GiveSmart vs BiddingOwl.com: Which is a better fit?

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.

Heather: Hello, I'm Heather. I work with the Registered Nurses' Foundation in Ontario, and I'm happy to share my experience on BiddingOwl that I give a five star rating to. It was COVID that made us move our auction to an online service. We researched a few companies the first year, and found BiddingOwl to be the easiest to use and the one that best suited our needs. We had a couple of board members who made some suggestions the next year, and we looked into those. They were considerably more expensive, and had individual prices for everything that was added. For instance, if you wanted more than one picture, you had to pay per picture. BiddingOwl was adequate with the three pictures allowed for each item, and again, moderately priced, and we stuck with BiddingOwl for the next two years. We chose BiddingOwl after considering other options that we found online and that were suggested to us because it was easy to set up, it was a platform that we could see would be easy for our supporters to use and to bid on, and because it was moderately and appropriately priced, not charging for every little thing. It's been a great tool for us to raise funds for our foundation. We found BiddingOwl very easy to follow. The site itself is a straightforward platform. There's no real tricks. There's option, and you start off with the chance to explain your organization and our mission, and share a little bit of information, recognizing that while we would do the promotion of our auction, there are also people who might find the auction just off of the BiddingOwl site. So getting the items in to the system was very straightforward. The descriptions, the specific places to add information about delivering the items that were purchased and that we were able to specify that for each item because we had a number of different ways that we would get the auction items to people. We found the listing of bidders helpful, and we do have a number of organizations and individuals who donate multiple items, and we just pulled them off the list. And in the subsequent years, they were still on the list and we were still able to pull them down, update things when we needed to. So the overall, again, the process, the pictures are straightforward. They explained that it's easier and better to have the pictures the right size. They're clear about the directions for what makes a good picture of the different items. So getting it all set up and ready to go live was straightforward and easy to follow. Looking at BiddingOwl for a silent or an online auction for any not-for-profit, I do recommend the platform, and I have recommended it to folks that I know in other associations because it's straightforward, it adjusts to the number of items that you have available. And the staff are great at answering questions and explaining things very quickly and even more quickly... They recognize when your deadline is, deadline to go live, and it's like they're on top of that and ready for you. In terms of service from other similar kinds of services that we've used, their support, I think, can't be beat. And particularly in the first year, that was critically important, but has been helpful even in the subsequent years that we've used the program. It's a great platform. It's easy to use. We got lots of feedback from the people who bought things in our auction that it was straightforward, it was easy to register, it was easy to bid. They appreciated the fact that you can put in a maximum bid and leave it and not worry about checking in to see if you've been outbid. There were people who appreciated getting the notifications by text on their phones when they'd been outbid. A lot of the people who support our foundation are older than me, and I'm not very young, and don't use technology a lot, but they were surprised and pleased at how easy it was to use.