Nearly full event management by using this software.

Easy to use, customize and edit and update. Features offered have improved each year we have contracted with Givesmart. "One stop shopping" for event and auction management. We have utilized more features each year. What started as just utilizing auction management capability with limited effort into making the online auction site attractive has evolved to guest ticketing, table assignments, a highly customized auction site that reflects the event theme and with real time auction progress and bids scrolling on large screen ad televisions throughout the event venue to increase people's competitive bidding nature. After action information has been vital to determining what auction items had the most interests and highest profit margin. Has enabled us to better focus solicitation efforts for the next year.

Really very few cons for the software. Only limitation observed was limited printing options for auction item description for printing on card stock. There needs to be several options for the size and information/photo of the descriptive card tents.

Overall, we were very happy with our decision to move forward with GiveSmart. We recently renewed and extended our initial agreement for an extra two years.

The flexibility and detail that is offered with in the GiveSmart interface to admins is truly custom. We were able to set up our auction event and run multiple raffles, instant buys, and silent auctions along with our oral auction. The seating/reservations module was an amazing addition to the transparency and planning of our event. In the end, the team support from Givesmart made this transition and the overall event set up so easy.

The donor receipts are one per item and are not very custom or adaptive. This created additional work that should be captured in the software package.

Givesmart helps us to make attractive fundraising event pages that also allow for smooth communication with our donors.

The event landing page is very customizable and looks very high quality. On the back end it is easy to get the information you need plugged in for fundraising events. You can have an event page up and running in only a few hours time.

Some of the back end features such as table assignments and ticket purchasing do not always function together smoothly. If a person purchases tickets or donates offline it is not always easy to get that plugged in nicely on the event site.

I've worked with GiveSmart for many years -- from the time they were Auctions By Cellular, Gesture and now GiveSmart. I have also worked with competitors and GiveSmart is the best product on the market due to their easy-to-use platform, staff support throughout the event planning process, and their onsite staff teams.

GiveSmart has excellent staff support and they are always quick to respond to questions, timely with email responses, and most importantly their onsite staff is excellent.

Not a great platform for live auctions - still not good enough to substitute for an "old fashioned" paddle raise. Lack of customization (font size, spacing around images, content) opportunities for the auction displays.

We looked around for awhile at a lot of different products before we settled on GiveSmart. Ultimately this one provided everything we needed with the perfect value for our money. So glad I found it!

Very user friendly, all of the features we were looking for in a software program.

There are certain things we cannot change/update ourselves. We have to contact support and have them do it.

GiveSmart makes it easy to enjoy an event/fundraiser by taking care of all customer needs and questions.

The event page was a very clear and concise hub to drive people towards our silent auction. I loved the customization that allowed you to match the design of the link to your event, in addition to the generic donate button.

The fact that the back end of the items tab didn't show a photo preview icon on each line. Also, that there isn't a comprehensive final report you can direct download all at once. Instead, you must click into each category of results you want to see one by one and download.

Fantastic. Highly recommended.

Fantastic customer service. Like, seriously, the best. Better than any other vendor we use. The product is loaded with features, most of which we take advantage of -- auction items, auction packages, raffle tickets, event tickets, paddle raises, donations, users, registrants, etc. It's very intuitive to use; not difficult to set up a new event; very thorough and reporting capabilities; easy to process credit cards and receive payments...

The visual design is a bit bland. Could be more pretty.

I loved the platform and the interface. The customer service it fantastic - especially that they have people come out and help with your events that truly care about the nonprofit sector. They really went above and beyond to help us close the auction and get the data inputted correctly!

I really liked the salespeople and the way thy helped you with anything you needed. This is the best customer support I've seen from all mobile bidding sites.

My only negative is the price for small nonprofits. If it were more affordable, I would use them again and again!

Our overall experience with GiveSmart was amazing. It was what helped us raise money right when the pandemic lockdown had started. We chose GiveSmart because of the good reviews and one other person we knew having used this product giving a good review. We had to make a decision quickly and chose GiveSmart and it was the best decision! I have referred several nonprofit organizations to this product.

