Silent Auction Pro Software

Simplifies the whole process of putting on an event and helps us to have more successful events.

Pros

Easy to use. Very User friendly. I have used this system for 6 events and have customized it for multiple types of auctions.

Cons

Wish it would build a customized web site for the event. It would be nice to have a dedicated website that would provide links to ticket sales, online auctions, View live autions item and advertise our sponsors.

Helped us run our best auction to date, with virtually no line at checkout, even though we had almost doubled our attendees from the prior year.

Pros

This is terrific software, especially for a smaller nonprofit. What sold the software to us is that when I inquired about it online on a Saturday, I got an immediate phone call from the owner of the company and software developer. This was very typical of all interaction with this company throughout our use of the software - we got immediate responses from support when we had questions, they understand that auctions happen on weekends and support needs to be available then, and when we found a few quirks in the software they were repaired immediately, often by the developer personally. We previously used Greater Giving and BidPal; all three have features that I like and don't like, but overall SilentAuctionPro is by far the best value for the price. The a la carte pricing is a huge benefit for nonprofits like ours that cannot use all features (i.e. online bidding). Overall, from last year to this year (BidPal to SilentAuctionPro), we went from about 100 to 195 attendees, and from our worst checkout ever to our best. The instruction files, help menus, videos, etc were by the far the best of any nonprofit software we have used. We were invoiced after the auction for the software, which could be of great benefit for a nonprofit just starting out with their first auction.

Cons

I would love to be able to have a website where people can enter their own donations and have them populate as donation items in the system. There were a few quirks like the system not liking quote marks and ampersands. I would like for there to be a bit more explanation on the page about the security of registering your card as many of my guests weren't comfortable doing so at the time of ticket purchase. It would also be great to have more customization options for the ticket sales page. Because of the way we run our auction, I would very much prefer to be able to assign bidder #s to a household rather than to an individual, but this would have been fine if we had noticed it earlier and planned accordingly. I would also like to be able to customize a bit more on the receipts, include ticket descriptions, etc. I would have set up our fixed price items differently than we were advised to as I don't think it was the best option for our auction and was a bit of a hiccup, but in fairness it was something we didn't get to in advance and did on the fly, so it would have been avoidable with a little planning. Although the reports are generally pretty great, I did have to piece together a few to get to what I needed which could be a pain for someone with less Excel experience. Really minor, but because we can't use online bidding, I print our bidsheets on carbonless paper. Would very much prefer that the half sheet option printed as a 2up because I ended up reformatting them in Adob

Pros

This software Keeps Us organized we went from a chaotic Messi checkout process to one with clearly defined procedures.

Cons

The look of this program is not super appealing at this very generic and Visually Bland maybe some updates to make things pop a little more might have the average user.

The ability to track our data more easily including donations and donor history. Electronic bidding was loved by many but frustrated some of our older guests and others who were reticent to give their credit card to allow them to bid. These are only minor issues that we will anticipate and prepare ourselves to manage better next year. The benefits far outweighed the challenges.

Pros

The program is intuitive. With a little practice, it is easy to find the tools I needed. The support from the Silent Auction Pro was immediate and always helpful. They also initiate follow-up calls to check on how we are doing. I truly enjoyed working with each of them.

Cons

My only disappointment is that we did not move ahead in our selection to Silent Auction Pro earlier in our annual process. We did not have the time to use the program to the fullest extent, You can be certain that we plan to begin now to position ourselves to use the program to its best advantage for our event next year.

Pros

Silent Auction Pro was a fantastic tool for us for our first online silent auction. It had enough flexibility to allow us to manage our unique online only use, it was fairly straightforward, and we didn't have a single bidder complaint about access. Our event went very smoothly!

Cons

The software wasn't always intuitive, so we ended up calling support a number of times. Often the answer was on the help page and we were either too lazy to find it, or didn't use the right search terms. That said, the support team was very quick to respond to our emails and calls, and very helpful.

