What are Panorama users saying about the software?

I love the software, I run an event entirely on my own each year & the platform is so user-friendly

Pros

When publishing prizes on line, the system guides you through and explains what each question means. It's very user friendly

Cons

I had a lot of trouble this year loading pictures to illustrate my items. I've never encountered so many error messages as I did this year!

The Ronald McDonald House in Baltimore, actually the one and only RMH in the State of Maryland, is hosting its first 5K event next month. This is the first time we have used fundraising software for an event. We researched a couple of different software packages prior to choosing FirstGiving. Based on the feedback we received from our event participants, the software has been very easy to use, which is very important to our Charity. We wanted to choose software that people would be willing and able to set up on their own. Our success and experience with FirstGiving has been great! One of the criteria in selecting fundraising software for our Charity was support; what type of support would be offered and at what level? Well, we are pleased to pass along that FirstGiving has EXCEEDED every expectation in terms of support and response to our questions! From day one to now (one month prior to our event) Nick and Camille in the Support Center have not only answered every question I called or emailed about, but they did so quickly and kindly. There was never a time when I was apprehensive about contacting them. One of the key aspects to a successful event is support and making sure that everyone involved with the event has a good experience. For our 5K, the capability of online registration and online fundraising was the key to raising key dollars to benefit the care of the Ronald McDonald House families. We are so excited about our 5K and looking forward to Race Day on April 15th. We would strongly recommend using FirstGiving as fundraising software; we are totally hooked and will continue to branch out and use this software in helping our Ronald McDonald House raise support in the future! Thank you FirstGiving, but a BIG THANKS to Nick and Camille for doing such a great job everyday in helping people and organizations like the Ronald McDonald House produce successful events!

2022 Ride

Pros

URL assignment to registered riders helps

Cons

The software is not user friendly for the lay person.

Falling Down In Service

I have had to complain twice about the same technical issue. The problem takes weeks to get fixed. People don't call back when they say. I won't use them again after this year unless I see noticeable changes.

Pros

Relatively easy to use and ability to generate reports. The money easily transfers into my account; no issues with that.

Cons

Some parts of the interface don't work and it takes weeks for the company to fix. Only three customer service people tend to the entire country; very poor efficiency.

Jumpstart - Artez

Random errors seemed to be fairly frequent requiring a lot of help from the support team, who were not always quick to reply or able to fix the issue.

Pros

Improvements to the peer-to-peer event pages made the site appear much less dated. These should be expanded to simple donation forms and non P2P events.

Cons

Frequent issue logging in, searching for a constituent was often difficult (can't search by email address for example, even though it's an available field), reporting not very customizable, can't manually push out receipts for monthly donors when they request them,

I've used this for a while and it is okay. I don't always get a response from customer support.

Pros

It's low cost, it was easy to put the donate widget on our website, you can store a fair amount of information in donor profiles.

Cons

Lack of customization options in the giving form, when downloading donations to GiftWorks, the memorial/honorarium fields do not format correctly, when using SmartEntry you can't include campaign information for donations. I have also at times gotten no response from customer support or had support that was completely unhelpful.

Terrible Product

This product is terrible. I can't say enough negative things about it.

Pros

None. Used to be sort of ok when FirstGiving and now is horrible since taken over by FrontStream

Cons

THis product is terrible. We will never use it again. The support desk is non-responsive. There is not even basic functionality such as pulling a participant registration list. There is no way to export data. OUr users/participants hate it. It used to be OK when it was FirstGiving and now it is atrocious.

I was a consultant for Giftworks desktop, which is now Panorama and in the cloud.

A fully functional system for a small nonprofit. The capabilities include the ability to manage volunteers, which is unusual for this level of software. Also, the ability to push a lot of the work to the constituents, so the need for back-end data input is greatly reduced. This is especially a benefit for a small agency.

