Auction Software- What do you use?

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Tammy Bristol
Tammy Bristol ✭
Tenth Anniversary Photogenic First Reply
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
I just completed my first annual auction at our school.  For years they have run the donations portion of the auction through RE, but the items, donors, etc. were kept in an antiquated program called Auction Tracker.  To complicate things further, BidPal has been used auction night. 

We are now looking for a program that will simplify our auction.  I've been told "Raiser's Edge does not play well with others" when it comes to auction software/ apps.  What do you use?  What do you like/ not like about it? How long have you been using it? How do you input your data into RE?  It would be SO nice to have everything in RE for once.  We looked at Maestro, but I was not impressed.  It seems antiquated to me and it lacks a lot of features that newer online programs have. 

I'd love your feedback about what you are using. We just really need to streamline things here and a great auction program would help!

Thanks,

Tammy
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Comments

  • John Heizer
    John Heizer ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 3 Photogenic
    I've worked with BidPal, Auction Harmony and Greater Giving.  All of them structure their data completely differently from RE and I've had to use Access to extensively manipulate their data to get it imported into RE the way we want it.  This was our first year using Greater Giving and they do have two very good exports that even use the correct RE Import field names but didn't include the level of detail that we wanted in RE so I still had to use Access.
  • Heather MacKenzie
    Heather MacKenzie ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 4 Name Dropper Photogenic
    We use Auction Tracker, actually, and the newest update to it has brought it further into the modern world in many ways.  If you don't yet have that version, do check it out before you rid yourself of AT.  The easiest way to get the gifts into RE has been to export them from AT into Excel, and then import them into RE.  If you have Import-o-Matic, then it would be even easier.



    I have also looked at Maestro, and found it no better than Auction Tracker.  I have never used anything else besides Excel to track items and bids.

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