Pros

The customer service from pre-purchase to event close out is exceptional. The software was intuitive & the training videos on the YouTube channel were more than adequate to train our volunteer staff.

Cons

We have no cons to submit.
Only the suggestion that while in check in function a credit card icon appear for the registrant allowing the check in team to confirm that the registrant has a credit card on file.

We raised the amount of money overall on our net!

Pros

I like the fact that the software texts or emails you when you have been outbid and that you can pre-schedule texts to go out to all the users on the day of your event.

Cons

In conjunction with the Pros, I dislike the fact that sometimes the system can get a glitch and the texts that get set up ahead of time do not get sent out even though you set them up correctly. Even with this, I'd use the group again.

Pros

I like the amount of support we receive. The amount of help available is very useful. I like all of the tutorials on the admin side.

Cons

ITs not the most user friendly. There are a lot of steps between registering and bidding. I felt like you needed to make sure people were registered then make sure it hey had a cc added and then make sure you could charge that card at checkout. Seemed like a lot of steps for the users.

Able to easily run a fundraiser with a silent and live auction

Pros

It's easy to use and makes my events go very smoothly. Guests are always impressed with the ease of check in and check out.

Cons

I think it's a bit pricey. I think the usage fee is a bit high and the commission to Silent Auction Pro could be lower. I also think there should be a discount for organizations who keep using it. There are other auction software companies out there and I might look to find a cheaper one.

Pros

I like that it lets us have an online auction time, table only time and then we can put what is left back on the site. I also like that it keeps track of who donates each item and which account it goes into at the end.

Cons

Having to take each item from a D to an A number seems like too many steps. If you could just make it an A number and then have to review it, it would be less steps.

Pros

That it's intuitive. Even people who have little computer experience are able to bid and pay for items that they want.

Cons

Appearance wise, it's kind of plain. Because of that, it's difficult to find specific items because everything is distributed the same.

Set up and run the event solely from volunteer committee without having to contract with other services for ticketing or check in/out. Handle high volume auction and attendee counts with smaller committee.

Pros

Donation entry was intuitive and loved that we could pull up items donated before so that we didn't have to retype everything. Demo environment allowed us to get committee members up to speed quickly and also allowed us to practice on some creative set up to meet our auction needs. Ticketing feature offered a variety of ticket options, some only displaying with a promo code, and love the addition of the asking for the email address for a ticket purchasers' guests - made it simple to reach all attendees with the marketing tools. Allowing the ticket purchasers to select the meal, or any other item we programmed made the table/catering coordination easy. Marketing features to promote the event to our attendees as well as help them feel connected to the event that was a couple months away. We set up an online auction the week before our event and people loved it! The online auction was open to the public so it allowed parents to share with friends and family that weren't planning on attending. We posted the event auction items on the online auction as previews to entice bidders to attend to get a chance at the rest of the silent and live items. Reporting is good, check in/out is all on one page, the system performance is great. Loved working in system even from our smart phone browser to check on things, make changes etc. any time, any where. Customer support was outstanding!

Cons

Special characters aren't allowed in donation title so we had to change once they got loaded as an auction item. Special characters in the description like " for inch threw off the formatting of the data export to excel. Reporting is good, but would have liked a few more reports or the ability to create ad hoc reports. We found one report provided this item, but another report provided this item so we had to export to excel and do look up functions which is tedious to do each time. Would like more options for formatting of bid sheets, and also would like to see some additional options with displaying, leveraging the "Donation Tag" feature which is critical for us as our teams need to be identified. Would like filters on lists as well.

Ease of check out at our benefit auction.

Pros

I liked the customer service. Excellent, responsive help. We had not used event management software before. The online support - youtube videos and the exceptional phone support made the journey quite painless.

Cons

Wish there was a way to capture our donor detail from Silent Auction Pro and export it to our database in eTapestry.

