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EA - easy to use and feature full if you're willing to dig and work to get the value
August 16, 2021

EA - easy to use and feature full if you're willing to dig and work to get the value

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with EveryAction

We use EA for a few of our clients that we consult for. This is typically as a 'CRM' and the main point of contact for the organization's digital outreach. We typically have an external website, but EA contains all of the donor data and information (for mailings, analytics, etc.) as well as the main area from which correspondence (email) and revenue (donation pages and engagement activities such as petitions and surveys) is generated.
  • Easy to Use - EA has really robust documentation as well for complicated features but also has a pretty streamlined mechanism to build anything. Very little requires technical knowledge to accomplish.
  • Consistent feature updates - EA does a great job of updating and adding new features to the platform.
  • Robust Data - for each email, you can see splits on opens, clicks, revenue and unsubs and for donation pages, you can see a ton of data to understand the impact of each page or email you're creating.
  • Deep customization of pages can require a fair amount of technical knowledge. If you really need to change things, a solid knowledge of JS, HTML and CSS is required.
  • Some nice to have features are missing - you often can't update multiple forms at the same time - each requires you to go in and make a change manually to each page.
  • Some features don't provide great results. As an example, the plain-text builder for EA isn't very good and requires us to regularly build our own or use a 3rd party generator - it seems like an odd thing to be bad, but it is.
  • EA has provided a ton of data to help us make better decisions about things like segmentation and such. At the end of the day, EA doesn't help you fundraise better, but it helps you understand how effective your fundraising is.
  • EA is very fast in terms of throughput for building emails - copying and then adjusting copy is a breeze and saves a lot of time.
  • Donor Data is much cleaner in EA due to their robust data systems.
EA comes out of the box fairly empty and requires a decent amount of work if you're looking to replicate experiences from another CRM or website, but if you're building from scratch, EA provides a lot of tools to make the process easy. At times it felt as though the onboarding process could have been better and more robust. I felt as though I had to dig to find a lot of features that I was looking for, but if you're looking to just get a page up that can accept donations, EA is super easy to implement and get running.
Since using EA, I haven't had any instances of pages going down. However, on the back-end, there are times where EA features can go down or some bug is introduced via an update (which happens decently often). The good news is that there are few instances in which these outages last longer than an hour, but it can be frustrating at times dealing with them without a ton of transparency about what's happening.
As a consultant for many non-profits, it helps us make better decisions for them. At the end of the day, EA provides us data and information about the success of our campaigns, tests, etc. that help us to understand the different levers that we have and how to use them to maximize the fundraising efficacy of our clients. The data is easy to understand and capture (most of it is automated) which doesn't create a huge burden for complex infrastructure to understand the impact of the actions you're taking.

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

Not sure

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?

Yes

Would you buy Bonterra Development + Digital again?

Yes

I think EA has a very particular audience that it focuses on very well - if you're a non-profit and you need an out-of-the-box solution for donor management and to send emails and build webpages, EA is phenomenal for that. It's easy to use and is quick to spin up. There's also a ton of features to build upon the basis after a while as well. I'm not sure EA is good for really small operations though - EA's tools are powerful and can be fairly overwhelming for smaller non-profits.