Silent Auction Pro

This is terrific software, especially for a smaller nonprofit. What sold the software to us is that when I inquired about it online on a Saturday, I got an immediate phone call from the owner of the company and software developer. This was very typical of all interaction with this company throughout our use of the software - we got immediate responses from support when we had questions, they understand that auctions happen on weekends and support needs to be available then, and when we found a few quirks in the software they were repaired immediately, often by the developer personally. We previously used Greater Giving and BidPal; all three have features that I like and don't like, but overall SilentAuctionPro is by far the best value for the price. The a la carte pricing is a huge benefit for nonprofits like ours that cannot use all features (i.e. online bidding). Overall, from last year to this year (BidPal to SilentAuctionPro), we went from about 100 to 195 attendees, from $25K gross to $45K gross, and from our worst checkout ever to our best. The instruction files, help menus, videos, etc were by the far the best of any nonprofit software we have used. We were invoiced after the auction for the software, which could be of great benefit for a nonprofit just starting out with their first auction.

I would love to be able to have a website where people can enter their own donations and have them populate as donation items in the system. There were a few quirks like the system not liking quote marks and ampersands. I would like for there to be a bit more explanation on the page about the security of registering your card as many of my guests weren't comfortable doing so at the time of ticket purchase. It would also be great to have more customization options for the ticket sales page. Because of the way we run our auction, I would very much prefer to be able to assign bidder #s to a household rather than to an individual, but this would have been fine if we had noticed it earlier and planned accordingly. I would also like to be able to customize a bit more on the receipts, include ticket descriptions, etc. I would have set up our fixed price items differently than we were advised to as I don't think it was the best option for our auction and was a bit of a hiccup, but in fairness it was something we didn't get to in advance and did on the fly, so it would have been avoidable with a little planning. Although the reports are generally pretty great, I did have to piece together a few to get to what I needed which could be a pain for someone with less Excel experience. Really minor, but because we can't use online bidding, I print our bidsheets on carbonless paper. Would very much prefer that the half sheet option printed as a 2up because I ended up reformatting them in Adobe to save printing cost.

Outstanding software, especially for the smaller nonprofit. It is by far the best value we have found in this space.