GiveSmart is user friendly. We had approximately a month before our annual auction and we were able to pivot from a live event to a virtual event DIY style.

There were a couple of features that we would have liked to see; a customizable graphic that counts our "paddle raise" (which in our organization is a reverse auction), and being able to highlight our larger sponsors (give them more visibility for their sponsorship)

It has been a great relationship for us. We had onsite support for our first event and she was fantastic (and kept me sane). They are usually timely with responses. The only difficult time was when we were sent the wrong cc swipers for an event. Luckily we were able to get it rectified prior to the event date but I kept getting pushback as it was something we were doing incorrectly instead of having the wrong equipment that GiveSmart gave to us directly.

+It incorporated everything we needed from ticket sales, to auction items to general donations

-The display banner that showcases the donor names isn't customizable. You can change the color of the font or other display features.

Unfortunately, it wasn't a good experience as we had a lot of damage control we had to do due to the automated emails being sent out through this software.

I like the ease of use in uploading auction items. I also like the customer service we received when we had questions.

It sent out notices to our guests (when we were changing their seats on the seating chart, etc.) without our knowledge. It also sent out invoices and receipts without our knowledge at the end of the gala (there were some whom we were working on case-by-case basis). Also onsite registration was not easy to do through this software.

Our experience with GiveSmart has been extremely positive and I would (and do) recommend them to others. I would like to see more proactive information from GiveSmart for event planning in our new virtual world - the competition is in my email daily with free webinars and informative tips.

Indefinite access to past campaigns Reports and analysis Attractive event website Ease of use by participants (in most cases) Ease of uploading items (in most cases except for raffle items) Excellent support

- Inability to stratify sponsors - We have 5 tiers of sponsors but are limited to only standard & premium categories. Would be optimal to highlight them at their exact levels, especially title and top tier sponsors. - Inability to bulk upload raffle items. - Inability to bulk upload images. - Inability to reorder campaigns on the Campaign page. All our 2021 events appear first - I'd like to view active/current campaigns first. - Inability to copy an individual item from one campaign to another. - No log of sent text/e-mail blast messages. - Item title character limit is too short. - The term "User" for event participants/donors is confusing - they should be titled as participants/donors in their own category. It's confusing when every GiveSmart staffer who provided help is included in the list of event participants and donors. - If you are on the dashboard page of a specific campaign and want to get back to the main Campaign page, you have to click on your name in the top right corner. When you click on this, it gives you the options of Profile, GiveSmart Events, JBWS, Logout. "GiveSmart Events" is the intuitive choice but you have to click on the name of your organization (which for us is JBWS) to get back to the Campaign page. - Please add an option for guests to choose to be invoiced for donations. We have many donors give through foundations that need an invoice for the donation to be processed. We need to let them give through GS without our manual intervention.

The software is intuitive to use and streamlines so many of the processes that eat up your time when you have to do them manually; we eliminated so many Excel spreadsheets, thanks to everything being easily captured, managed, and tracked right within the software - from auction packages to ticket sales to even the seating and meal requests. Beyond the software, Gesture's customer service was incredible; from the initial sales call all the way through to the event itself, every single Gesture representative we worked with was attentive, helpful, and genuinely interested in helping us have a successful event - which we did. In just the 48 hours since the event concluded, I've received multiple compliments from guests who expressed how "smooth" the night ran and how "seamless" their experience was, from check-in to bidding on auction packages to purchasing raffle tickets to checking out when they won auction packages. We will definitely be using Gesture again, for next year's event!

Since our event is coordinated by a mix of paid staff and volunteers, it would be helpful to have an administrative access level in Gesture that is "view only" - currently, it's all (full admin rights) or nothing. It would also be helpful if raffle winners could be "drawn" right in the software, rather than needing to use a random number generator on a third party site.

