Opiniones de Silent Auction Pro

Hands down, the best thing about using Silent Auction Pro is the customer support. At every small bump in the road, someone was there to help us figure it out.

While it's understandable that the software is constantly evolving and improving, I found that the menus were confusing the navigate.

Customer Service is amazing
Really, really, easy to use
TONS of reports to pull for any information you would need
Real-time reports on how much money you are making and the return on the value
The registration page and the ability to customize it to our liking was amazing, especially when recognizing sponsors.
The mobile site was awesome and so easy to use
Texts/Emails that came during the event are helpful

Can only have one event going at a time
Unable to "edit" thank you letter when going to send out, it pulls straight from the template
The donor v. bidder and confirming identities

The wide variety of functions combined with good customer service and a great price.

Not all functions and reports are intuitive to me, but they have excellent instructions, training videos and customer service - making learning the functions easy.

This software essentially removed our need to hire an auction company to handle our event - saving us upwards of $2,500.

The software could use a little more "what you see is what you get" buttons - in other words, navigation for dummies; but if you spend even a little time using the software, it's intuitive and grows on you quickly.

Donation entry was intuitive and loved that we could pull up items donated before so that we didn't have to retype everything. Demo environment allowed us to get committee members up to speed quickly and also allowed us to practice on some creative set up to meet our auction needs. Ticketing feature offered a variety of ticket options, some only displaying with a promo code, and love the addition of the asking for the email address for a ticket purchasers' guests - made it simple to reach all attendees with the marketing tools. Allowing the ticket purchasers to select the meal, or any other item we programmed made the table/catering coordination easy. Marketing features to promote the event to our attendees as well as help them feel connected to the event that was a couple months away. We set up an online auction the week before our event and people loved it! The online auction was open to the public so it allowed parents to share with friends and family that weren't planning on attending. We posted the event auction items on the online auction as previews to entice bidders to attend to get a chance at the rest of the silent and live items. Reporting is good, check in/out is all on one page, the system performance is great. Loved working in system even from our smart phone browser to check on things, make changes etc. any time, any where. Customer support was outstanding!

Special characters aren't allowed in donation title so we had to change once they got loaded as an auction item. Special characters in the description like " for inch threw off the formatting of the data export to excel. Reporting is good, but would have liked a few more reports or the ability to create ad hoc reports. We found one report provided this item, but another report provided this item so we had to export to excel and do look up functions which is tedious to do each time. Would like more options for formatting of bid sheets, and also would like to see some additional options with displaying, leveraging the "Donation Tag" feature which is critical for us as our teams need to be identified. Would like filters on lists as well.

1. Excellent training and support by [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] and his Silent Auction Pro team!
2. This quality software system really did its job from initial communications, to auction set-up, right through event night and beyond with solid reporting!
3. Its affordable price, combined with superior customer service and tech support, made the decision to purchase a no-brainer-- especially for a committee of nervous new users!

There *is* a learning curve for newbies, as with any other software package. However, the online tutorials as well as ample documentation with clear procedures made it as painless as humanly possible to get up to speed and functional with it.

This was our first use of this software and we were very satisfied with the results we achieved the night of our event. The software is relatively easy to use - the modules are marked but you do need to take you time to make sure you are on the right page. The customer support was fantastic. Every time I had a problem or a question they were there to answer it. They were able to go into my site, analyze my problem and help me solve it.

I did not use the registration part of the software since I purchased it too late to really get the benefit of that part of the program. However, I was able to push my guests to the site to register their credit card prior to our event. On the day of our event as our guests checked in we had a few banks of computers with people manning so that if our guests had difficulties they were there to assist. (I would recommend that for anyone using the program.)

During the event, we were able to showcase our fundraising live as it happened. This aspect definitely helped generate more bidding and involvement of our guests.

The modules could be designed to be easier to differentiate.

The ability to change! In this year of constant change, we were stopped 48 hours before our Auction was to take place in March of 2020. We were never able to hold an in-person option but we were able to switch all the data we had already entered to go from live to on line with just a few quick and easy steps! we finally held the Virtual auction in November 2020.

We did not take a picture of every item in a basket, just the combined basket itself. That was fine for the main page. the drill down page listed every item in the basket but the individual pictures did not exist so the item said No phot to Display. We ran out of time to take all the pictures so we dealt with it. I would've preferred it to at least show the basket from the main page. Zoom capabilities only existed when a user drilled down. This is usually not an issue since our silent auction is in person...… just not this year! [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] gave me great ideas to deal with the virtual aspect of our auction to try to make it as personal as possible!

