Classy Reviews

I've used Classy to run fundraising campaigns for 4 years now and it couldn't be an easier user interface. They offer everything a non-profit needs to raise money, including ticketed events, crowdfunding and peer to peer. On top of that, their reporting capabilities are top knotch and they are continuing to bulk up their marketing communications option within the platform as well. Classy is always thinking of new ways to make the job of non-profits easier!

More integrated marketing communications would be helpful!

At my job, we administer a variety of charitable funds, many of which participate in different types of fundraising activities. Using Classy, we are able to tailor-make fundraising sites utilizing easy-to-use templates that address each of our donor's wants and needs. I often tell donors that their Classy page can serve as a stand-alone website for their efforts, which is wonderful for our grassroots groups who may not have money in their budget for a web designer or to buy a domain name. The customization allows us to add photos, change colors, and many other features, which result in some really gorgeous looking sites.

Classy makes it easy to access donation information, which can be easily viewed when you log into the system as an admin and exported to an CSV file. They have an event-specific template which can be used to sell tickets or registrations to an event. Since you can export all the purchaser info, it allows you to go green with your ticketing -- there's no need for purchasers to print out the email confirmation they receive when you have easy access to all buyer info.

In addition to the license fee, Classy does take a 1% fee on each online donation received. There is an option for the organization to pay the fee or for the donor to pay the fee. We ask our donors to pay the fee, and there has never been a complaint as fees are much higher on other comparable sites (EventBrite for ticketing, GoFundMe for crowd-funding, etc.).

Overall I love Classy, but there are a few areas it can improve. The user dashboard is not the easiest to navigate through. It lists the names of donors and the amounts, but not what campaign they donated to. So you have to go to through your campaigns to find the donation. For an organization like ours which administers many Classy pages at once, this can be needlessly time-consuming. I love the custom options that each template has, but sometimes there are glitches. For instance, I was unable to upload a background image to a recent campaign page. But a quick email to customer service fixed the issue in a very short amount of time. Classy is constantly upgrading and adjusting features though, so I imagine they will work out some of these kinks in the future.

Accepts international donation and recurring donations. But these are standard function any platform should offer

Theme - only basic customization allowed . basically a single column form with all the fields. Assume that they clients can't add any code.

Does not allow the best practice of using multistep forms
Does not acceptBank ACH or paypal
You cannot even add a paypal button in the form instead you have to stick in a custom section under the body making it look ugly
Cannot integrate tracking and analytics tools like Google Tag manager, optimize or hotjar
Account servicing is bad. Our account exec barely responds to messages

It's incredibly easy and intuitive to use. Makes it easy to get anyone up and running on it quickly and actually producing things. On top of that, it's really robust in terms of customization and making something look sharp and professsional. In peer to peer fundraising its email automation takes out a ton of work.

It is not meant to be used as a "robust" donor database and as such integrates with salesforce which may be too big an operation for some and unless you are tech savvy or are good at importing data into your database it will create data silos.

I like the ability to customize the donor page and the ability to see information in the back end. It is easy to navigate and easy to pull info that I need.

The free version is very limited, and even the basic paid versions are incredibly expensive.

Straightforward to use, basic fundraising tools.

Terrible customer service, frequently broken and buggy features.

It is so easy to get a fundraising campaign up and running

The software can be a bit pricey compared to building your own solution.

Many customizable features and the ability to do serious peer to peer fundraising. The admin panel is also well structured.

Super high fixed fees. Do not attenpt this if you have less than coming in through social media-driven campaign donations. It's not worth it if you just need a pretty donation button.

The program is great for nonprofit organizations looking for simple software to use.

I don't like the user interface is a bit messy.

Once I could get a fundraising page completed, it looked very good. Graphics were good, ability to use various fonts and different sizes was good.

I found Classy to be expensive for what I got as a fundraiser and administrator. Customer service was pretty good, if I could get them on the phone. I found too many things difficult to do and ended up frustrated with the software. Also, we didn't raise much money because it was expensive and, of course, there were fees for each donation.

I love the all the different fundraising campaigns, especially the peer to peer campaigns! You can create a fundraiser goal and have people create their own personal fundraising pages and/or create teams to fundraise together. The reporting is really nice as well on the back end.

