- Log in
- Browse Businesses
- Guides
- Resources
- Write a Review
- Request a Review
- Backed by the National Science Foundation
- For Business
Charity Advantage has a rating of 3.5 stars from 19 reviews, indicating that most customers are generally satisfied with their purchases. Charity Advantage ranks 94th among Website Design sites.
This is a 5 star company with great reviews everywhere. We have had no issues with any part of the service for at least 8 years. They have very helpful support. You can tell when they really care about your questions and making sure you understand how to use the system since there are so many things you can do with it.
We've used them several years. The integration with PayPal failed far more often than it worked... PayPal works fine for us on all other types of sites we find it. Agree about the no phone calls and you have to go online to check to see when and if they have answered your problem. We've had better uptime than Melanie... about 80% but the functionality has been awful at times and we've lost registrants for events because of it. They also charged us $49.95 for years when they were offering less expensive options to others.
This is a 5 star company with great reviews everywhere. We have had no issues with any part of the service for at least 8 years. They have very helpful support. You can tell when they really care about your questions and making sure you understand how to use the system since there are so many things you can do with it.
Hardly a scam that the raging person who started this review states. I found thousands of sites that use them in a simple google search, so they are legit. I myself, did not have many issues at all, other than some bulk mailing problems where some of my mailers were being blocked. Overall, they build you a nice site, and provide you actual useful tools that other companies charge you for, at a very reasonable price.
As for ease of use, that is very subjective. If you know very little about computers, then a system this big will perplex you. I found the system quite simple, but i do have many years of experience working with similar software like MS Office.
We work so hard to help nonprofits. We understand that some people can write things online that aren’t correct and wish the best to them.
We've used them several years. The integration with PayPal failed far more often than it worked... PayPal works fine for us on all other types of sites we find it. Agree about the no phone calls and you have to go online to check to see when and if they have answered your problem. We've had better uptime than Melanie... about 80% but the functionality has been awful at times and we've lost registrants for events because of it. They also charged us $49.95 for years when they were offering less expensive options to others.
The online donations system you were using is the same technology that powers every user. It always works unless you are having an issue with your PayPal account which can happen. We have live support Monday through Friday and if you prefer support tickets, we answer every ticket very quickly. In addition, our ticket system has always sent an automated notice when you place a ticket and also when it is answered. While we do appreciate your writing, it is impossible that your site would be online 80% of the time. We have always maintained a state of the art web server infrastructure with a 99.9% uptime rate. If your site wasn’t online, it would be due a problem with your domain name or issue outside of our control. While we appreciate feedback, we don’t agree with your statements.
I have used Charity Advantage for 3 years. It was been a wonderful experience. They are helpful and reasonably priced. I can make most changes to the website myself, but if I need help they get to it within 24 hours. I've never had a bad experience with them.
Thank you. Most users have a very positive experience and we appreciated your taking the time to comment. As of 2018, we are in our 18th year online and have served thousands of nonprofits.
I am a long time user. The back office interface is simple to use but seems very powerful. I usually read all the nonprofit tech forums online and CharityAdvantage has a great reputation and very high ratings. Donations system works great. Support is excellent. I always recommend them.
We appreciate the referrals. 82% of all our new users are referred by other users without compensation for doing so. The nonprofit forums all speak very highly of us.
We had a Paypal button and never got donations. We moved to Charity Advantage and now we are in the fundraising business. It handles the custom form, notifications, receipts, donor acknowledgements, donor database management, efundraising campaigns, and a complete mobile app. They rebuilt our site and made it look modern and sharp and it was completely free. I don't know how they do all of this for barely any cost but I have referred several colleagues and they are all happy too. The support seems very fast and they really help you which is hard to find these days. Overall, we are extremely happy and their knowledge of fundraising with their platform has really transformed our organization!
We’re so happy to hear that you like your new site. Most users that signup have an existing site, and they are so impressed when we build an entirely new site in just a few days and at no extra costs.
Charity Advantage actually deserves half a star. First, the samples shown on their website do not represent any product that can be delivered. So, do not expect for your website to look anything like those sample sites. Secondly, sales representatives and webmasters do not tell you upfront that the samples are not designs that they can duplicate. Also, they do not reveal this information to you until after taking your money.
Nonetheless, Charity Advantage is not worth the cheap price and headache of dealing with incompetent, unprofessional staff. Of course, you get what you pay for. Now, I am happy to pay a local individual $299 for a 5 page website which I am certain will look much better than the cheesy, tacky junk that that Charity Advantage made.