Pros

They have been able to reproduce the excellent, user friendly software that was on the desktop and put it in the cloud. This is not easy to do. I have not implemented the new software but I do have a copy of it and have played with it a lot. One of the things they are conscious of is the ability to have the constituents access the software and have donations, events, and memberships done online, which many others have not been able to do. I always felt that the desktop version was easy to implement and use. There are enough ways to customize the end user experience that accommodate a lot of needed customizations but not so much that the software couldn't be implemented without a lot of customizing, which makes it great for a small organization, which was Giftworks' strength.

Cons

Because of what makes the software good, also makes it limiting for many users who require a lot of configuration. There are some very sophisticated systems that would be more suited for that type of need.

Panorama - Health Board use

Pros

The software is really easy to navigate, and when used properly very easy to use

Cons

The tutorials they released on updates are more complicated than they need to be.

Used as a School Data Tracker

Overall, Panorama works great for what we need it for: student data tracking. Students are easily able to go to the website and fill out surveys about their SEL growth and tell how they are feeling in both their home and school life. As a teacher, it allows us to see their attendance, their grades, if they are on track to pass the year, etc.

Pros

We use Panorama at our school to track student data, absences, growth, and scores. It’s easy to click on a student name and see all the vital information I’m looking for.

Cons

I don’t feel like anything is missing for the purposes that we use this software for.

Giftworks has been a very good fit for our small non-profit: cost wise, ease of use, and features.

Great way to keep up with donors, current and potential.

Pros

The ease of entering data and the connection to Mail Chimp are the most important features for us. The simple ways to pull and query data also rank high.

Cons

Some of the terminology is hard to understand and the documentation doesn't always clarify it. We're using the Membership module and would like to move to the Cloud version when it's available.

Long-time user with good overall satisfaction. Predominately small-to-mid size shops.

Pros

Easy to use notes section and ability to back-date entries allows to gather comprehensive data on a donor profile. Customized Smart Lists and Reports provide valuable data and support our ongoing efforts.

Cons

It's a CRM tool, so the data-entry is still a heavy lift. It isn't quite as intuitive as other software systems. It's still a solid software package.

We at Junior Achievement of the Upper Midwest have been using FirstGiving for the last few years for our biggest fundraiser, bigBowl. This is personally my first year running the event and I have been nothing but impressed with the support provided by FirstGiving. The bigBowl event has increased this year and we have over 3,000 bowlers. With the 3,000 bowlers come plenty of questions, which come through me, and I pass them along to the FirstGiving support team. I am beyond impressed by how quickly they answer my questions and make adjustments for our bowlers. Not only are they very timely (most of the time within a few hours), but also they are extremely polite. Even after the second or third email request I send to them on any single day, they have continued respect for the easiest question. I never feel like my questions are irrelevant. The support team helps me learn more about the program, which I am very thankful for. With the support of the FirstGiving staff and our increased knowledge of the site, we have increased our fundraising greatly from this time last year. I can't thank the support team and out account leader, Lucas, enough for all of their help in making the fundraising process VERY easy. THANK YOU!

Panorama

They are always a pleasure to work with and answer questions as quickly as they can.

Pros

It's easy to re-create events for success with proper templates. They also have some great videos for support.

Cons

There are some pieces that you just can't do in terms of high-level coding for website ease but I know this is an area they are working on.

We wanted to move to the Cloud version but the feature we needed membership was available

We used the desktop version for 7 years to manage donors, donations, memberships, classes and events

Pros

Nothing, we wanted to move to the version but the features we needed were never converted. We asked numerous times when membership would be available and never heard back.

Cons

Didn't convert the features were needed to the new version and no one could give us any idea when the features would be available. We converted to NeonCRM

We have been using Bidding For Good for many years and it just keeps getting better!

Pros

It's easy to use both as an administrator and for the bidder. I like the reports that can be generated. Also, the neat and clean look of the auction itself.

Cons

The payment processing has changed, but we are getting used to the new process. Staff at Bidding For Good has been very helpful.

