Brightly Event Manager™ vs. GoFundMe Pro

This is an ideal program for any school or district looking for a way to monitor room and maintenance requests. The digital routing availability will help ease the burden of paper copies and make it quicker for everyone to use and submit their needs. Schools with a variety of staff members are best suited, especially since when submitting a request you can designate those that need to be involved and what specific needs you have from facility to technology.

Incentivized

Well suited for organizations with large fundraising programs or many recurring donors, especially those who have the staffing to devote to reporting and fundraising data analysis. Variety of payment options is good for mobile-first or younger audiences who may be taking more frequent advantage of payment methods like Venmo and Apple Pay. Most useful if it is used in tandem as an event registration/event hosting platform (Classy Event Registration or Classy Live) as attendee data and fundraising is kept in a single place. Less appropriate for smaller organizations, or folks that will not be doing crowdfunding/peer-to-peer/events. There are other platforms that do standard donation pages well that have fewer bells and whistles but are accordingly cheaper.

Incentivized

• You are able to designate whether you are submitting a maintenance request or a schedule request (for rooms).
• You can set recurring schedules for areas or rooms you may need weekly or monthly to be requested on a set day or time.
• SchoolDude autoroutes to the personnel you designate, taking out any physical paperwork involved.
• You can see your history of requests (both maintenance and schedule) in the database.

Incentivized

• The Classy platform is easy to use, both for the staff and our volunteer fundraisers
• It's easy to build a great looking fundraising page
• Classy support (particularly chat and phone) are attentive and responsive. Every one there is smart and nice!

Incentivized

• The filter and ability to sort through your request history is a little difficult to navigate and can be glitchy if you are not sorting in the correct way.
• There should be a quicker and simpler way to verify whether a room is booked prior to scheduling.
• A cleaner, more simplistic look and navigation would go a long way.

Incentivized

• Campaigns lack customization options which can be limiting- while you can add code to make some changes, there is a basic framework that you can't always override.
• Slow to roll out some donor payment options like Venmo.
• Not inexpensive price point and on an annual contract, so the software is definitely an investment.

Incentivized

VERY easy to use, but lacks flexibility. But very easy to learn and master, even for someone with technical skills. They offer live chat which is a great help for on-demand support. At higher call volumes, you may wait 10 minutes, but I’ve never waited for more than that and the support if 90% of the time very helpful.

Incentivized

Classy's team was very helpful as we transitioned over, and helped us get everything set up quite easily. The few times we've had issues or questions, their online chat feature has been a quick way to get answers. On Giving Tuesday last year, the site went down, but Classy was quick with communication to its clients and had the problem resolved in about an hour. I know that if we have any problems or questions, the company and its team will be responsive and helpful. That makes a difference to me and our small team. We don't have time to troubleshoot or stay on hold for a long time waiting for support.

Incentivized

This is the only program I have used for the facility, maintenance, technology, and room requests. However, there are programs that include similar features. Frontline Professional Growth is a platform that includes digital forms and routing similar to SchoolDude. But it is a vastly more in-depth program with features that go beyond what SchoolDude is often used for.

Incentivized

I have not used any other platforms like Classy. Given I came into this organization after Classy was already chosen, I was pleased with how easy it was to learn the platform and how user-friendly the entire thing is. Although I haven't used any other platforms like it, I would highly recommend it.

• Less printing and copying in a district.
• Quicker submitting and processing time.
• Able to track requests and see what is being used in the district.

Incentivized

• This has been nothing but positive. We use the basic version so there is no fee associated with it other than a percentage of each transaction. So everything that comes in is added revenue where the only investment is staff time, but there is no monetary investment.

Incentivized