Auctria vs The Giving Block: 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.