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Pros
Classy is very easy to use, from the moment it is set up. Implementation was relatively straightforward, and had a dedicated Classy representative to walk us through the process.
Overall Classy has been a great experience. We have multiple recurring donations that come through and the team provides great back end support.
I very much appreciate the chance to ask questions and receive answers in real time from a real person. Plus, the campaigns look amazing and are easy to share, edit, and create.
I love the engagement we as an agency can have with the donors or event go-ers. Classy's platform is wonderful and interactive.
Cons
They refused to cancel until next renewal date.
Price is WAY over market; customer service reps LIED about pricing offers; vendor lock is tough to get out.
Does not acceptBank ACH or paypal. You cannot even add a paypal button in the form instead you have to stick in a custom section under the body making it look ugly.
We constantly have fundraisers confused on how to set up their page. This has been a huge pain point.
Most Recent Video User Review for Classy
SEE ALL VIDEO REVIEWSClassy is an "okay" platform but not my #1 choice
Terry S.
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"Classy puts the fun in fundraising"
Overall: Classy makes it easy to create reliable and professional looking online fundraising pages.
Pros: Beyond the ease of use and wide array of features, Classy's customer service is outstanding. They always go above and beyond to provide value to the non-profit community. Their toolkits, whitepapers and blog posts are available free to all, and the customer and technical support is always available and helpful. All around great service.
Cons: The trade-off for simplicity, ease of use and reliability is a more limited array of options and features. The complexity of our events frequently stretches the capabilities of the software's standard features. That said, Classy support can sometimes offer a custom work-around.
"Online Fundraising Made Beautiful and Easy"
Pros: At my job, we administer a variety of charitable funds, many of which participate in different types of fundraising activities. Using Classy, we are able to tailor-make fundraising sites utilizing easy-to-use templates that address each of our donor's wants and needs. I often tell donors that their Classy page can serve as a stand-alone website for their efforts, which is wonderful for our grassroots groups who may not have money in their budget for a web designer or to buy a domain name. The customization allows us to add photos, change colors, and many other features, which result in some really gorgeous looking sites. Classy makes it easy to access donation information, which can be easily viewed when you log into the system as an admin and exported to an CSV file. They have an event-specific template which can be used to sell tickets or registrations to an event. Since you can export all the purchaser info, it allows you to go green with your ticketing -- there's no need for purchasers to print out the email confirmation they receive when you have easy access to all buyer info. In addition to the license fee, Classy does take a 1% fee on each online donation received. There is an option for the organization to pay the fee or for the donor to pay the fee. We ask our donors to pay the fee, and there has never been a complaint as fees are much higher on other comparable sites (EventBrite for ticketing, GoFundMe for crowd-funding, etc.).
Cons: Overall I love Classy, but there are a few areas it can improve. The user dashboard is not the easiest to navigate through. It lists the names of donors and the amounts, but not what campaign they donated to. So you have to go to through your campaigns to find the donation. For an organization like ours which administers many Classy pages at once, this can be needlessly time-consuming. I love the custom options that each template has, but sometimes there are glitches. For instance, I was unable to upload a background image to a recent campaign page. But a quick email to customer service fixed the issue in a very short amount of time. Classy is constantly upgrading and adjusting features though, so I imagine they will work out some of these kinks in the future.
"Run away if you can"
Overall: Great if you are just starting with fundraising for your Org. Basic functionality bad customer service.
Pros: Accepts international donation and recurring donations. But these are standard function any platform should offer
Cons: Theme - only basic customization allowed . basically a single column form with all the fields. Assume that they clients can't add any code. Does not allow the best practice of using multistep forms Does not acceptBank ACH or paypal You cannot even add a paypal button in the form instead you have to stick in a custom section under the body making it look ugly Cannot integrate tracking and analytics tools like Google Tag manager, optimize or hotjar Account servicing is bad. Our account exec barely responds to messages
"Easy to use for donors and organizations, seamless integration, and a helpful support team! "
Overall: The integration with Salesforce has been a big win for us. We've more than doubled our funding while cutting our manual data entry time in half.
