Raklet vs Givebutter: Which is a better fit?

Dave: Hi, I'm Dave. I'm the founder and principal at Watermark Business Partners, and I'm using Raklet to put together a community for my clients and partners. I give these guys five stars, because the functionality is really, really strong for such a cost-effective and reasonable entry-level platform. I'm excited to get this in place and really impressed and encouraged by what I've seen so far. So as far as other alternatives, I think the one piece that I'm using elsewhere is the learning and online course digital content component. So for that right now, I am looking at Easy Course. Also, I use sessions for my online meetings and bookings, webinars, all that kind of stuff. So I think there's an opportunity here to maybe bring some of these tools together into one place, but for me right now, from a directories and community component, I think Raklet's a really good, easy to implement, robustly solutioned starting point, and I like what I see. So for me, I chose Raklet because I'm new to this. I've never built something like this before. I'm not someone with a tech background. I come from a big corporate, a former banker who is new at the entrepreneurship thing and is even worse at technology. So as a newbie, I couldn't justify a big investment, but at the same time, I didn't want to go with something half-baked to the market. So I thought their pricing approach and value proposition was really reasonable. I don't mind commission payment on payment processing. I think that's fair. But some of the other bigger guys out there, like Brilliant Directories is another example that I considered, some of them are quite expensive, and I need to get comfortable before I can justify that investment. And right now with Raklet, I think it's a great place to start and really, really reasonable. I'm not fully. I haven't deployed the tool yet, but from an onboarding perspective, they do have fairly strong community supports and resources available online, so I've been impressed by that. Some maybe take a little bit of digging to find online, but that's, I think, often the case with just put anything. There's more than I probably expected and perhaps more meaningful, the tool is sufficiently easy to use, that I haven't found myself looking for help very often in the first place, which is really the key. So my number one recommendation for others considering Raklet would just be to really go through all the learning material first, and I think the onboarding process will be a lot smoother. There's a lot of great content there, and I found that even though I was able to figure things out for myself as I went, I think it would have gone a lot faster if I had taken the time to look at their resources, because they're really impressive and shouldn't be taken for granted.

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.