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Greater Giving vs GiveSmart: Which is a better fit?

Updated on January 23rd, 2025
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Summary
Features in Auction
38
Best performer
40
  • Event Tracking
  • Image Library
  • Receipt Management
35
40
  • Shipping Management
User satisfaction
4.3
User reviews90
Ease of use
3.8
Functionality
4.1
Value for money
4.2
Customer support
4.6
4.5
User reviews207
Ease of use
4.4
Functionality
4.2
Value for money
4.3
Customer support
4.6
Price starts from
--
Yearly subscription
Free version
Free trial
Yearly subscription
Free version
Free trial
Best for

Greater Giving works exclusively with registered 501c3 schools and nonprofits - offering integrated solutions to help simplify your auction gala, streamline check-in/check-out and raise more funds.

Nonprofits, Schools, Universities, Hospitals, 501(c)3

User reviews
pros & cons
1 / 4
View Reviews
1 / 4
View Reviews
Video reviews
video-8b27d13a-ddf7-4aa1-1e5e-08dced758cf4
Kevin H
Director of Advancement
5.0

Kevin: Hi, my name's Kevin. I'm the development Director at Community Action Agency, and I would give Greater Giving five out of five stars. I'd used OneCause before and thought it worked well, but was a little more difficult on the back end to really get the system working, created some issues logging in for the guests at our event, and it didn't have as clean of an interface and kind of a forward-facing side of things for our gala that we did, and it made it difficult for our guests to bid on the items that they wanted to. I had used Greater Giving in the past at a different organization and had experience with that, got great feedback from the guests at our event that they liked that they were able to do that on their phone. They got easy reminders. It was easy to log in, and they were able to skip the registration line and get right into the event because they knew all the information right there on their phone. So when I was struggling with the other platform, it was an easy choice to go back to Greater Giving. And Greater Giving has a much better price point than a lot of the other systems that are out there on the market. It's been very easy to get Greater Giving integrated into the organization. We use Bloomerang as our CRM, and have been able to export our guest list and donor information over into Bloomerang very easily with the reporting functions out of Greater Giving. It's been great to have the chat and the phone support from Greater Giving. It's nice to be able to get folks when you need them and solve problems right away so that we don't have to leave our guests and our donors waiting. I think with Greater Giving, advice I would give is watch a lot of the tutorials. Try out some of the functions yourself before you get fully into your event so that you're comfortable with it, that you understand how to use the software. And also train a number of other people in your organization so that it doesn't just rely on one person, but you have a number of people that can work together as a team to create the event within Greater Giving, to be outwardly facing with your guests, but also utilize the great support that Greater Giving always has.

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Kierstin W
Donor Relations and Events Director
2.0

Kierstin: My name is Kierstin. I am the donor relations and event director. And I give GiveSmart a two-star review. And for more reviews, you can check out the link below. So before GiveSmart, we were using 501 Auctions. And we were looking for something that would give our guests the ability to bid on their phones. So we wanted to go away from pen and paper and have more user functionality during the event on the phones for guests. So we chose GiveSmart because you could upload all of the auction items through your computer and guests could view them from their phones and we no longer had to have pen and paper bid sheets. In addition to that, they had a lot of other event management functionality that I really liked. Some of that was that you could set up a text-to-donate number, which is a six-digit number that they could text during the event itself. You could set up individual fundraising pages per campaign or per event. And they had great attending management so I could track the different audiences when they were coming in, communicate with them directly. All of these reasons made GiveSmart a great choice. GiveSmart was fairly easy to onboard with. I didn't have a whole lot of issues getting set up. The dashboard itself was really easy to navigate and it was fine. So for someone looking to purchase GiveSmart, I would recommend that it's good for really simple fundraising events. And if you have needs like peer-to-peer fundraising and auction and text-to-donate, it's great for that. They really encourage you to use all of the functionality. So I would be very upfront with your needs and your timeline. In the beginning of the planning process, we had a situation where they were trying to push a lot of functionality on us really late in the planning process, causing more stress, trying to set up phone calls and meetings I didn't need. The auction features were okay. We actually ended up not using it at all. I think we went back to pen and paper that year because when I actually got into the platform I saw that it was not what I was expecting. It wasn't presentable to a guest at our really nice event. So again, it's great for a really simple fundraising event if it's like for a kids-focused nonprofit or something, but for a more upscale event that needs a little bit more build-out, probably not your best option. We had a lot of seemingly simple functionality that had to be built out on the fly. And so going back and forth with their customer support team wasn't very fun.

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User interface
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Greater Giving

Top Features
38/40
  • Real-Time Monitoring
  • Shipping Management
  • Absentee Bidding
  • Activity Dashboard
  • Alerts/Notifications
  • Attendance Management
  • Bid Management
  • Billing & Invoicing
  • Buy Now Option
  • Campaign Management
  • Catalog Management
  • Credit Card Processing
  • Customizable Branding
  • Donor Management
  • Electronic Payments
  • Email Management
  • Event Management
  • Event Scheduling
  • Event Ticketing
  • Event Tracking
  • Image Library
  • Inventory Management
  • Live Auction
  • Membership Management
  • Mobile Access
  • Mobile Alerts
  • Online Auction
  • Online Bidding
  • Payment Processing
  • Proxy Bidding
  • Real-Time Notifications
  • Receipt Management
  • Registration Management
  • Reporting & Statistics
  • Reverse Bidding
  • Search/Filter
  • Silent Auction
  • Social Media Integration
  • Watch List
  • Website Management
See All features
Hide Auction Software Features -

GiveSmart

35/40
Show Auction Software Features +
Greater Giving
Deployment
  • Cloud, SaaS, Web-Based
  • Desktop - Mac
  • Desktop - Windows
  • Desktop - Linux
  • Desktop - Chromebook
  • On-Premise - Windows
  • On-Premise - Linux
  • Mobile - Android
  • Mobile - iPhone
  • Mobile - iPad
Support
  • Email/Help Desk
  • FAQs/Forum
  • Knowledge Base
  • Phone Support
  • 24/7 (Live rep)
  • Chat
Training
  • In Person
  • Live Online
  • Webinars
  • Documentation
  • Videos
GiveSmart
Deployment
  • Cloud, SaaS, Web-Based
  • Desktop - Mac
  • Desktop - Windows
  • Desktop - Linux
  • Desktop - Chromebook
  • On-Premise - Windows
  • On-Premise - Linux
  • Mobile - Android
  • Mobile - iPhone
  • Mobile - iPad
Support
  • Email/Help Desk
  • FAQs/Forum
  • Knowledge Base
  • Phone Support
  • 24/7 (Live rep)
  • Chat
Training
  • In Person
  • Live Online
  • Webinars
  • Documentation
  • Videos
Greater Giving
  • By Global Payments
  • Located in United States
  • Founded in 1983
GiveSmart
  • By Community Brands
  • Located in United States
  • Founded in 2017
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