Auctria vs Givebutter: Which is a better fit?

Speaker 1: Hello, my name is Cassidy. I am a board member and the co-chair of the New River Valley Home Builders Association Home Expo, and we use Auctria to run an auction for our charity every year, and I give Auctria five stars. Before we started using Auctria for our organization, we ran a pretty significant auction event, but we did all of it with paper, sort of the traditional way and adopted Auctria when we realized we could expand our auction success by offering online bidding and better access to sea items and more participants and just a broader reach for the whole items and organization. So we made that move a few years ago and it's been a great move for us. We looked at several different options before choosing Auctria and some of the main reasons we chose this particular program was the cost was great and worked for us as a nonprofit. We also have lots of features that were important to us, like being able to keep our donor information from year to year. So it's really easy for us to kick up the next event with Auctria because everything is stored and ready to go for the next auction. We're also able to keep all of our bidder information, which makes communication really easy. We can remind folks, "Hey, our next event's coming up, make sure your information is current and get ready to bid for our next auction." We love the interface during the auction. It gives us really great live updates and information and closing the auction is really easy. Our auction often happens over a very busy weekend, part of our big Home Expo event, and it's kind of a high stress moment when the auction ends and everybody wants to get their things and find out if they won. And closing the auction is super easy.It's kind of a one click, everybody's billed and we're ready to close and get things out the door to folks. So those have all been really, really important features for us. When we first set up Auctria, we used a lot of the tutorials that are offered through the site to kind of learn the ropes and get the hang of things. So there were some really great video tutorials that walked us through. One in particular that was really helpful was setting up our donor spreadsheet so that we could automatically import it into Auctria and have the auction pre-built out for us. So being able to use some of those resources out of the gate helped us get set up pretty quickly. But we've also had great customer service, so any questions we've had, we've just popped over a question through the website and gotten a response pretty easily and quickly as well. If you're considering using Auctria for your organization or event, I would jump on there and kind of play around and test it out a little bit. I've actually also used Auctria as a bidder for other organizations and I found that was a really great way to realize, hey, this is a really easy tool, really friendly to both the bidder and the organization doing the event through Auctria. And so if you can get on there and play around with the tools and test it out, watch those tutorial videos, those are really helpful. And then obviously if you've got the opportunity to be a bidder, I think it's really great to know that the other end, not just my end of creating the event, the other end is really user-friendly as well. And that makes your event a great success.

Melanie: Hi, I'm Melanie. I am one of the founders of Hearts for Honduras, and I would give Givebutter a four star rating. We used PayPal previously before using Givebutter, and what we found is it just really the cost of the fees was one of the big factors for us to look to change because we were going to get charged for every transaction. And so that was a big factor for us in finding something that passed on the fees, but a reasonable fee at that. Givebutter really is a platform that really supports nonprofits and does not charge us anything. So everything they do, we get to have a complete, basically a landing page where our participants can set up fundraising pages, we can fundraise for our upcoming trips, and also for our nonprofit in general. So just their overall support of nonprofits was a huge factor in being able to establish that, especially when you don't have very little budget to work with. So there is a little bit of a learning curve with Givebutter and just terms of playing around, how to set up your platform and set up your landing page. But once you get into the rhythm of it, it's pretty easy and it's easy to show others as well how to use. So that was a big... That's been kind of nice being able to teach our participants how to set up their own fundraising pages, but just a little bit of a learning curve when you're first starting off. So I would say that there's a lot of options out there. We did a lot of extensive research, compared the different platforms. Givebutter is right around the same in terms of the fees that they do charge for the processing of payments and fundraising dollars. They're relatively in that same ballpark of most. They're a little bit less. So that was a big factor. But really the big factor was the fact that there's no cost passed on to us to use the platform. So they raised their money completely through donations that donors make. So that was a huge factor for us in making that decision.