Pros

It was very easy to fix our set up mistakes, even in the middle of our event. Having users store credit card info in the system made check out very easy for us as well as our attendees. Having the option of attendees viewing auction items before event helped build excitement.

Cons

Many of our attendees complained that the software was a mobile website and not an app. We wished there were more info in the help section about how to give our users a better experience. For instance, turning your phone on the side will give you a better view of the auction item .

We love using SilentAuctionPro for our annual Benefit Dinner. Since it is cloud-based, all our volunteers can work in the system at the same time and can enter information as it comes in. We use the AuctionDay feature for check-out which has sped up our process tremendously! Also, the pre-populated thank you notes created after the event save a lot of time and man-power. Over all it is a great product for any organization.

Pros

Great way to track donations before, during, and after an event.

Cons

It is a bit cumbersome to switch from donor lists/address/etc., and the invoice/AuctionDay pages.

The main problem we were trying to resolve was the Check-in process and checkout process. Both were easily to resolved with Silent Auction Pro (SAP). Another common issue we had was the ability to grab more bids per auction item. We found a major increase in bidding per person with SAP. Along with this tool, we are now able to see what and who donated items as in the past we were not able to track this. Having the ability to now see the percent return on auction items which we never had before. Very easy to enter donation and auction items!

Pros

Checking in and out for all attendees. High use of Bidding and reporting. Ease of use entering donations and creating Auction items.

Cons

There was nothing that I disliked about this product except that it would need the ability to have multi winners.

Advice to Others

Support was out of this world and the help pages were very useful!

Silent Auction Pro allows us to manage a high volume of donators, donations, auction items, bidders, etc. Customer support is great, they are always available to answer my questions timely. Loved the phone call the day before the event to share the 800 number. Love that we can email receipts to winners. Love that we can notify winners via email or text once a table is processed. Like that you can have multiple users at same time, especially at event day, doing data input, checking in bidders, checking out winners.

Pros

Silent Auction Pro allows us to manage a high volume of donators, donations, auction items, bidders, etc. Customer support is great, they are always available to answer my questions timely. Loved the phone call the day before the event to share the 800 number. Love that we can email receipts to winners. Love that we can notify winners via email or text once a table is processed. Like that you can have multiple users at same time, especially at event day, doing data input, checking in bidders, checking out winners.

Cons

1) Certain characters are not liked by the program (inch symbol, & symbol), especially when exporting to excel. 2) Bid sheet area to write in bids is too crowded, would like options to modify bid sheet layout, not sure if we can or not but would like opportunity to export bid sheets to a file and add "NO BIDS" on back side of page 3) Price went up from last year, both module cost and %. 4) Would like more options to print vs export and when exporting to design what fields and sort order, especially on sold items 5) Dont like that when you create duplicate items that they are linked and then if one is not sold it cannot be deleted without deleting them both 6) When you update an auction item, you go back to the donation, update, then update auction item. It does not always take the updated title from the donation as the new title of the auction item. Cannot figure out why. 7) would like the name on the bid sheets to be larger font, as we had two bidders get the wrong cards and not know that it was not their name at the top 8) Would like bidders to write more clearly :) (I know, out our your control) 9) Would like a quicker way to see what auction items have no bids at the end of the event instead of scrolling through the page

Advice to Others

Customer Service is great!

We have used Silent Auction Pro for two years now. Our event is an auction for a small school. Silent Auction Pro reduced the amount of event prep time significantly compared to our prior software. User friendly system, allows one-time volunteers to quickly learn the system.

Pros

User-friendly and 100% on-line.

Cons

Nothing!

Advice to Others

Absolutely the best experience for the event managers and guests.

We had never had an auction much less an online one. The customer support is outstanding. Took us awhile to get the hang of it but help was just a phone call away.

I have worked with the support team and the Silent Auction Pro team over the years and the program and the team are fantastic. The application does exactly what it is supposed to and the support team is there to help when you need them. I highly recommend this product.