Item: Bonterra Development + Digital
Rating: 8
Author: Susan Bean

Overall Satisfaction with EveryAction

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

EveryAction is being used across our whole organization. It combines into one cloud based platform our need for a donor database, an advocacy platform, an email marketing tool, and a volunteer management system. All of our staff can access it remotely from different offices or locations. It has streamlined our operations tremendously.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It is constantly improving features based on customer feedback.
It allows for tremendous segmentation of our supporters in various creative ways.
It unifies where we keep information about our donors, email subscribers, advocates, and volunteers.

Cons

Every Action does not allow for an overall maximum number of sign ups for events, which is a problem because events have capacity restrictions. You can limit ticket types for ticketed events, but we use it to publish sign up forms for volunteer events and community events and need capacity limits on those.
You cannot run reports on activist codes that have been applied outside of 30 days and since we use activist codes to label our supporters in all sorts of ways over a span of years, this limits the functionality of many reports.
My colleagues report that the membership feature doesn't work consistently and causes problems for accuracy.

Return on Investment

It has definitely improved fundraising performance because we are better able to track the success of specific campaigns and adapt future efforts based on what we learn.
It has also been more efficient for us to keep all the information about our various types of supporters in one CRM rather than managing multiple databases and multiple platforms that are not integrated.
We have also improved the effectiveness of our advocacy campaigns because we can try different approaches and better track how successful different approaches have been.

Implementation Rating

I remember thinking it was a challenge to transition to EveryAction in a few ways. For starters, it is simply an incredibly complex database so many of our staff were very daunted by learning to navigate the various features. Additionally, the user roles were poorly structured such that we could not make sense of how to assign user roles in order to best allow for access to the right components of the software to the right staff members, while prohibiting some staff (like interns and volunteers) from accessing sensitive data. Lastly, for some reason I can't remember we had a tough time merging duplicate records when we integrated our previous systems into one and one of our staff spent many unexpected hours trying to sort that out.

Reliability and Availability

EveryAction has almost always been available when I have needed technical support. With just a few exceptions, responses to support tickets is usually timely and helpful. Even when they can't solve my problem, they take feedback and send it to other staff to try to improve the product at a later date which I appreciate.

Performance

I would answer this question exactly the same way I answered the ROI question. It has helped us raise more money, be more efficient and know our supporters better.

Key Insights

Do you think Bonterra Development + Digital delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Bonterra Development + Digital's feature set?

Yes

Did Bonterra Development + Digital live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Bonterra Development + Digital go as expected?

Would you buy Bonterra Development + Digital again?

Yes

Alternatives Considered

Salsa CRM and NationBuilder

I don't honestly remember why we selected EveryAction over these other two. I do remember that we didn't look at Salsa long because EveryAction clearly had so much more of what we wanted. It was very close with NationBuilder, but ultimately our whole team is glad we went with EveryAction.

Other Software Used

WordPress, Squarespace, ClickTime, Dropbox, Zoom, EZ Texting, SignUpGenius

Likelihood to Recommend

EveryAction is very well suited to organizations that do both advocacy and fundraising. For organizations that do not do much policy advocacy or at least not much in the way of grassroots organizing, than EveryAction is likely more complex than what one would need.

Comments

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EveryAction is a complex and sophisticated database that I am grateful to benefit from.