What auction software imports well/easily into Raiser's Edge?

Theresa Larsen

We are looking at selecting new auction software and I want to find one that imports all the auction data well into Raiser's Edge. We will have the typical auction activities - ticket sales, live auction, silent auction, raffle, fund-a-need, etc. For years, our organization has been manually re-entering in all of the auction items that each donor purchased into RE but we really want to automate it this year. Any recommendations of ones that are relatively easy to import into RE. Right now we are looking at Greater Giving, BidPal, and Give Smart. Does anybody have good or bad experiences with any of these products? Any other suggestions of products that we should look at?

Aaron Rothberg

Hi Theresa-

 

We currently use 501 Auctions, but we're also exploring other possibilities. 501 Auctions provides a great customer experience and their support is top notch (they deploy three support technicians to us the day of our auction, provide training to volunteers, and stay with us the entire night to ensure everything goes smoothly), but the data exports leave something to be desired. There are five main reports I use for getting data out of 501 Auctions. Those exports/reports are Silent Auction, Live Auction, Sales (we sell 150 mystery boxes with a grand prize in one of the boxes), Donations (which includes Fund A Need), and Tickets and Sponsorships.


The first thing you'll notice in the screenshot below is that the five report columns don't align perfectly. You can finagle them so that everything does line up, but it takes a little bit of time.

 


Once you get over that hurdle, you'll have to add in any columns of data you need for your constituent import and your gift import.


[Update! I've just discovered they have another report which does combine all five reports I mentioned. You learn something new every day! My comments below still apply.]


For us on the constituent import, that means adding and populating columns for Import Id, Cons Code Import Id, Cons Code, Cons Code Date From, Title, First name, Nick name, Last name, Primary Addressee, Primary Salutation, Gender, Phone Type,  Phone Import Id, Phone Num, Phone is Primary?, Addr Import Id, Pref Addr?, Addr Type, Addr Send Mail?, Addr Lines, City, State, Zip, Country, and another set of Phone columns for email.

 

For the gift import, that means adding and populating columns for Gift Reference, Gift Date, Gift Amt, Gift Receipt?, Gift Receipt Amount, Gift Receipt Date, Gift Code, Gift Type, Gift Subtype, Gift Pay Method, Campaign Id, Appeal Id, Fund Id, Letter Code, Gift Acknowledge?

 
Before combining the five reports into one report, I also add an additional column to each report indicating which report the data came from (Silent Auction, Live Auction, etcetera) so that I can be sure to attach each gift to the appropriate appeal since we have different appeals for Live Auc, Silent Auc, etc..

 

So, in summary, donors love the 501 Auctions experience and the support is outstanding, but there's quite a bit of work that goes into turning their exports into something importable into Raiser's Edge.

 

We sat through the first half of an Auction Maestro demo and they claim to have an integration with Raiser's Edge, but we didn't get that far into the demo as we didn't like what we were seeing on how to configure and manage the software in general. The interface looked really outdated to us.

 

Hope that helps!

Brian Davies

Theresa Larsen:

We are looking at selecting new auction software and I want to find one that imports all the auction data well into Raiser's Edge. We will have the typical auction activities - ticket sales, live auction, silent auction, raffle, fund-a-need, etc. For years, our organization has been manually re-entering in all of the auction items that each donor purchased into RE but we really want to automate it this year. Any recommendations of ones that are relatively easy to import into RE. Right now we are looking at Greater Giving, BidPal, and Give Smart. Does anybody have good or bad experiences with any of these products? Any other suggestions of products that we should look at?

We use Greater Giving, it is a fairly user friendly system and has a simple chenin process and quick auction package purchases entry which makes night of the auction processing easy. I will not say the gift import process is easy, but if you take the time ahead of time to create records in Greater Giving with RE Import IDs as the alternate ID, I found it fairly simple to export the gift information from Greater Giving and modify the file to import into RE. Before the auction and for a first week or so after the auction we use Greater Giving as our primary reporting on auction progress. Once the dust settles we move everything to RE. Once gifts are moved we do have some double entry to keep both databases up to date, but by that time the majority of the payments have been processed.

Amy Dana

We currently use Greater Giving and I've found the export/import to be pretty easy. There are two canned reports which you can Import right into RE, one for Constituents and one for Gifts. However, my org has ImportOmatic which can do Constituents and Gifts at the same time. There is a basic accounting report which shows all the info you need and I pull it in through ImportOmatic.


I'm not terribly sure about Greater Giving since I'm pretty new here and I suspect we are not using it to its fullest potential (story of every DBA's life). It seems straightforward and I've been happy with the support when I have questions.

Jen Claudy

Just a comment for those who might not have Import Omatic but want to import Constituent and Gift data at the same time...Zeidman's Importacular offers Constituent & Gift Imports for free (other things, like Relationships, have an annual fee to them, but I don't believe it's terribly expensive).  If you are Hosted, look for it in Plug-Ins, as it should already be there.  There's a bit of a learning curve, as with everything, but I found the process to be fairly straightforward.

John Heizer

Theresa Larsen:

We are looking at selecting new auction software and I want to find one that imports all the auction data well into Raiser's Edge. We will have the typical auction activities - ticket sales, live auction, silent auction, raffle, fund-a-need, etc. For years, our organization has been manually re-entering in all of the auction items that each donor purchased into RE but we really want to automate it this year. Any recommendations of ones that are relatively easy to import into RE. Right now we are looking at Greater Giving, BidPal, and Give Smart. Does anybody have good or bad experiences with any of these products? Any other suggestions of products that we should look at?

We also use Greater Giving.  I still do a lot manipulation of the GG data in Access before I import it into RE (helps me eliminated dupes, add additional information as Gift Attributes, etc,).  We've also used BidPal and Auction Harmony. EVERYONE will tell you that they interface with RE, and that's true to the extent that RE can import any Excel or CSV file, but knowing the complexities of how all that data must be linked is a different question.  GG is the only one I've found so far that knows you have to create your own ImportID to link Constituents, Addresses, Phones, and Gifts. correctly.

Christine Cooke 2

Theresa Larsen:

We are looking at selecting new auction software and I want to find one that imports all the auction data well into Raiser's Edge. We will have the typical auction activities - ticket sales, live auction, silent auction, raffle, fund-a-need, etc. For years, our organization has been manually re-entering in all of the auction items that each donor purchased into RE but we really want to automate it this year. Any recommendations of ones that are relatively easy to import into RE. Right now we are looking at Greater Giving, BidPal, and Give Smart. Does anybody have good or bad experiences with any of these products? Any other suggestions of products that we should look at?

Currently using GreaterGiving -- the multi-year contract was already underway when I arrived on the job.  But just FYI Auction Maestro is a partner of BB and has a sync link to RE.