Streamlined auction process before, during and after event. We went "paperless" and didn't have to fuss with paper bidding forms and associated headaches. We raised more than $10,000 more than we ever raised before using an online bidding system. We look forward to using again next year!

Very easy to navigate the dashboard to build fundraising website and to upload pictures and descriptions of auction items. Bidders loved how easy it was to register for the silent auction, and we benefitted greatly from launching the website and opening the auction prior to the event. There were many easy tutorials for our volunteers to watch so that they could get comfortable with the online bidding system, and they were well equipped to handle questions from guests. We benefitted greatly from having an onsite specialist with us at the event. She was extremely professional, smart, highly capable and knowledgeable about the software, and she worked nimbly and confidently throughout the night to answer any questions and even offered suggestions that contributed significantly to the success of our auction - and on top of that, she was very enjoyable to be with! After the event, we were able to easily close our books and to process all payments (a significant improvement from many years of dealing with cash and checks and tracking down payments) and to run reports providing incredible data for us to review and learn from.

I cannot think of anything to improve this software. It was perfect for our event - simple to use and very geared toward serving a volunteer-based event!

GiveSmart has been a great resource for our online fundraising. We used the platform prior to the pandemic, and have increased our usage since. With endless access to the platform during the subscription period, we are able to come up with unique ways to fundraise and know the platform will help make them happen.

GiveSmart is fairly intuitive and easy to use. There are a lot of guides that are easy to follow. The GiveSmart team has been very helpful in assisting our organization transition to virtual fundraising during the pandemic. GiveSmart has offered numerous webinars filled with tips regarding virtual fundraising. We love being able to customize many aspects of the platform to fit our fundraising needs and like that we have endless possibilities and uses for the platform. We are grateful for the ease of pulling comprehensive reports. This allows to easily and accurately move the data into our data collection system.

Be sure to read and understand each feature and ask questions if something is not clear. We had an issue thinking that a feature on the auction meant one thing, but in reality it meant something totally different. The GiveSmart team was able to help us easily remedy the problem the miscommunication created on our end.

The past two years have been a good experience with Give Smart. The support team and the Customer Service Teams are professional and extremely helpful.

The software based on our users feedback is easy to use. Once someone is registered they appreciate their data remains in the system. We did a virtual gala this year, and with help from the Give Smart team, we were able to set up our entire gala on Give Smart with not alot of effort. The mobile bidding is easy for users for our silent auction and this year being virtual for our "live" auction as well.

We feel that some features could be improved. One is when adding sponsors even though there are two categories, premium and standard, if you add a premium sponsor after adding other sponsors they show up in random orders. It would be helpful if once you added the sponsors you could drag and drop them in the order you would like them, especially since most sponsorships are based on a dollar range. On the global settings screen and the home page there should be more flexibility with fonts and ability to add additional items not just the specific ones that are there like location and date and time.

Overall our club's experience with its fundraiser using GiveSmart was great. You can have several administrators to share the load of work when you are an all volunteer organization. Our

The Customer Service is right by your side in setting up your site and they provide a great "help" base with written and video information. Once you get the hang of uploading your donations it's quite easy. I like that once your account is secured, you can begin working on the site. We start up on our next event in August just lining things up and continue to refine it until our event in April. Takes the pressure off of the volunteers.

I have sent suggestions based on a previous product we've used to their IT and wish I would hear back. I also would like to see the company provide a separate pricing index for organizations that are strictly community service and all volunteer. We're working hard to raise funds for our community and have no hired leadership. Makes it tough. A drawback for us has been the ability to create and send a personalized thank you identifying the object and tax information to donors as I upload their donation. We have to do an extra step outside of the product.

I had a wonderful experience with this software. I found it was easy to make my own auction site.

The gesture software is very easy to learn. I am new to the website and it only took me about an hour to figure everything out. Everything is pretty self explanatory. I had to create an auction site for a silent and live auction. Adding each item came with ease. When you go to add an item each section is categorized telling you exactly what information to put in. I also found it very easy to go back and change things if I had made a mistake. The site is easy for others to use and view the auction items I posted. I felt that the crowd we were trying to attract was the older generation of people and this site allowed them to have the ability to see each item without complication. I really liked that the software told you who was watching certain items. It was easy to generate an item sheet in order to print them out and post them for our auction.

