TrustRadius Insights for Classy are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
Classy has become a go-to platform for nonprofit organizations, offering a range of customizable features that cater to their fundraising needs. Users rely on Classy as an accessible and easy-to-use online donation portal, providing a seamless experience for administrators and donors alike. With its user-friendly interface and flexibility in donation options, Classy serves as a one-stop-shop for donors, simplifying the process of making contributions.
One of the key use cases of Classy is its ability to create appealing web pages for ticket sales, merchandise, and event registration. This empowers users to raise more money for their cause by attracting participants and supporters. Additionally, Classy serves as a reliable and low-cost option for primary fundraising, seasonal appeals, and peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns. Its customizable features allow users to create comprehensive and easily digestible campaigns for fundraising events, offering different donation levels and showcasing the impact of each donation option.
Classy's integration with organizational accounting management software further simplifies fundraising operations by consolidating them into a single platform. This eliminates the need for manual data entry and ensures accuracy in financial reporting. Moreover, Classy supports the entire operation by flawlessly integrating with CRM systems, improving efficiency with data gathering for donation renewals, stewardship, and tax purposes.
Organizations have found Classy to be instrumental in capturing and retaining donors worldwide due to its excellent customer service and fundraising resources. The platform's ability to bridge the gap between donors and bank accounts has helped organizations double their online revenue and grow their programs. With its continuous improvements, Classy strives to make fundraising easier for nonprofits by providing a seamless user experience and robust reporting capabilities.
Overall, Classy serves as a versatile tool for various fundraising efforts, including crowdfunding campaigns, special events, general fundraising, ticketed events, and peer-to-peer fundraising. It offers a user-friendly interface for both donors and administrators, supports multiple payment options, provides customization options for campaign design, and seamlessly integrates with other systems for efficient data management. Users appreciate the helpful and responsive customer service staff, making Classy a reliable choice for nonprofit organizations in their fundraising endeavors.
We use Classy for event management, peer-to-peer fundraising, crowdfunding & general reporting to learn more about our donors. For so long we had been depending on Facebook fundraisers to generate "community" support of our organization - but Classy provided a way for us to launch a more professional platform to get more interest from our community & social media followers.
Pros
Event management - easy check-in process & attendee management
Campaign customizations - choose which type of campaign works best for you
Easy, simplified reporting
User-friendly & fast
Cons
Reports can sometimes be too general
Likelihood to Recommend
We love using Classy for event management - especially now that they have the check-in feature with the Classy Live integration. We also love the use of the auction features, but most of our auctions are in-person, so we don't get to use it much.
We use Classy as an online fundraising tool for our health system. Classy makes it easy to have fundraising pages, whether they are in-depth landing pages or ticketed event pages, or just simple donation forms. We love how user-friendly it is for our donors and supporters, while also being easy to use for administrators in the back end.
Pros
Ease of Use
Customer Support
Aesthetically-pleasing templates
Variety of payment options
Variety of donation pages
Cons
Not a complaint, but I know Classy doesn't have Zelle or CashApp payment yet
Design vs. Edit in donation pages can be frustrating. Should be able to make those changes all in one page instead of going back and forth.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think Classy is a great solution for any nonprofit, whether large or small. With such great customer support, any organization would benefit from using the platform for campaigns, donation forms, donor management, events management, payment processing, and more. It is easy to integrate the platform with other fundraising softwares, which is very useful.
I use Classy for all of our online fundraising (giving page, p2p, crowdfunding, and ticket sales). This product supports our entire operation, and integrates with our CRM flawlessly. I am the manager of our development operations, so I oversee employees and volunteers who also use Classy to support our fundraising efforts.
Pros
Customer Services
Crowdfunding and Peer to Peer fundraising
Integration with Salesforce
Donor profiling
Cons
Could be more streamlined for users
Reporting could be more functional, less basic
Layout is clunky, but not unusable
Likelihood to Recommend
Classy is perfect for online fundraising - both for professionals and volunteers. If you have very specific reporting needs, I would not recommend it without integrating with a well-developed CRM. Their customer support, however, is very helpful and enthusiastic.
Classy is used as our main donation platform - for one-time donations, recurring donations, crowdfunding, and peer-to-peer campaigns. We chose Classy for its various payment options, donor self-service option, and user interface for both donors and administrators. It has solid integration with our CRM and supports the organization's ambitious fundraising operations. It has solid integration with our CRM, Salesforce (at the time of this review) which we have been happy with. It has an excellent internal reporting function, which has improved our efficiency with gathering data (for donation renewals, stewardship, tax acknowledgments, etc.) and also has pages that better help us foster a sense of community among donors. They have expanded their payment options since using the product, which has been a great benefit to us (now accepting Paypal, Venmo, ACH Bank Transfer, Apple Pay, etc.)
Pros
Donor Self-Service Portal - allows individuals to pause, start, and adjust their ongoing contributions as needed, as well as pull their own receipts.
Fundraising Campaign Templates - this has let us quickly make multiple pages for specific fundraising campaigns, especially useful during end-of-year when we have many donation pages within a given multi-channel campaign.
Mobile Responsive - provides a seamless experience and many payment options for those using mobile devices, including Apple Pay, ACH Bank Transfer, and Paypal.
Cons
Peer-to-Peer Campaign Template Options- certain design features require a more technical skillset or purchase of additional hours in order to implement.
The standard templates serve most uses, but users are somewhat restricted in moving around certain page elements.
