Silent Auction Pro

We've used Silent Auction Pro for at least three events in the last several years as a Mobile Pro client. It is pretty intuitive and keeps our donations well organized, as well as allowing us to communicate effectively with bidders and donors. The ability for anyone to bid online opens our fundraising to the community, not just our school families, helping us raise much more money than we could achieve with paper bidding.

We would love to see an app in the future, rather that just a mobile site for bidding.

Easy to use: The software is very easy to use after spending a little bit of time familiarizing yourself with it. They have numerous help pages and even some youtube videos that help you learn the software. Additionally the technical support was out of this world (see Tech Support is Outstanding). We also loved that numerous people can enter donation items so that the cumbersome task of entering items is not tasked to one person.

Reasonably priced: It is reasonably priced, relative to other similar softwares, and the support alone was worth the money. Originally, we thought the fees were slightly high, but after investigating other software pricing, and after our experience with this software and their support, the annual fee (which allows for as many auctions/events as you'd like within a year) and the 2.0% taken from high bids were nothing, and we would absolutely do it again.

Tech Support is Outstanding: The event coaches are very friendly and incredibly helpful. They help you get started, make suggestions along the way, and they are there to wrap up afterwards as well. We had an IT problem at 9:00pm CST. I called in, my event coach answered me, and she had tech support looking into my problem immediately. Every tech call was answered or gotten back to within an hour.

Overall Great Features: The user pages looked stunning, most features you'd want are available. We really enjoyed our use of the software and are looking forward to our next auction.

Takes Time to Learn: The administrative pages are slightly cumbersome to navigate in the beginning. They take time to learn, although that is probably true of every auction software.

Some Features Not Available: There were a few features that were not available that we would have liked to have seen, such as an option for the public to view all bids placed on an item with bidders names or without, similar to an in-person silent auction. The Donate Button (Fund-a-need) was not intuitive for our users and confused them.

Administrative Pages: Looked a bit dated. For a new software, we would have expected everything to be a bit more up-to-date looking. However, the user pages were very nice looking for the actual auction. Additionally, it would be great if there was a "view as user" option to be able to see what your changes look like once you've made them in the administrative account. It was cumbersome to have a user account and an administrative account and have to switch between the two constantly to be able to view things we were changing in the administrative account. Also the software won't let you have two logins open at the same time.