Great software, but needs some fine tuning

The overall experience has been positive and does help us keep track of our donor database and donor amounts, which will help us create a capital campaign and other fund-raising opportunities.

Pros

I like the setup and ease of entry of donor information and tracking how much donors give.

Cons

Not very intuitive to use and creating thank you letters is not the easiest process. User documentation and support could be better.

I have been working with FirstGiving fundraising pages since 2004 when it was still named Justgiving, was still centralized in the UK, and was fairly new to the U.S. market. Online fundraising was in the infancy stages and we needed a way to do this without investing time and capital in building and maintaining our own system. FirstGiving was the answer for us. There have been many reasons why we "stuck" with Firstgiving over the years. The webpages are easy to build. The cost is minimal compared to other online fundraising pages we investigated. The donor data was secure. We did not have to deal with any credit card information. We would get a check every month from the active pages we had available. FirstGiving had a strong customer service and support staff. Most of the time, they were quick to answer my frantic calls. FirstGiving's pages were not set up to make it easy for them, but with the potential donor in mind. They were always asking the question, "What will encourage this person to give?" That made sense to us, but we really liked was the option for each donor to make a comment on the page that showed their support for the fundraiser. That's huge! Thanks, FirstGiving!

Awful! Declined over the years!

We paid $600 for this service for the fourth year in a row, and now we can't set up our event or reach a real person to help us. I'll look to sue the company for our money back if we can't get the help we need. This is the last time we will ever use Firstgiving/Panorama. Awful company. Too bad. It used to be good.

Pros

This service has declined over the years. Customer support is virtually unreachable.

Cons

The new interface is not stable with Safari. Trying to log into our platform with Chrome and Firefox and can't log-in. When you try to reset your password a "page does not exist" message pops up.

FirstGiving is awesome

Pros

This is one of the most easy fundraising software programs to master. Super user friendly and easily adaptable to any event or organization.

Cons

It can be a little tougher to import or export from the software for some reporting aspects. But, there are really not a lot.

They stole our money. Seriously.

Cons

We received donations via FirstGiving. The check we received from FirstGiving BOUNCED (seriously, bounced). They gave us some BS excuse about writing it from the wrong account but more than a month later and we haven't received our money and now they aren't answering our emails. We are out a substantial amount of money and our donors were defrauded. STAY AWAY FROM FIRSTGIVING AT ALL COSTS.

Works well enough

Pros

It's easy to use and reasonably priced. Because so many people use it, it's imperative that I not have to take a significant amount of time explaining it. FirstGiving is simple enough that I don't have to.

Cons

There's nothing that I don't like about it, although there are at least a couple of other products that are comparable, and it needs to do a little more to stand out.

tech support does not respond to requests for assistance

I am less than two weeks in and very frustrated. I signed on to this program because it used to be FirstGiving and they had a very responsive support and customer service department. I have been having issues for days and no response other than one email this am saying they left a voice mail for me, when there is no record at all on my phone of a call coming in from them. Had I known it would be this difficult getting tech support on the line or even fixing the issues and sending an email out, I wish that I would have checked out their support more carefully before signing on.

Pros

Their representative who helped me get acquainted with the program was excellent and took her time helping me understand how the fundraising platform works.

Cons

I have experienced glitches in the system, edits not able to be made as it is embedded in template, as well as and more importantly, my work not saving. Submitting tickets for support and making calls and getting only voice mail, with no return calls.

Easy to use. A convenient way to make a donation.

Pros

This product is easy to use, and provides me with a safe, secure and trackable way to make a donation.

Cons

I did not like the additional charge to the nonprofit, but I did like the fact that I could elect to pay the fee instead of having the organization I was donating to pay the fee..

FirstGiving review

Pros

They are easy to work with and we receive our money in a timely fashion.

Cons

I think that the percentage that they charge for their fees is a bit high. I realize they need to make money but I think their fees are one of the highest.