Pros: We made the switch to Classy from another fundraising platform in October 2018. The year prior, from October to December, we raised about $80,000. This year we raised more than double that, and I know that a big reason for that is because of Classy. The site is much easier to use for donors but it also is more aesthetically pleasing. It invites people in and engages them. Creating a page that transitions seamlessly from our own website was very easy to do with Classy. Page setup is user-friendly and I like that you can see the changes that you are making in real time, instead of having to make a change, save it, then go preview it, then go back and change it again (which is what we had to do on our old platform). Classy customer service has been very helpful as well. They are responsive and knowledgeable, and finding answers to my questions, or solutions to my problems, has been simple and pleasant. We have integrated Classy with our Salesforce database, which is a huge plus for us. There were some kinks but their support team was very helpful. Though more expensive that our former platform, I feel that the investment was definitely worth it.
Cons: The price is significantly higher than the platform we used before, both in annual costs and in transaction fees. We also need volunteer registration functionality, which Classy doesn't provide, so we do still have to use our old platform for that piece.
"Classy is good for online giving"
Overall: Classy is user friendly for those who don't delve deep into coding or database management but can be restrictive to those who do. Transfering data to platforms that Classy does not have built in partnerships with can be extremely confusing and difficult. However, the front facing websites are clean and easy for donors to use.
Pros: Classy is a good software platform for online giving. My favorite feature is the ability to duplicate a campaign. This saves tons of time in creating a new campaign for an event or ask that repeats every year or multiple times a year. Instead of starting from scratch you can duplicate and update based on things learned from prior campaigns.
Cons: Classy is somewhat restrictive in designability. In making the platform user friendly to those who aren't coding experts, the site lost some flexibility with what you can do on a campaign site. For large fundraising events you cannot created website tabs, which means all the information has to be on the landing page. This can make the campaign messy and cluttered.
"Perfect online fundraising solution for small nonprofits"
Overall: We love hosting all our online giving through one platform and giving our fundraisers tools like classy to raise money on their own.
Pros: I love the all the different fundraising campaigns, especially the peer to peer campaigns! You can create a fundraiser goal and have people create their own personal fundraising pages and/or create teams to fundraise together. The reporting is really nice as well on the back end.
Cons: There are paid plans and also a fee per transaction that can be difficult for small nonprofits, but the rates are competitive
"Classy is the go-to for peer-to-peer fundraising and ticketed events"
Overall: The Classy integration with Facebook has reduced friction by helping our volunteers fundraise more easily.
Pros: The Classy for Salesforce support team is incredibly knowledgeable and has spent hours helping us fine-tune our integration issues. Classy campaigns are easy to set up, and the platform is great for peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns, especially now that it integrates with Facebook. Our account manager is extremely responsive, and the customer service representatives via the chat feature are helpful.
Cons: I wish the campaign pages had more flexibility/customization - like being able to add "impact tiles" to a ticketed event. Also, the reporting within a campaign for campaign level administrators is less user friendly than it used to be. We wish there was a way to easily copy attendee information (address) into billing information. Also, the mobile functionality is lacking - we wish there could be check scanning and on-site credit card processing.
"Classy Review"
Pros: I've used Classy to run fundraising campaigns for 4 years now and it couldn't be an easier user interface. They offer everything a non-profit needs to raise money, including ticketed events, crowdfunding and peer to peer. On top of that, their reporting capabilities are top knotch and they are continuing to bulk up their marketing communications option within the platform as well. Classy is always thinking of new ways to make the job of non-profits easier!
Cons: More integrated marketing communications would be helpful!
"Beautiful product"
Pros: It's incredibly easy and intuitive to use. Makes it easy to get anyone up and running on it quickly and actually producing things. On top of that, it's really robust in terms of customization and making something look sharp and professsional. In peer to peer fundraising its email automation takes out a ton of work.