I think my least favorite thing about this software is trying to figure out when someone bids higher than you and who it is. I found that I had trouble when I bid on an item. My friend and I really wanted an item and we kept out bidding each other but didn't realize we were the only two bidding. I wish it would tell you who is bidding against yo.

The first year, we did not feel the support was adequate on the night of the event. Last year, we had a dedicated GiveSmart person in our organization and we were very satisfied with the support we received. Also, the support from the beginning of the campaign until weeks after was very good. We are a nonprofit organization composed of an all volunteer workforce. We needed help and it was available. We are using GiveSmart again this year. We look forward to another successful event.

We use this software for our annual fall fundraiser. We utilize the functions for Silent Auction, Live Auction, Ring The Bell, First Choice, etc. it is extremely easy to add, delete and correct items. Downloading the reports to Excel take seconds. If mistakes are made, they are easily corrected. Our members enjoy using the product, even though many of them are not computer literate. It’s easy to use! We have had a lot of success using this software.

I wish the list of available reports had names that better defined the reports.

I like that you can use it for multiple fundraising campaigns. I also liked the presentation view so participants can bid and watch simultaneously on one screen.

A little clunky. Not super user friendly. I needed guidance and tips and tricks for best practices but I don't feel like I really received that. I feel like there were a lot of features and customization options within the site that I didn't take advantage of because I didn't know how best to utilize them. I also didn't find the help pages that useful which was where I was directed to everytime I asked for help. They need to be more descriptive overall. I also didn't realize that our tax preferences weren't properly set up until after the event was over and it was too late to do anything about it. My nonprofit ended up eating the tax that should have been charged to the purchaser (according to the law) and we lost over $1000 having to pay that bill ourselves. I would suggest including this to planning agendas for future events. Or reset the default.

The experience with Givesmart has been very good so far. The support team is always good about answering questions or getting back to me quickly when we are the middle of an event crisis. We have used the on-site staff to help us at the live events and I cannot say enough wonderful things about how smoothly our event ran, the helpfulness of the staff and the ease of keeping the data accurate during the event.

The software is pretty user friendly. There are various options for reporting tools to access the data stored per event which makes it handy for when I need to reconcile an event.

The option for customizing the home page is still not as easy to arrange as I would like it to be.

GiveSmart support is always quick and helpful. Overall GiveSmart works for us, but I wish it was a little more user friendly on the admin side for sponsorship groups and groups of tickets.

This system works very well for us for its silent auction capabilities. Easy to use and increased our revenue from a paper system. Also great for instant buys (wine pull, raffle tickets) and donations. Easy to use system for guests.

I wish there was more flexibility in the ticket purchasing side. Guests that are part of a group of tickets that have been pre-purchased are not able to go on to update their own information. This makes the check-in process longer as we try to capture the information that is needed (addresses). Did not like having to buy their specific swipers at such a high cost to use once a year.

Overall, this software has helped us organize our dinner auction better, have a faster checkout and engage our guests earlier.

Easy to use. Downloadable reports. Mobile friendly

Entering items and descriptions are very time consuming. IT would be nice to figure out a faster and better way to do this

I have recommended this product to quite a few non profits for the ease of use and the fact that it combines several event planning tasks into one platform.

The software allowed us to get rid of excel sheets and a separate ticketing vendor. We like the auction capabilities and simplicity of use. We like that Gesture makes enhancements and improvements based on user feedback. We like the ability to use the helpdesk chat function when we have a question. We like the dashboard and reports. Unrelated to software , but a nice customer service perk is that you have a rep designated to you.

A few improvements can be made (as with any software) and when I suggest them, they are escalated. I have been very pleased over the years and plan to continue to use Gesture.