I had seen this software used as a guest at another event and sitting at our table, the excitement around driving the bids higher was impressive. So when it came for me to organize an event, I pushed for using Silent Auction Pro mobile bidding though we were uncertain that our clientele would be receptive. Post the event, the response was almost all positive, they loved bidding on their mobile devices and we made much more money from our silent auction. We particularly loved the automated winner text notification and giving them the opportunity to self check-out/pay, making it all so much faster and easier. From the point of view of the auction administrator, it made my life much easier with no last minute pulling an all nighter to produce bidding sheets, etc. The customer service was superb and personalized. Someone always answered my calls, no matter the hour and helped resolve the issue(s) I was having or if they couldn’t, they referred it to the developer who is the owner and soon afterwards all was resolved. I loved the reminders ahead of the event to ensure all was moving along smoothly and the personal calls to check in were very much appreciated. I felt fully supported at every step.

It was definitely challenging learning a new system but it was worth the time and effort. There were a few little quirks that need resolving and these I have shared with the developer.

A good way to track all donations and purchases. There are many features which make this very easy. The check-out system is pretty user friendly and works well. The support staff at SAP are great to answer questions and lead you through the process.

The first ticket purchase by a buyer only allows for the purchasers name, and does not let you reassign the name to someone else right away – you have to go back in and readjust. It worked but is a little bit clunky.
A lot of data entry. As we were using this for the second time, some bits were easier as we could pull from past donors info.
The bid sheets selected the donations that were entered first, which were not always the biggest selling points when bundling
Setting up the bar tickets was a bit messy.
Would be nice to be able to pull more specified reports from the program. Customize the report formats.

Silent Auction Pro helped our auction and operations team see data (auction items, ticket purchases) on a real-time basis. Previously, we relied on spreadsheets and emails, and version were easily confused and confusing. It was also great to tally up totals at the end of the evening quickly to make a grand total announce while all guests were present.

This was our organization's first time using mobile bidding and it was received with mixed reviews. It was confusing for some to login if they didn't receive an email. We will collect emails at registration next year to make it smoother. The QR codes on the items were great, but most guests did not already have the app on their phones. It was difficult, at times, to scroll through items. Lastly, it would be great to have a cross reference for "baskets" by individual. We weren't sure why the numbers continued from 2015 rather than starting fresh for the new event.

This software is easy to use and if you have any issues, the customer service is like none other. They call and check on you, they are available for zoom calls to help when you need it and on the day of the event, if you have missed a step, they are calling and letting you know so you can get it fix asap. I have enjoyed using this software and working with the Silent Auction Pro team.

There really are not any cons I can detail here. Anything I have issues with, they are available to help me with and come up with a solution if they didn't have one already.

We use this software for our yearly school auction. This is now our 4th year using it. One of the huge benefits is being able to use contacts, logos, donation descriptions, etc. from previous years. It really saves time if you have the same donors year after year. That being said, it does take time to set up contacts, donations and auction items initially, but you know you'll have everything saved for next year. Also, we got lots of compliments on how nice the auction looks and how easy it is to bid. I agree!

It took me a little time bit of time to learn where things are and how to use the tools. I don't know if it would be worth the time to set everything up if you weren't planning on using the software for more than once.

I have been working Silent Auction Pro for many years now for our auction fundraiser. We have a silent and live auction portion and this program works perfectly for all our needs. There are still even more cool features that if we took the time to look through a bit, we could make things run even more smoothly (i.e. notifying winners of their winning bids, creating thank you cards for afterward, etc.)

It'd be nice if we could change font size on bid sheets - we have an elderly clientele and I know the sheets might be hard to read for them.

The best software for an auction! It has just about everything needed to support your staff. We literally pulled this off with less than 3 people on the back end in comparison to the past were the actual event required dozens of staff and volunteers to pull off an auction at the sale that we produce. First of all Customer Support is top notch. No matter what stage you are in, they know this software and they will get your show organized from preproduction to post show. They care about your needs and they will work on improvements if there is something that can be reasonably done.

The need to reconcile bidders with the same last name is a hold up as you need to be watching out for this and we did have some customers who felt turned off by this as they are long time customers. I would be that Silent Auction Pro will do something about this as they want 100%satisfaction from their customers. It's something we have not yet shared with them that this is a bug that needs fixing. I would like the header to be a little larger to reflect that this is our museum's event.

Ease of use and simplicity of the process.

Image upload is very limited to what is set in the system and color customization is not available. It will be nice if you can add more image in the registration page to at least match the event website. Data archive is very limited. You have to back-up data after each event, otherwise, it's gone. They're very good in sending reminders, however, having the data archive for future use provides convenience and assurance that at least you have a copy or your data in Silent Auction Pro.