Silent Auction Pro

Support is stellar. Easy to manage donations, turn them into auction items, and enter bids for them. Quick to check guests in and out and provide them with invoices.

Requirement to open a merchant account with Vantiv. Handling of couples who want to bid under a single number. Handling of "Fund-a-need" or paddle raise auction type. Handling of event seats sold offline Handling of "reservations" for seats, before tickets are actually sold.

Southern Gateway Chorus used Silent Auction Pro (SAP) to manage our Gateway Gala for 2016, our major fund-raiser of the year. We found much to like about it, but also a few things that could stand improvement. The best thing about SAP is its people and the support they provide. They were right on top of everything. I never waited more than an hour for an answer to a support question. SAP also provides a very nice flow for managing donors and donations, and turning them into auction items. We were also impressed with the ease of checking guests in and out and providing them with paddles and invoices. Data entry for auction results is also well-thought-out, and quick and easy (with the exception of the Fund-a-need auction type - more below). Less useful is SAP's process for managing prospective guests. SAP conflates donors and guests as "Contacts". This means that if a person is both a guest and a donor, there is potential for duplication. SAP has a process for managing duplicates, but the outcome of the choices that you make in that process are not always very clear. Southern Gateway sells many of the tickets to our event through person-to-person contact. We did not find a good way to handle these sales in SAP. We wound up having our list of guests imported, and then using SAP to assign bidder numbers to them. SAP also does not deal well with groups of people (such as couples) who want to register using one credit card and bidder number. Its documentation, and its support personnel, stress the need to have each person have his or own contact record, phone number, email address etc. This is unnecessarily cumbersome. One kind of auction, which SAP calls "Fund-a-need", is not very well handled. It requires that you create multiple phony "donations", and then turn them into phony "auction items". Data entry for these auctions is cumbersome and error-prone. We wound up with a number of duplicate entries, which had to be manually resolved. This should be an easy software fix. Finally, SAP requires that you create a merchant account with Vantiv if you want to accept credit cards, and another account with American Express if you want to accept their cards. This process is not simple. You are also required to use card readers that you rent from SAP. Southern Gateway has a preexisting merchant account, and card readers, from Square. It would have been much easier if we could simply have used that account.