Although your comments are incorrect, we do appreciate your taking the time to write. Every sample that you had seen were actual websites that we built for our users. On a daily basis, other users ask us to design sites just like them with a 98.2% satisfaction rate. However, for us to build a beautiful site, you needed to supply content including quality text and images. Web designers don’t supply content for your site. Unfortunately, on rare occasion a user will spend almost no time giving us content and provide minimal or low quality content and then expect a site to meet their needs. While we do most of the work and are happy to, website projects are a partnership and we do require some participation from our users. We build thousands of beautiful websites and it is very clear to us when a user doesn’t fully cooperate, and then complains when it doesn’t meet their expectations. We do have a free revisions period to handle any issues and also have a money back guarantee. In addition, we do not charge any extra fees to build a professional customized site for our users.
We have been with Charity Advantage for several years and it is a low cost site that we have used. It meets our needs; however, we noticed that we could not access our website and we tried to reach out to Charity Advantage. The website live chat link is disabled and the business phone is disconnected. They are still charging my card the monthly fee but we can't access -- hopefully their representative will see this review and reach out... we may have to look at options if we can't get access soon.
Hi Kathryn. Thanks for contacting us and we’re happy to help!
We provide support through our popular Live Chat Monday through Friday 10:00 am – 6:00 pm EST. If you were logged into your account at that time, we would have looked forward to assisting you. If you aren’t able to login, we also have Live Chat on our website CharityAdvantage.com. We just launched a brand new site yesterday and the live chat wasn’t functional until this morning. If you had tried to contact us during that time and couldn’t login to your account, we apologize that we were not available. It is extremely rare that a customer would not be able to contact us.
Since we’re not certain of your exact issue at this time, we would suggest one of two things for resolution. If you can login, please do so and use the Live Chat in your account during our support hours. If you are not able to login, please use the Live Chat at CharityAdvantage.com during those same hours. Our team will look forward to assisting!
Regards,
Emily
Price is super low. Quality is very high. Support is very fast and thorough. I find them friendly and easy to do business with. Their online donations system does everything and they don't charge anything extra for it! My friend works at Habitat for Humanity and they use CharityAdvantage. She referred it to me and I am glad I found them!
We are glad to hear that you are so satisfied with the support and prices. We work very hard to keep the prices low to meet the needs of tight budgets. We do work with many Habitat For Humanities. Affiliates of most national organizations use CharityAdvantage since their headquarters often refer them.
We use Charity Advantage because of the price and when it is working without problems things are OK. Not as flexible a website as I would like but the price is good. Problem is support is only Monday-Friday 9-5 EST. Our site went down today shortly after 10AM (Friday) as a result of Charity Advantage tech support and now more than 12 hours later is still down. There is no way to contact then real time or over the weekend. This is not acceptable.
Tip for consumers:
Price is good for non-profits. They have a lot of options for the site but there are certain items they can not do even if you are willing to pay extra for their staff to do programing..
Products used:
Charity Advantage website
I love CharityAdvantage! Support is very fast and the system is easy to use. Our first admin in the office had very low tech skills and managed the entire site! I go to a lot of nonprofit conferences and it seems that CharityAdvantage is highly respected.
Yes, we are mentioned at so many nonprofit meetings, seminars, and conferences. We have been online for 18 years and have so many satisfied users. Thank you.
I have been using CharityAdvantage for about five years. I never had an issue with the donations system and it connects to PayPal which is rock solid. I couldn't see how there would be any issues with that unless one didn't follow the simple instructions. CharityAdvantage support is fast and thorough but I don't use it much - it is a pretty simple system to use. My site has never been down. People just exaggerate. A website would never be online 80% of the time. How could a website be down that much? I have referred many customers to CharityAdvantage and don't know of any complaints about down time. I was referring someone recently and they asked me to check about up time and the answer was the same as I got five years ago: 99.99% up time. Any major host will have that.
Thank you for the positive review. Our donation system always works and you are correct that we maintain an industry standard 99.9% up time rate. The user that stated otherwise was either incorrect or perhaps had an issue with their domain name which is outside of our control and support.
Four year customer... We use most of their features. I would say that the database system and mass emailer are the ones we use the most because we blast our email lists often. When we started we had a list of about 50 emails. Now we have over 3,400 so that has been a real benefit. Our donations have shifted from mail to web and the increased list size has had a large impact on our growth, We had 4-5 websites since we started online and this is by far the best looking and most professional. Support is excellent and they don't charge a support fee for the data management and other features... It is all included.
