Online Express: A Long Way to Go to Catch Constant Contact
October 25, 2017
Online Express: A Long Way to Go to Catch Constant Contact
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Blackbaud Online Express
We are a non-profit conservation organization. We use Online Express to informational and fundraising emails to our members and supporters. We use it for our statewide communications. We also have six centers in different locations around the state. Those centers use it to let local members know of events and programs. We also use it for membership renewals and to supplement our direct mail fundraising.
- it provides quick and relatively comprehensive data about who opened, clicked and reacted to our emails.
- It allows us to automatically record transactions made via email to Raiser's Edge. In other words, if someone makes a donation via Online Express, that information is recorded automatically in our data base.
- We recently moved from Constant Contact for our emails to Online Express. Except for the couple of examples I previously gave of what Online Express does well, it underperforms Constant Contact in every way.
- Its user interface is clunky and hard to manipulate; it seems as if it were designed when the Internet was in its infancy and not updated since.
- It is extremely time consuming to randomize and divide email lists for split-testing.
- With Constant Contact we could easily increase our open rates dramatically by simply re-sending our emails the next day to the people who had not opened them. It is extremely cumbersome to do that with Online Express.
- Online and phone support is slow, wait times are long, and when you finally get a person to talk to or chat with, they often don't know how to solve your problem. And they are annoyingly cheerful about it! It's as if they don't realize that they weren't any help.
- OE's online email signup form allows visitors to our website to sign up only for our one basic email list. Unfortunately we have six locations and need separate lists for each of those centers.
- It is difficult to tell. We making the transition from Constant Contact to online express in August. Our end of year fundraising is about to start. We expect it will make it easier to track our donors' and members' actions, which is why we bought into it.
We chose Online Express because it was bundled with a Raiser's Edge upgrade, and because we hope it would let us manage online donations and memberships more easily. We still expect that to happen. But in every other way, it underperforms Constant Contact. It is harder to create and design emails. It is harder to find answers and solutions to problems. OE's data reporting seems better but it is less meaningful because with OE it is harder to split-test and re-send emails.