Donation Acknowledgement Customization - wish Classy had the functionality to embed or upload our own graphics into the automated email templates for recurring acknowledgments so we can further personalize those communications.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
At our organization, we use Classy as our online site for donors to make generous contributions. We also use Classy as a tool for registration for various events we have throughout the year. Classy has been a breeze to use and makes running multiple campaigns at once very easy.
Pros
Fundraising.
Registering attendee's for events.
Tracking campaign progress.
Cons
More customizable features.
More visual user face.
Quicker user experience.
Likelihood to Recommend
For our organization, Classy has been able to meet all of the needs we have. As a non-profit, Classy makes the process for our donors simple and seamless, something that is of the utmost importance. As Classy users, we're very happy with how easy the platform is to use and navigate.
We utilize Classy for peer-to-peer fundraising and managing ticket sales for fundraising events. Classy is integral to our nonprofit as a large part of our fundraising is received through individual online donations. Classy addresses the need for an accessible, quick online donation portal, as well as for event management. It's easy to use for admin and donors, and I've never had issues that haven't been resolved in more than 24 hours by their support team.
Pros
Integration with third party CRM systems.
Easy and fast for donors to use - donors can chose from PayPal, Venmo, etc.
Easy to build reports.
Event pages are professional, easy to manage, and bug-free.
Cons
Occasionally the server goes down during busy times, but it's never lasted more than a couple of hours.
Likelihood to Recommend
Classy is great for continual fundraising throughout the year. The volunteers at my nonprofit create a page that they use for the entire year to fundraise in their networks. Each spring we use Classy for event planning purposes, specifically to sell tickets and track attendee information. It's great for fundraising events - the website is easy for donors and attendees to use, and you can customize it pretty much however you need. Plenty of freedom on the admin side.
We use Classy to collect and record funds raised during a peer-to-peer fundraiser. It helps to organize the fundraisers and their donors and keeps track of our current progress. It also allows us to promote our sponsors with hyperlinks. We can run reports to do data analysis in real-time as well as after the event is over. The users each have a page that they can use to collect donations without our need to control their fundraising.
Pros
Peer-to-peer fundraising
Sponsor advertising
Donor management
Multiple-program management
Cons
Some donors have a difficult time using online platforms
It does crash and need restarted sometimes
I wish it would work with Instagram fundraisers
Likelihood to Recommend
It is great with younger people and those who are at all tech-savvy. We do have some difficulties with an older population using the platform. But Classy lets you enter things off-line, so you can spend some time entering the information manually. I wish they had their own user hotline, instead, the user has to call you to fix problems.
We use Classy to create website that support various fundraising events across Canada. Each year, we run 10 or more peer-to-peer campaigns and another 20 or more fundraising events through Classy. Classy allows us to offer and manage web-based donations in a way that serves all stakeholders well. Easy integration with our organizational accounting management software serves our accounting department. Simple easy to use design options allow event managers to create a professional website with all the right information. Participants seem to find their user experience is straightforward and easy easy to navigate. With all of those three things being easier, we can focus on our priorities like recruiting participants and ensuring a quality event. We have seen increased participation since using Classy and having measurably fewer user problems means having more returning participants year after year. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Classy became a huge asset as we pivoted to fundraising in socially distanced context.
Pros
Simple design tools for campaign managers
Excellent Support Team
Overall website design easy to navigate for users
Integration with accounting software
Cons
I'd like a sidebar option for content that remains on user page as they navigate
Alternative look options for fundraising progress bar
More "how to" support for integration with Mailchimp
Likelihood to Recommend
If you need a website to support a fundraising event that has tickets, donations, or peer-to-peer capability, but your organization doesn't have an IT department that can create the solution for you - Classy is a great option for you. After various people being disappointed with our previous alternatives, all of our key stakeholders, both staff and volunteer, have been happy to thrilled with Classy.
We use Classy as our payment processor and fundraising tool. Classy has allowed us to mobilize our community through peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns, our main donation page, individual links for board soliciting and tracking, and (eventually) event ticketing. The platform allows us to easily brand pages that look incredible and communicate different needs for specific campaigns. There is also an email platform built-in for specific campaign solicitation, but we only use the email receipt feature. It is highly customizable depending on individual campaign/fundraising needs.
Pros
Peer to peer fundraising / crowdfunding campaigns = new donors.
Highly customizable and brand-able.
Ease of use on the backend (tracking/reports/donor info).
Cons
Classy is easy to use but could offer more flexibility by giving a coding option for more advanced users.
Some templates (like internal receipts) are unable to brand/change.
Would love a specific campaign type for recurring donors.
Likelihood to Recommend
Classy is well suited for an organization that has the structure and capacity to support large-scale peer-to-peer / crowdfunding campaigns. It takes a lot of marketing effort for these campaigns to be successful, even for someone whose full-time job is to plan and execute campaigns of this type. If your donors prefer to give via mail, Classy can be an expensive payment processor, so you really want to ensure that you're able to utilize their specific tools to gain and steward new donors for your cause.
Classy is our primary donation page and helps us customize landing pages for events and fundraising pages. We also have Classy integrated with our customer resource management, which helps us keep our data organized.
Pros
The support team is great and has excellent advice for using Classy in new ways.
The campaign pages are easy to set up, allowing extensive customization.
Cons
Sometimes their technical tickets take a while to resolve.
The customization of each campaign design is limited -- they all use a similar template.
Likelihood to Recommend
Overall, Classy has really upgraded our ability to adapt to what's going on at our organization and create pages to match.
