change, and create all aspects of our page. For example, I first used GiveSmart without any instruction from a manager. She instructed me to look around and see what was going on. I was able to navigate the site effectively, and only found a few pieces for which I needed more instruction.
GiveSmart offers a well-made item section. Our gala has a silent auction made up of more than 170 items, and GiveSmart makes it easy to upload those items in bulk or add them individually. It offers every field I would want to have for an item and provides a comprehensive and adjustable front-facing-view for donors that is easy to manipulate.
GiveSmart's main page creator is easy to navigate and create the site you want. They provide helpful details like sizing for images and the ability to create buttons and links and different sections as our needs dictate. It's easy to adjust the colors and design to reflect our branding.
Lots of connection points. I can associate a contact with an organization, an event and a donation, easily bouncing between them and pulling reports accordingly. Love this!
This system has many more features than we will ever actually use but I love that because when we have a new idea or want to try something out we don't have to switch systems, we just have to dig a little deeper into salesforce and they probably have a solution waiting for us already.
Salesforce is great at training! I love their trailhead and have used it a lot, especially when I was just getting to know the system. It is easy, fun, informative, and always there to teach me something new. I can also go at my own pace instead of many people's models of training through webinars that are almost always at inconvenient times.
The distribution reports do not separate what campaign the transactions were for.
Revenue reports do not clearly state the CC fees for each transaction, which requires manual calculations.
We could not change the item a transaction was billed to if it was wrong. For example, if a donor made a restricted donation but was labeled unrestricted, we were told there was no way to correct it, so we had to keep track of those changes on the side.
For the most part, we are very satisfied with GiveSmart. There are some additional functions we'd like to see it have and GiveSmart has been responsive in the past to add new features that nonprofits are looking for. Their support teams and account representatives are very friendly and helpful. The ease of their system allows a competent person to enter the data and create campaigns without having to have much technical knowledge.
For the most part, GiveSmart serves our organization's needs for creating fundraising forms. It is especially useful for our peer-to-peer fundraising and event planning and registration efforts. The dashboard is relatively intuitive, and there have been improvements in creating forms and managing campaigns since shifting from Mobile Cause to GiveSmart Fundraise.
I think Salesforce has so much functionality that it makes it difficult in terms of overall usability. Once you can figure it out, it's a 10/10, it's just getting there. If you're willing to do the work to figure it out then you're golden. For what it's worth, I don't know if you're going to find something with this level of functionality that's easier to figure out
We never experienced any issues with outages, the system being down, etc. It's extremely reliable. That's very important when you're dealing with financial and personal information! We want to make it easy for people to give, and it's great that we've never had to worry about service issues making that more challenging/
We haven't had any issue regarding performance or reliability with GiveSmart. We don't integrate it with any other software so that issue isn't relevant. The pages load quickly and reports are completed almost as soon as you hit the "run" button. Overall, the system works as designed and is pretty quick when people use it.
When I did have to reach out for support it was not always easy to get ahold of anyone to help. There were also times when I did get help where I struggled to understand and be understood. Not a language barrier, but more of a not understanding what my problem was. I am not sure if it was a problem on my end or on theirs, maybe both, lol
I would say the support for Salesforce for Nonprofits is overall pretty great, as they offer many avenues to find the information you need and offer nonprofits the ability to work with Salesforce-trained volunteers or professional for free, which is useful especially during the customization process. I will say that I have often encountered situations where I needed to figure out certain information that I could not find even amongst the vast network of knowledge they provide.
GiveSmart provides great training videos on their system. Not everything is covered with their videos but their support staff are very friendly and knowledgeable. I would have given them a ten but not everything is covered in their videos and sometimes you have to find the right word to search for in able to find the right training video.
We just made the change using the band-aid approach. In other words, we just went for it and taught the users how to do it at our first event and went from there. 90-95% of people haven't used a mobile bidding software so most everyone was on the same stage of knowledge so implementing it was easy as people didn't have to re-learn anything.
We used DonorPerfect and Handbid in the past and they lacked all the features we needed and their customer support was insufficient. The user experience on these platforms was always a challenge. GiveSmart is more streamlined and we have had better customer support when we run into issues.
As a cloud native organization with no previous Microsoft infrastructure, Salesforce was a more logical and effective option for us. The suite of products was also far more comprehensive and required less customization. We were able to adopt a "configure not code" approach to our development of systems to support our mission that lowered the cost of upgrades.
For what GiveSmart is designed to do, the software works excellently. We haven't found something GiveSmart cannot do when it is used as designed. However, when GiveSmart is tried to be used as a total CRM, it doesn't do that but that is okay as it wasn't designed to be a total CRM but rather a mobile bidding software.
Our donors always want an easy method to donate before, during, and after our event—GiveSmart definitely gives them that flexibility.
Retaining the information that GiveSmart allows us is important, especially when we compile statistics and reports based on what was processed through our GiveSmart event site.
Salesforce for nonprofits is our source of truth for donor and member data.
It's made a world of difference to know we only have to look in one place for an address or donation history.
We have yet to connect Salesforce with our financial software (QBO) given the cost of the third-party connectors though I am investing a fewer lower cost options I have just found.
