Givebutter
What Is Givebutter?
Givebutter is the most-loved nonprofit fundraising platform, empowering millions of changemakers to raise more, pay less, and give better. Nonprofits use Givebutter to replace multiple categories of tools, including donation forms, fundraising campaigns, events, auctions, donor management (CRM), email, texting, and more—all for free. As the #1 rated nonprofit software company on G2 across multiple categories, Givebutter is on a mission to power the next billion changemakers.
Who Uses Givebutter?
Small and medium-sized nonprofits love Givebutter, including charities, service organizations, faith-based, schools, universities, sports teams, companies and hopefully your group too!
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Reviews of Givebutter
Christopher
The Best Site to Fundraise
Comments: Givebutter is easily accessible, customer friendly, effective, transparent about their minimal fees, and the best site to fundraise, hands down, no questions asked. I used to fundraise on other platforms, but I will now always stick to Givebutter after having a continued remarkable experience with the company. I'm very thankful that I discovered this site, and it has saved me a great amount of time & energy with my fundraisers. I've also seen a spike in my crowdfunding success by using this company.
Pros:
I most like the new ticketing feature for events because I plan to directly use Givebutter for a future project where there will be both crowdfunding for the tour and ticket sales for each event along our stops. Givebutter is a simple and brilliant solution for all of your fundraising needs, and this ticket feature is an example that shows how accessible, practical, and user-friendly the site is. I love how all these tools will be centered in one platform, and that helps me out tremendously.
Cons:
There are very few things that I don't like about Givebutter. As the company evolves, there are better and better additions to the givebutter.com site. I definitely can't complain about the software because I've had such an easy and fun time using this fundraising platform.
Jennifer
Alternatives Considered:
Best Option for Small Nonprofits
Comments: We have no plans whatsoever to change from Givebutter and see ourselves using it for a long time. It's perfect for our needs! Any nonprofit with a budget of under 1M would be wise to explore Givebutter as an option.
Pros:
Givebutter's customer service is probably my favorite, though a close second is the format of the dashboard and ease of use. I always receive a response from customer service within an hour or less when I've reached out, and I see consistent improvements being made from suggestions made by users. They really, really listen to what users are saying and implement solutions quickly!
Cons:
The only function I dislike is in the auction feature, where it cannot be deleted from a campaign. We launched an auction on the wrong campaign by mistake and now it lives there indefinitely, without a way to remove. However, I'm confident Givebutter will update soon to fix this, as they always have a way of listening to the needs of their users and implementing solutions quickly.
Givebutter Response
3 weeks ago
Wow, Jennifer! Thank you for this detailed and complimentary review! We're so glad you're part of the Givebutter fam. That's a great suggestion to remove the Auction tab from the main campaign page if an auction is canceled. I've created a feature request for that - feel free to add your vote! https://community.givebutter.com/raise/p/if-an-auction-is-canceled-also-remove-the-auction-tab-from-the-campaign-page
Christine
Alternatives Considered:
Givebutter for Gala Event
Comments: We used Givebutter for ticketing and other "purchases" for a gala event. It met our basic needs and we could use it's peer-to-peer capabilities to allow audience vote-by-donation for our event's competition that we could not do with last year's solution (Ticketspice), but the overall experience was frustrating. Features were limited. Fees were high and tip requests annoying. Reporting and data management was insufficient.
Pros:
We needed the ability to sell (and comp) tickets (with different pricing tiers), to send tickets electronically, check-in guests (preferably with a quick ticket scan but also by name), and allow audience voting during our event. Givebutter delivered all of these capabilities. The event/campaign could be set up and managed outside of our CRM (by a volunteer who then didn't need full access to sensitive data) and integrated (limited) with our CRM. We also sold online tickets to the event and streamed it on Givebutter (although that was a complete hack)
Cons:
Although the product satisfied our needs, there were many small frustrations and overall it felt like an incomplete product. Issues included:- High fee rate (standard credit card rate, although our actual fees seem higher) for non-profit use.- Additional "tip" to Givebutter both on the user side (can be removed if you pay even higher fees) and when making payout transfers is frustrating and not non-profit friendly- Ability to set different ticket tiers but no easy way to handle table purchases (just purchase X tickets)- Receipt info can be customized, but not in the way we wanted (include overall fair market value of purchase, as that cannot be deducted)- Poor campaign layout editor with limited options- Livestream of event is simply on the event ticket page. No ability to track watchers unless they click the "check in" on email. But during the livestream anyone can go to the ticket page and watch. It did allow us to have donation buttons on the same page as the event.- Payouts are manual and separate for each campaign. - Somewhat clunky UI
Givebutter Response
3 weeks ago
Thank you for sharing these thoughts, Christine. We're always working to improve Givebutter and feedback from changemakers like you is the most important part of that process. I've forwarded your feedback to our engineering team so they can take it into considering on future updates.
Nathan
Alternatives Considered:
Integration with Bloomerang is critical and easy to use
Comments: We would not have used GiveButter if it had not been for their Bloomerang integration. That has made transferring donor data and information super easy.
Pros:
Easy and very intuitive to use. Free to set up pages and has a good number of options to use, but not an overwhelming number of options. Love that on auction items, you can manually add bids (for live auction) and can change the auction start date for each item.The integration with Bloomerang is crucial! It is the reason that we are using GiveButter. There are other good options out there, but they don't have the native integration.The Live Display feature is slick and will come in handy at live events for real-time updates.
Cons:
For some reason, text will not format correctly in the Story section, especially when copying and pasting. I have been told by support that I need to manually type everything in versus copying and pasting. Bullets when formatting text don't work correctly either. This is a basic feature that must be corrected immediately.The ability to use discount codes on the registration page is pretty weak. Cannot configure codes to specific items. For instance, if you want $10 off a specific ticket, you can't assign it to that specific ticket. Doing a percentage amount can get messy too. Need the ability to assign codes to specific tickets.Missing chance drawing (raffles) functionality. We're bastardizing a way to do it using auctions, but I hate to have to bring in another software to execute the chance drawing.
Givebutter Response
3 weeks ago
Thanks for sharing these thoughts, Nathan! We're always working to improve Givebutter and feedback from changemakers like you is the most important part of that process. I've added all your feedback to our roadmap so engineering can take it into consideration for our next updates.
Sara
Alternatives Considered:
Great Price, Great Product
Comments: Givebutter does everything that I need it to. I can process donations for our ongoing donation page and for specific events like Giving Tuesday. I am also able to use it for our annual fundraiser by selling vendor booths & tickets. And all of this for free. It's perfect!
Pros:
It's free which is great for me because I work at a small nonprofit and we have a huge upswing in money coming in for our annual Fundraiser in August, then the rest of the year there is little activity. Paying for a product all year when it's really mostly used a few months out of the year didn't make sense. Givebutter being free is the biggest Pro!
Cons:
It was little hard to import donors and I never figured out how to put in past donations to get our records all in one place, but I was able to tag people as having donated in the past so that worked well enough.
Givebutter Response
3 weeks ago
Thanks so much for buttering us up, Sara! We're glad you're part of the Givebutter fam. If you still want to import those historical donations, we recently added that ability. Here are directions for you! https://help.givebutter.com/en/articles/6934176-how-to-import-transactions
