Factor 360

We had at least 3 separate issues with the functionality of Factor 360's 360photocontest.com website, and the marketing person was very polite and apologetic through those issues.

I wish the owner of the company had not been extremely rude and disrespectful, especially because his company provided no services and we were simply asking for a refund because services were not provided. I'm concerned about other nonprofits using their services and having a similar experience.

I'm a nonprofit consultant and I help nonprofit organizations with their strategic planning, especially around development/fundraising and marketing initiatives. I've worked with several nonprofits who have used Factor 360's 360photocontest.com platform and never had any complaints from those charity partners. For the first time last week, I actually personally worked on setting up a contest with the platform and had a disappointing experience. After I requested information on setting up the contest, the marketing person emailed me saying I would shortly receive an email with the set-up link. Hours later, I hadn't received the email in my inbox or spam folders, so I reached out to him and asked if I should have received it. He said yes, but gave me the link just in case. I wondered why he couldn't have given me the link in the first place, but didn't question the little snafu. Then I tried signing up with the initial contract form, but the webpage wouldn't submit the form when I was finished--it simply refreshed leaving the form empty again. I tried again later that day, then again the next day in case it was a fluke. Eventually I emailed the marketing person with a PDF copy of the completed form and reported the website issue. He apologized and sent me the next link to the next form I had to fill out for the payment. I filled that webpage out with the credit card info to pay the set-up fee that 360photocontest.com charges to set up your contest webpage. However, there was no way to print a receipt, so I had to reach out to the marketing person again to ask for a receipt and an invoice. He had to reach out to someone else, who sent only the receipt, so I emailed again to receive the invoice. The payment webpage said it would take 1-2 business days to receive instructions on setting up the contest webpage, so I waited 2 business days before emailing the marketing person again to find out why I didn't receive the instructions. He told me the instructions had been sent to the person I stated was in charge of the contest, so I reached out to the Executive Director and asked her to forward the info to me. It was faster for her to fill out the next webpage requesting all our contest info, but every time she tried to submit the information, an error message came up. At this point, we were on our 7th day of trying to set up the account. We're under a deadline to get Giving Tuesday and EOY fundraising set up, so we had to go with another platform which was set up in a timely fashion with just 1 day of work on our end. I completely understand that technical issues arise, but I wanted to request a refund from Factor 360 because I had paid a set-up fee and the contest webpage was never set up. The president of the company sent several rude emails in response, saying that his company had created a page (which was blank of all information but our contest dates and nonprofit contact info) and had spent 2 hours in support time troubleshooting with us. He also said it was strange that I was requesting a refund if I had worked with them in the past and knew the set-up process. Had he politely apologized and declined the refund, I would not be leaving this review. However, I'm very disappointed that the president of a company which serves nonprofits would try and pin the responsibility of 2 hours of support work on the nonprofit representative when his website was causing the issues which needed supporting; that he would claim our nearly blank webpage was a "set up contest page"; and that he would imply that it was my fault for not knowing about how long the set-up process would take if I had previously used the system before without knowing the full situation--as I said, this was my first time actually personally having to set up the contest. I would hate for another nonprofit to have precious time wasted in setting up such a vital fundraising campaign at such a vital time of the year, so I hope this experience helps others in choosing a better platform and partner.