EveryAction vs. Foundant Grant Lifecycle Manager

EveryAction is ideal for any advocacy group that is organizing the public to engage with their elected officials on issues. We primarily use it to send out Action Alerts calling on supporters to sign letters and petitions. From advocating with the local school board for more investment in mental health supports for students to advocating with the Governor to enact into law legislation to reduce child poverty -- EveryAction is a vital tool in our advocacy for public policies and public funding that support the well-being of children.

Incentivized

From where I stand, GLM is well-suited for use by small-staffed charitable foundations who make more than thirty (30) grants a year and distribute more than $500,000 in funds to non-profits. The software is able to handle every step in the grant-making process from receipt of a request, to the evaluation and decision regarding the grant, to tracking the pay-out, and to closing the grant when the work or the year is completed.

Incentivized

• Acknowledgement letters
• Keeping track of donations
• Allowing changes to be made to donations if necessary, even after a couple of days (our old system was very difficult to make changes to a donation record)
• Allows for direct attachment of any electronic documents to the donor profile

Incentivized

• Foundant provides a streamlined grants management solution for reasonable cost.
• The company listens to its users, collecting ideas and making improvements. Updates to the software are rolled out several times a year. When something cannot be changed right away, the company gives context and forecasts when the change might be possible.
• While the software is easy to use, it also offers more advanced features (such as merge templates) that allow more customization for the advanced user.

Incentivized

• Getting help from the ticketing help system--it can take a long time to get a response.
• I'd be interested to see more email templates available for us to use or take inspiration from.
• The log-out times for EveryAction can be frustrating, especially when you get logged out in the middle of building a campaign and you lose information.

Incentivized

• Need a smother process for third party responses. Currently individuals recommending more than one student for scholarships have many emails to deal with to find the correct link to upload the correct student's letter.
• Questions that would filter which applications the applicant would apply for.

We will never us EA, nor recommend them to another org, simply based on their failed promises to deliver training, on-boarding and then charging our account during our free 3 month period, then after cancelling the contract their legal department tried to force us to sign a cancellation agreement that barred us from writing reviews, making comments, etc!

Incentivized

It's just so easy--there isn't a lot of techy lingo or graphics, so a regular person can log in and have a sense of what does what. There might be a few terms you need to learn, but everything is in common English so you can almost always find what you're looking for.

Incentivized

Before the pandemic, tech support was 10/10, but now it’s a little harder to get ahold of someone. I completely understand the difficulty now with working from home and everything so I’m not upset, it just does cause a little worry when I’m pressed for time. A lot of it is my fault for leaving things to the last minute though :/

Incentivized

Will not go higher than 8 because of how often I end up locked out

Incentivized

Support is really good. The answers are always extremely helpful and really walk you through all the steps necessary to answer your questions. I do wish they had capacity for a live chat feature to allow for quicker responses because occasionally there can be a bit of a lag of a day or so to get a response.

Incentivized

They went through all the features and explained in easy-to-digest details what features the system had. They were also responsive to questions we had. We were able to check in with the support team after training and received prompt followups that helped supplement the training after we had real-world experience using the system.

Incentivized

EveryAction definitely makes it easier for my job and reaching members. I manage communications and to be able to communicate with members and donors quickly has been great. After a few weeks of reading the training guides and watching videos, I was able to learn EveryAction and it has helped my job. It is worth a shot!

Incentivized

Because EveryAction was developed by a team with plenty of experience in both non-profit and political work, it was far more tailored to our needs than either Salesforce (which caters more to for-profit businesses than non-profits focused on advocacy) or NationBuilder (which caters more to political work than non-profit work).

Incentivized

I have not used other online grantmaking products or evaluated others. I used to use MicroEdge Gifts, but not the online application version. It was a stand alone management system. This is hands-down better, easier to use and a more complete system

It just works whenever we need it. We'd grown our list and scaled up substantially since buying the product and have had no issues.

Incentivized

• Improved digital advocacy performance (one click action taking).
• Negative impact on email performance (open rates).
• Improved SMS acquisition (easy check box to sign up to receive text messaging).
• Vastly improved ability to pull data for analysis compared to other tools at this price point.
• Simplified integration of forms embedded in the website (Drupal).

Incentivized

• Positive customer service--fairly easy to use for applicants.
• Positive--easy to run reports you have already set up, so [it] saves time.
• Negative--limited question types makes it harder to gather the data we want to track.
• Negative--our budget is more complex than can be tracked in Foundant, so we have to use a separate program.
• Negative--we have to track potential grantee conversations in a separate program.
• Negative--getting data ready to display in a dashboard takes a lot of time to manipulate in Excel.

Incentivized