Silent Auction Pro

A Must for School Fundraising

Comentários: We are going to start using our SAPro software in our other school fundraisers, not just our auction. It is a great way to organize and keep all of our sponsor and donor information organized. I can also not speak highly enough of the customer support! They are quick to answer calls and get you answers to your questions.

Vantagens:

We've used Silent Auction Pro for at least three events in the last several years as a Mobile Pro client. It is pretty intuitive and keeps our donations well organized, as well as allowing us to communicate effectively with bidders and donors. The ability for anyone to bid online opens our fundraising to the community, not just our school families, helping us raise much more money than we could achieve with paper bidding.

Desvantagens:

We would love to see an app in the future, rather that just a mobile site for bidding.

Overall Excellent Experience with Software and Support

Comentários: We were overall very pleased. It provided a greater reach than we would have ever been able to achieve with an in-person silent auction. We loved the versatility, the ease of use (after learning), and the support. We'd absolutely recommend this to another organization and will be using it again.

Vantagens:

Easy to use: The software is very easy to use after spending a little bit of time familiarizing yourself with it. They have numerous help pages and even some youtube videos that help you learn the software. Additionally the technical support was out of this world (see Tech Support is Outstanding). We also loved that numerous people can enter donation items so that the cumbersome task of entering items is not tasked to one person. Reasonably priced: It is reasonably priced, relative to other similar softwares, and the support alone was worth the money. Originally, we thought the fees were slightly high, but after investigating other software pricing, and after our experience with this software and their support, the annual fee (which allows for as many auctions/events as you'd like within a year) and the 2.0% taken from high bids were nothing, and we would absolutely do it again. Tech Support is Outstanding: The event coaches are very friendly and incredibly helpful. They help you get started, make suggestions along the way, and they are there to wrap up afterwards as well. We had an IT problem at 9:00pm CST. I called in, my event coach answered me, and she had tech support looking into my problem immediately. Every tech call was answered or gotten back to within an hour. Overall Great Features: The user pages looked stunning, most features you'd want are available. We really enjoyed our use of the software and are looking forward to our next auction.

Desvantagens:

Takes Time to Learn: The administrative pages are slightly cumbersome to navigate in the beginning. They take time to learn, although that is probably true of every auction software. Some Features Not Available: There were a few features that were not available that we would have liked to have seen, such as an option for the public to view all bids placed on an item with bidders names or without, similar to an in-person silent auction. The Donate Button (Fund-a-need) was not intuitive for our users and confused them. Administrative Pages: Looked a bit dated. For a new software, we would have expected everything to be a bit more up-to-date looking. However, the user pages were very nice looking for the actual auction. Additionally, it would be great if there was a "view as user" option to be able to see what your changes look like once you've made them in the administrative account. It was cumbersome to have a user account and an administrative account and have to switch between the two constantly to be able to view things we were changing in the administrative account. Also the software won't let you have two logins open at the same time.

Silent Auction Pro - basic auction software

Vantagens:

Silent Auction Pro has features like image uploading and item organizing that make it useful for auctions.

Desvantagens:

Silent Auction Pro uses an unreliable payment processor, they do not give an opt out for saving credit card info, and there is no bulk upload for items.

Round 2; Regrouping

Comentários: I loved the software. We had used BidPal/OneCause prior but the cost model was unbearable for us this year. With Silent Auction Pro we pay after the first event; nothing upfront. Capped fee% and low fixed cost are benefits. Credit card processing (we used WorldPay) fees are lower (and no monthly fee), making the total cost lower. Software is feature-rich. This can be a double-edged sword as features can add complexity. Help is always available and phone support was awesome. Overall, the features are worth it. Ability to 'stage' or start a new event while keeping a recently finished event active for a bit would be a welcomed improvement.

Vantagens:

Features, Performance and Support were all Excellent.

Desvantagens:

Registration and PW requirements for bidding . No import (from spreadsheet) capability. Understandable, but would have been nice. They do offer to import for you at extra cost. They must have had bad experiences... It turned out to be less an issue than I thought. They were very upfront about it and it was not a surprise.

Silent Auction Pro is Very-User Friendly

Comentários: Overall, I love using this software as they made it so easy for me using it for my first time. It is very user-friendly and the tech support team is amazing and was always available to help! They basically held my hand through it all! That is what I appreciated the most. You guys rock!

Vantagens:

In my second time using the software for new online auction event, I love that software recognizes previous donors and if you want to add a donation you can select donation from previous year and update details like value, expiration dates, etc. without having to duplicate the work, and you don't have to upload photos - just use the same ones you had before. That was a huge time saver for me.

Desvantagens:

One sections you go in to Manage Online Bidding, you can see all of your auction items (and the ones that are bundled) with their assigned #, you click on the auction item number and can see all the photos of bundled items and total value and starting bid. There were times I wanted to know what is value of each or even the description of each bundled item while in that section but there was no option to click on while in there. The nice thing is for what I wanted to know was in a different section so I had to exit that section and go to another area to get the info I wanted then go back to Manage Online Bidding.