Cons: It is not meant to be used as a "robust" donor database and as such integrates with salesforce which may be too big an operation for some and unless you are tech savvy or are good at importing data into your database it will create data silos.
"Great Tool "
Overall: Classy has changed the game for our events management & check-in capabilities. We are so thankful for a platform that keeps our fundraising events running smoothly!
Pros: We love being able to customize Classy to meet our specific organizations needs. Our Classy Support Team makes it extremely easy to get the most out of Classy!
Cons: There are a few tools that we wish Classy could do - but we are always able to find a workaround that works for us.
"Fully Featured Nonprofit Fundraising Software - with a price to match - but not a CRM "
Pros: You can make really beautiful and functional things with Classy, there is lots of room to customize and design. The peer to peer fundraising pages as part of event registration is great (this is what we are using it for). There are lots of moving parts so it is good that they have such great customer service - people on the phone have been great, also chat and email options. The onboarding process was really hands on - which it should be as the price/year is very high and taken with the percentage is even higher. We are early in our relationship with them trying to see if this powerful tool will bring in enough extra donations to be worth the added cost. No doubt its a good product with good service.
Cons: It's pricey, almost 3k/year - we've just launched our fundraising campaign and it remains to be seen if we can increase donations enough to cover the cost - but the biggest downside is you can't move your donor database in - at all. So let's be clear that this is not a CRM in any real sense- you can't upload files of people or donations to it - it is a one by one manual thing. It seems like a great way to manage people who have given through classy but if you have donor files already, you'll need another database - which you'll also have to pay for so this seems like a lot to pay for not a total solution. If you were to be starting from scratch this might be a moot problem. For us - we are keeping our Donor Tools account and just using classy for events as a test - but two donor portals is not an ideal situation.
"Classy is great. Amazing customer service and great product."
Overall: We are creating beautiful event and donation pages and exciting our donor-base. Classy is easy to use on the front end and our users love it.
Pros: Classy offers an easy-to-use (back-end and front-end) software for our small organization. We have tried 4-5 other event softwares and Classy is our favorite by far. Price negotiations were fair and the Classy staff was fantastic during our onboarding experience. It truly felt like they were intending the best for us and that felt great. The customer support team is phenomenal. Any time we have had questions we have had them resolved and more in 20 minutes or way less.
Cons: Sometimes I run into features that I think are missing (it is important to realize that one software will not solve all of your problems). Classy has a great "suggestions" feature though that you can add tips for their developers.
"Classy lives up to its name"
Overall: Classy allows us to create beautiful landing pages for donors and supports and is easy to use.
Pros: Classy has been our fundraising platform for nearly three years and has allowed us to raise money to fight child sexual abuse with our community of donors. Classy is easy to you, have helpful resources for various campaigns, and recognizes campaigns that are exceptional.
Cons: We have not had any negative experiences with the software.
"The best fundraising software on the market"
Overall: Zero complaints. The few times we've had an issue with the software, the Classy Care team has quickly resolved the issue.
Pros: Easy to setup, simple to use, and a great user-experience for our supporters.
Cons: Wish there were some hardware features (such as card readers) attached to the software.
"Classy review "
Overall: Brooke at classy was an amazing account person for us. All in all classy is great but we truly are a small company and needed a CRM built in.
Pros: We really liked how user friendly it was for our fundraisers.
Cons: We needed a CRM and also thought the cost was a little high. We moved to a org like classy that had a crm built in for less of a cost.
"Several of our clients use Classy as their primary online fundraising software"
Overall: It allows individuals to easily set up fundraisers on our behalf.
Pros: You can make visually appealing campaigns with relative ease. You don't have to be a designer to put these campaigns together and if you have time to dedicate to figuring out the most visually appealing format you can end up with a really solid, professional-looking fundraising campaign. The software can also be customized to send out receipts to online donors.
