GiveSmart vs KonfHub: 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.