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Community foundations, private foundations, education foundations, associations, higher education organizations, corporations, etc.
Small and medium-sized nonprofits love Givebutter, including charities, service organizations, faith-based, schools, universities, sports teams, companies and hopefully your group too!
I love the ease of being able to work with applicants and evaluators in an easy way. Communication, documentation, and management is easy through SmarterSelect's software.
It is not until the email is opened that the recommender sees that Anthony is the actual person applying for the scholarship. This is often confusing for the recommenders.
It's easy, functional and a good value for the money. It's also great for several audiences to use, such as young teenagers and older adults who aren't too comfortable using technology.
There have been issues with individuals accidentally creating admin accounts rather than applicant accounts.
It's easy to use, customer service is fabulous, I really like that we can make changes/revisions to our application, does not require IT help.
Any issues have to be dealt with via email/chat. Sometimes it is a lot quicker/easier to explain a problem by talking rather than writing.
There are a lot of great things about this software. I enjoy the ability to customize the site easily, even for those without any sort of web-design knowledge.
We ALSO added references as a required part of the application. This cut down on time we spend on the phone tracking down references and writing them.
The back-office dashboard is impressive, featuring customizable reports and the ability to track all your donors effectively.
There were some issued when I was trying to transfer the money back to the cause. It was a bit confusing to figure out how to access the raised money.
Everyone is so caring, cheerful, helpful, and capable. The response time is excellent and they listen to all my suggestions and put them on a list for developers to work on.
Unfortunately donations are tax deductible but most users will pay the difference in tax so that the organization can still raise the same.
Givebutter was a great auction platform that was very easy to use, they were very helpful when setting up and finalizing everything was all done by Givebutter.
Certain product features are limited (i.e. inability to customize certain fields and forms).
IT ALSO FREE - the best price for Nonprofits. We are currently using Givebutter for our annual gala, and love the functionality, easy integrations and helpful customer service.
Had trouble at first with adding the video but it ended up working out.
Darla: Hi, I'm Darla. I'm the Executive Director of a nonprofit and I give SmarterSelect a four out of five. We were using online papers for our scholarship application process, and we wanted to go online. So we had also reviewed Academic Works when I was also reviewing SmarterSelect, and Academic Works was more expensive and didn't quite have everything I was looking for. We are a small staff of two, so that means we wear many hats on a daily basis. And as you can imagine, saving time and efficiency is very important for small non-profits, so SmarterSelect offers the Scholarship Matching Questionnaire feature. This 20 question feature allows our applicants to be matched to more than 80 scholarships that we offer. So this was a very valuable tool that really attracted me to SmarterSelect. As you can imagine, matching those students manually was very time consuming. So that was one problem that SmarterSelect helped solve. Another problem that we have is, reaching our college students consistently. They're not very good about replying to emails, so SmarterSelect has the messaging feature. Not only does it offer the email messaging, it has the option for us to text message our students and reach them more quickly. So that's huge for us to make sure we're able to stay in communication with them. And another problem that SmarterSelect solved was, as we were wanting to go online with our application process, and especially during COVID-19 pandemic, we were able to have the students apply online for the scholarships. And as our staff was working remotely, we were able to review and process and communicate with the students. One thing I liked about SmarterSelect was, they offered a free trial. So I enrolled for that and was immediately connected with a technician, I believe his name was Roger. Roger was so helpful. He talked with us. He helped us with the online preparation of our unique programs, helped answer our questions, and the integration of taking our application from paper to online was very customizable. And their customer support really helped us in the initial stages and even throughout. This is year four for us using it and each year it seems like we have different questions and they're always able to help us through that. So the integration has been wonderful. Most scholarship programs are very unique in their own programming and the nice thing about SmarterSelect is that it's very customizable and you can develop the application however you need it to be. You can ask whatever questions that you need to ask and having the Matching Questionnaire as an option to help in the process of matching the student to specific scholarships was a huge selling point for me. And I would highly recommend that if you are in a scholarship program and you have several different scholarships to award with all different types of criteria, SmarterSelect is very workable, very customizable and very affordable.
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.
SmarterSelect
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