Excellent Choice

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

Awesome fundraising tool for our organization!

Our non-profit arts education organization has had a very positive experience with Silent Auction Pro. We look forward to using this great software and all of its features/capabilities even more as we move forward in 2020!

Pros

1. Excellent training and support by [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] and his Silent Auction Pro team! 2. This quality software system really did its job from initial communications, to auction set-up, right through event night and beyond with solid reporting! 3. Its affordable price, combined with superior customer service and tech support, made the decision to purchase a no-brainer-- especially for a committee of nervous new users!

Cons

There *is* a learning curve for newbies, as with any other software package. However, the online tutorials as well as ample documentation with clear procedures made it as painless as humanly possible to get up to speed and functional with it.

Round 2; Regrouping

I loved the software. We had used BidPal/OneCause prior but the cost model was unbearable for us this year. With Silent Auction Pro we pay after the first event; nothing upfront. Capped fee% and low fixed cost are benefits. Credit card processing (we used WorldPay) fees are lower (and no monthly fee), making the total cost lower. Software is feature-rich. This can be a double-edged sword as features can add complexity. Help is always available and phone support was awesome. Overall, the features are worth it. Ability to 'stage' or start a new event while keeping a recently finished event active for a bit would be a welcomed improvement.

Pros

Features, Performance and Support were all Excellent.

Cons

Registration and PW requirements for bidding . No import (from spreadsheet) capability. Understandable, but would have been nice. They do offer to import for you at extra cost. They must have had bad experiences... It turned out to be less an issue than I thought. They were very upfront about it and it was not a surprise.

Silent Auction Pro - basic auction software

Pros

Silent Auction Pro has features like image uploading and item organizing that make it useful for auctions.

Cons

Silent Auction Pro uses an unreliable payment processor, they do not give an opt out for saving credit card info, and there is no bulk upload for items.

Phenomenal Support

Our primary objectives were to: 1. Streamline the checkout process and make it easier for our donors. 2. Increase the size of our bids with respect to the Fair Market Value of the items. We achieved both of these objectives.

Pros

The product is great (and increased our bid-to-FMV ratio), but the support is phenomenal! In my "day job", I have been a software professional for 30 years. I have never seen the level of support that Silent Auction Pro delivered to us. They were very proactive in reaching out to make suggestions such as "you are now 4 weeks away from your event, so you should be thinking about these things...". They also offered and delivered a live training session at no charge for our personnel. When I called for help with a particular issue they often offered just to take care of the issue for me. That was especially helpful while we were in the middle of our gala/auction! The software provided all of the functionality that we had hoped for, as well as a number of benefits that we had not imagined. I highly recommend this as a solution to manage events which include an auction.

Cons

None that I can think of. We did a few things wrong this first time around, but that was because all of us have day jobs and did not spend adequate time to get up to speed and "didn't know what we didn't know". However the support staff did a great job helping us over those snags.