There are paid plans and also a fee per transaction that can be difficult for small nonprofits, but the rates are competitive

I like the easy-to-use Classy platform. Overall, the donation pages are easy to create, implement, and deliver to our audiences.

I think not having the Venmo or Cash App payment processors.

You can make really beautiful and functional things with Classy, there is lots of room to customize and design. The peer to peer fundraising pages as part of event registration is great (this is what we are using it for). There are lots of moving parts so it is good that they have such great customer service - people on the phone have been great, also chat and email options. The onboarding process was really hands on - which it should be as the price/year is very high and taken with the percentage is even higher. We are early in our relationship with them trying to see if this powerful tool will bring in enough extra donations to be worth the added cost. No doubt its a good product with good service.

It's pricey, almost 3k/year - we've just launched our fundraising campaign and it remains to be seen if we can increase donations enough to cover the cost - but the biggest downside is you can't move your donor database in - at all. So let's be clear that this is not a CRM in any real sense- you can't upload files of people or donations to it - it is a one by one manual thing. It seems like a great way to manage people who have given through classy but if you have donor files already, you'll need another database - which you'll also have to pay for so this seems like a lot to pay for not a total solution. If you were to be starting from scratch this might be a moot problem. For us - we are keeping our Donor Tools account and just using classy for events as a test - but two donor portals is not an ideal situation.

Classy is just what we needed to make online donation easy and painless. Not only is the donor experience great, but Classy keeps track of the donors in a variety of useful ways and we receive our monies in a timely manner. In addition, Classy is able to organize our annual fundraiser, handling both ticket sales and donations.

Classy has many features that we don't fully use. We hope to learn more and use Classy more effectively in the future.

It allows dynamic and customizable campaign pages. We've been able to increase the information we disseminate to our donors

The design template is limited without coding experience

I have had a good experience using Classy. One of the things I like best is the support that Classy offers, especially the "chat" function. It is very quick and easy to use. I also like the team function, where attendees can have both an individual page and be part of a team.

I don't like the cost of this software– it is very expensive, especially for a nonprofit.

The customization of each of the campaign pages.

the mapping from classy into salesforce was not as smooth as I thought.

Classy is such a helpful tool for our nonprofit because the make fundraising centralized. You can set up events, peer to peer fundraisers, crowd funding, etc. We are still figuring out how to best use these different tools for our nonprofit, but Classy has a ton of resources to help with that too. I think the resources Classy offers is one of the things I like most about them. If I ever have a question, I just go there and there is usually a resource available.

It is hard to tell your donors how much they should pay to cover fees because WePay uses a set approach and Classy uses a percentage. It would be helpful if they could agree.

Our nonprofit team has really appreciated Classy's clean user interface and its many robust native integrations. Despite other similar options, we are always inclined to use Classy as it works cleanly with our existing systems such as Salesforce, minimizing busy work for data entry and donor management. Their support team is highly accessible and have been a really helpful resource for our team to maximize usefulness of our campaigns.

While the plug-and-play setup can be very helpful for quick campaign creation, for some campaigns, customization options are limited. Their in-house payment processor Classy Pay also has some fees which were relatively hidden which has been disappointing, but it is generally a very useful software.

Classy has been a game changer for us here at The Launch Pad. It felt like a scary investment because we are a very small non-profit and it can be risky to spend money on things other than programming. However, Classy helped us reach a broader audience, it engaged younger families in what we do, and it gave us a much more professional look. Classy is user friendly, it communicates to our donor database so our Salesforce account stays up to date, it sends receipts automatically, and as a team of only 3 people serving 100s of teens a month, that helps us out so much. We are classy customers for life!

The only complaint I have is that I wish we could switch between campaign templates without having to rebuild the design. It's not a huge ordeal, that would just make it a little more efficient.

I love how easy it is to set up new fundraisers and for others outside the org to create new P2P campaigns to share with friends. I also love how easily and efficiently it integrates with MailChimp. Last, their support is pretty decent.

It's incredibly pricey for all that it does. If you are looking for a CRM, keep looking. Classy does not offer good data management or reporting.