Thank you for your review. We’re happy to hear that the website has been instrumental in growing your contact list, which should lead to more supporters donating through your website since CharityAdvantage includes an entire fundraising system at no extra cost.
Not as simple to use as they present in the beginning - some days I cannot get it to work at all and many many times I will work for several minutes making changes to the pages and when I click "save" it tells me my time has expired and I have to start over. More times than not I am very frustrated with it
While we understand this review is from 2012 and our system has been upgraded many times since, in using any system at that time it was a best practice to save your work often if you were going to be taking a lot of time to make changes. The save button was available right on the editor. In terms of “getting it to work”, this seems like a little user frustration which all back office systems have. While we apologize that you were frustrated, saving your work more often and perhaps using our Knowledge Base or requesting our support more often could have solved any issues for you.
Charity Advantage offered this great opportunity to my agency with supports and ongoing help. They "built" our site with all sorts of typos and then failed to help us transition it over accurately. Our site was up for less then a week and then every time we tried to access it we were directed to a blank page. Charity Advantage offered no help stating everything looked fine on their end. I finally transitioned back to my old site and lost months of time with this horrible company.
Unfortunately, so many online reviews for any business aren’t correct. This is an example. First, we only copy/paste content given to us when we build a website. We don’t “type” or enter text on a site. If there were typos, they were in the content that you provided to us. For helping with a “transition” you were responsible for logging into your domain provider to point the domain properly to your new site. Your domain vendor would have been happy to provide support for that since that is the number one support question for them. In terms of seeing a blank page when you went to your site, there are many reasons for that. Perhaps you had a page with no content set as your “home page” in the system by mistake. Perhaps your domain name wasn’t renewed at your domain vendor and when the domain was entered they routed it to a blank page. Perhaps you didn’t correctly point the domain to the new site. For whatever the reason, there were no issues with our system that would cause a blank page to appear when a user goes to your site.
Always wonder why people base the reputation of a business off of a handful of reviews. Unless the business has over a hundred reviews, it's best to just go to the Better Business Bureau website. I did and charityadvantage has an A+ rating. The irony here is that it has a better rating than sitejabber, which is dedicated to the critique of other businesses!
We have always had a stellar reputation in the nonprofit community. We understand that an organization of our size will obtain some negative reviews on a site like this. That is just the nature of the Internet and review sites. Even the best hotels and restaurants in the world have negative reviews. Best to just have your own experience with a business.
We have used Charity Advantage for several years and have only had a few glitches, but overall it works well.
We appreciate your review. It is our pleasure to serve you.
I purchased their services and after getting my money I never received the help and never received my website! THEY ARE THE CROOKS!
We have been online for 20 years and have built more nonprofit websites than any other provider. Everyone who signs up receives the same Getting Started email with instructions on how to work with us to get their new website. The Getting Started email is sent automatically and immediately after signup. It usually takes us 14 days or less to build the new site.
We provide professional live chat support so customers can speak directly with one of our experts. It is highly unlikely someone would ever pay us and not receive services unless they didn’t work with us to get their new site. We also reach out to new customers with a welcome call to answer any potential questions. Additionally, customers can build their own websites using our system with over 200 video tutorials and our online support. Beyond this, customer actions would be out of our control. Customers may use our system to build their own sites. They may sign up and not do anything for a period of time because they are busy.
In the event that a customer is not satisfied, we have a well-communicated 90-day money back guarantee. We are the only provider that offers a 90-day money back policy for our low monthly service fees and we don’t charge any additional costs for building the site. Anyone requesting a refund would receive one. Anyone can dispute a credit card charge and seek resolution from their card company. We all know that banks honor any legitimate payment dispute.
If you signed up, didn’t provide your website content and instructions for a new site, and didn’t request a refund, then you wouldn’t have given us an opportunity to serve you or resolve any issues. Please contact us directly for a full refund.
Gain trust and grow your business with customer reviews.
You are correct that our reviews on other sites are so positive. When we survey our own users, our satisfaction rate beats industry standards every time. This website (Site Jabber) is a “complaint” site so you are more likely to see some negative reviews written by users that may be either incorrect, frustrated with technology, or other issues not actually related to our services. While we always appreciate feedback, any business that serves thousands of users is going to see this.