Cons: The thing I like least about Classy is the extra percentage they take from all incoming donations. They charge an additional fee on top of your payment processor (Stripe, Paypal, etc.) which can really eat into your funds raised if all of your online donations are being funneled through a Classy fundraising page. For this reason, I would recommend it only for crowdfunding or "friendraising" events because it is easy for others to sign up and fundraise on your organization's behalf.
"Consider Classy"
Pros: The ability to peer-to-peer fundraise, crowdfundraise, and create multiple branded beautiful campaigns are a huge selling point! Everything syncs to your CRM and we gained over 100 new donors in our first Classy campaign.
Cons: Classy is fairly expensive, so make sure to do the math to see how many of your donors are giving online or who are ready to mobilize in digital giving before purchasing. Peer-to-peer has an incredible reach but requires a lot of advanced prep to really be effective.
"Classy is AWESOME!"
Pros: Classy is just what we needed to make online donation easy and painless. Not only is the donor experience great, but Classy keeps track of the donors in a variety of useful ways and we receive our monies in a timely manner. In addition, Classy is able to organize our annual fundraiser, handling both ticket sales and donations.
Cons: Classy has many features that we don't fully use. We hope to learn more and use Classy more effectively in the future.
"A game-changer for organizations looking to take giving to the next level"
Pros: With millenials as the largest segment of charitable givers, it was important for us to have a visually-appealing, user-friendly platform for managing online giving. Classy has done that for us. We have made a complete shift in our giving strategy from almost exclusively direct-mail appeals to a robust, web-based, crowdfunding and peer-to-peer approach. Additionally, the integration with Salesforce has been instrumental for us in being able to get the most bang for our buck. Finally, the ongoing user support, blog posts, guides, checklists, etc. have really been second-to-none. I can't recommend Classy highly enough.
Cons: There are still a few features that are coming along - but with Classy's customer support, I'm sure they're on their way!
"Classy is the best!"
Overall: This platform makes it easy for our fundraisers to raise more money.
Pros: It's easy to navigate. We have been using it going on our 3rd year. My higher ups attends great conferences. They offer webinars - if you ar not up to speed on anything it's one's on fault. And they are really fun to work with.
Cons: During our peak season - Dec-Feb - sometimes it can be hard to get through - but it's rare.
"Great For Fundraising Events"
Pros: It makes it very easy to build great looking web pages. I love how easy it is to setup and design beautiful pages for fundraising events in minutes. I also love the ability to customize and send e-mails to individuals after they purchase a ticket to an event.
Cons: I wish they had more options when it comes to their coupons options. For example, we are holding a bar crawl fundraiser and I would like to set it up so it someone bought 3 tickets they would get the 4th free. They don't allow an option for that. Instead, I will have to e-mail the person who purchased 3 tickets a coupon code that they will then have to go back and enter in to get a 4th ticket free.
"Donation Platform for EVEYONE"
Overall: Overall we are pleased with moving to Classy for our fundraising and events platform.
Pros: We love being able to use Classy for ALL of our events. We are able to track donations, events, and fees. The cost is very good compared to many other services and we love being able to use Classy for our Monthly donors!
Cons: One area that we found was hard at first was pulling reports. However, because of the GREAT services from the Classy team, we were able to be taught and now we have no issues!!
"Classy Review"
Pros: Straightforward to use, basic fundraising tools.
Cons: Terrible customer service, frequently broken and buggy features.
"Great for Peer-to-Peer Fundraising"
Pros: I like how easy it is for someone outside of our organization to set up a page and begin fundraising on our behalf.
Cons: I wish there was an option to be able to set-up a page for others like our Board or VIP donors, etc. It would make it so much easier for them to then just share their page.
"Overall a great experience"
Pros: Overall we have really enjoyed using Classy at our organization and using it has become part of our daily routine.
Cons: Overall, there is nothing that comes to mind in regards to what I like least about this software.