Not Every Activist Should Use EveryAction
July 26, 2023
Not Every Activist Should Use EveryAction
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with EveryAction
Most of the organizations in which I've used EveryAction - or which I've supported with EveryAction setup & use - try to make it the solution for all of their online organizing needs. There are very few mobilizing functionalities it doesn't claim to offer (most notably, peer-to-peer texting). That can be really convenient for organizations that are trying to do outreach on a lot of different levels, and recognize the need to have all that data live together in one place. But I've also noticed that the scale of what EveryAction offers can make it overwhelming for less technical staff, and especially volunteers. I have found it suits organizations best that absolutely need bulk email, digital fundraising, phone banking, event management, broadcast texting, online advocacy, action tracking, reporting, and a bunch more functionality all in the same tool because they have no other options.
- Some people find the Create A List tool more intuitive than other record-querying equivalents, which can make it easier for digital organizers to target and segment bulk emails, broadcast texts, door-knocking sheets, etc.
- The ability to add custom fields on both Contact and Contribution records allows for some flexibility in making the system adapt to your organizing model
- There aren't a lot of other tools out there that make phone banking quite as accessible
- EveryAction's Email Series/Automations allow for some pretty sophisticated things to run mostly on their own, from welcome and reactivation series, to drip campaigns
- For the most technical EveryAction users, the ability to customize online form appearance and functionality using callback functions allows for pretty intricate customization of submitter experiences (e.g. redirecting form submitters to different destinations based on how they filled out the form)
- The most common frustration and complaint I've experienced has been about support. Issues can sometimes drag on for months, they have given false or misleading information, data has been lost during migrations, and perhaps the worst is that they have been caught trying to avoid responsibility. But on some level these might just be symptoms of a larger problem. The tool is too big, trying to do too much. That means we customers get overwhelmed and need to ask for support more often, and that their support staff may actually be less familiar with some details of the tool than we are. And it doesn't help the situation that they seem to have pretty rapid staff turnover.
- In the theme of EveryAction trying to do too much, many of the pages - from records to admin menus - are just overwhelming. There are too many sections and subsections. When to get to know each one, it makes sense why it's there and why it's important. But the combination of all the different pieces makes it a very difficult tool to onboard volunteers less comfortable with technology. If your grassroots fundraising program relies on a bunch of retired volunteers, it will be a challenge to get them to use EveryAction.
- Generally speaking, it seems as though there's more emphasis on marketing and sales than support. There is some ability to pick and choose just the pieces you need and not pay for pieces you don't. But everything is expensive, there is a lot of emphasis placed on upselling you, and there are hidden costs. Up until not too long ago, there was no way to bulk delete records, and when you'd ask support for help doing so, they'd bill you with a data services charge. They offer migration support for a cost, but in all the migrations I've seen and heard about, they aren't very helpful because they spend more time explaining what can't be done without even more costly support than trying to understand your unique organizing and data needs. And if you have a data warehouse and want to get your data dumped in there, the prices can get very high very quickly.
- On the more technical side, EveryAction's APIs are useful, but I feel they get developed and managed so haphazardly that it's hard to plan around them. The API credentials you get have selective permissions to the endpoints you'd need in a way that's completely opaque. For instance, loading values to Custom Contact fields is a relatively straightforward part of updating a Contact record, but if Custom Contribution fields require a completely different process, involving automated bulk imports, from updating Contribution records. Bulk imports don't allow for other, more standard Contribution updates and you have to ask to get an API key type has access to the bulk import endpoint, even if you already have access to Contribution endpoints. Their documentation is decent when it comes to using the endpoints, but doesn't reflect operational obstacles like this. I've found and heard that more time is spent working with support than actually writing code when developing using their APIs.
- Reports can be very helpful, but despite what EveryAction folks claim, in my experience, they're just not quite as customizable as we need. Especially when it comes to connecting people to one another, or understanding donors AND their donations, it seems the only options are to export data and process it externally, whether that means someone's doing a whole lot of work in Google Sheets, or you have tech capacity for data visualization, but still have to pay a lot for the data dump.
- EveryAction's positive impacts are usually felt in the sophistication of outreach, which, when done right, translates into better engagement, leadership development, and even cold hard cash. Being able to tailor outreach and mobilization based on something close to a full picture of each supporter is the best way to identify candidates for moving up ladders of engagement (aka "conversion"). Automations and other functionality can free up organizers' time, but in general my experience has been that folks get more busy rather than less, with all the possibilities that emerge.
- EveryAction's more immediate negative impacts have to do with admins' user experience. Feelings of overwhelm at the scope of the tool and frustration at the experience of support can lead folks to just reduce or stop altogether their engagement with EveryAction. Unfortunately, even when it's working perfectly, the tool is only as good as the data being entered and managed within it. So if folks aren't fully adopting EveryAction because of the initial experience, that neglect will just reinforce the negative experience, because it won't have the data it needs to work the way it's intended. That CRM death-cycle is extremely costly, and while some of the responsibility lies on us to commit our staff and volunteers to using our tools correctly, there's only so much we can do when aspects outside of our control (like support) erode our stakeholders' faith.
- EveryAction also has some indirect negative impacts on the organizing tool marketplace as a whole. It's not EveryAction's fault that you can't effectively organize without a bunch of different types of outreach these days. But in buying up all the competition in the progressive space (Blue State Digital, Action Kit, Mobilize), and insisting on cramming in all these different types of outreach into one tool, in my opinion, it's behaving like a monopoly, and making it more expensive and more complicated to do our work than would otherwise have been the case. To me, that increases the barrier to entry for smaller organizations, which often translates to those run by and in service of the most underserved and historically oppressed communities.
EveryAction's functions are critical to any organizing that needs to scale past personal email addresses and various Google sheets. Providing those has leveled up many organizations' ability to reach, retain, and develop supporters and leaders. This has worked best for organizations that fit the profile of needing all or nearly all the functions EveryAction provides (which go well beyond fundraising, digital marketing, and advocacy) and that have no other way to combine all their organizing data in one place. For other organizations, its impact is limited by either being "too much" (too costly, too overwhelming, etc.) or "too little" (not flexible enough, not great at certain functions, etc.) - or sometimes a bit of both!
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For me, the problem with comparing EveryAction is that it tries to do so much that it's hard to compare it to a single tool. Most of the online organizing tools it is usually contrasted with aren't yet on TrustRadius (e.g. Action Network, New/Mode, etc.). We lump these online organizing tools together as CRMs, when that's one of the functions they struggle with the most. Salesforce's Nonprofit Starter Pack doesn't offer any outreach out of the box, but does offer very sophisticated and flexible record storage solutions and reporting, which is the kind of CRM functionality we need when we're combining data from all these different kinds of outreach. The problem is that, in my opinion, Salesforce is even less user-friendly than EveryAction, and you'd need to figure out how to combine it with one or more proper outreach tools, which could get expensive if you only go for tools that integrate with Salesforce. Action Builder (also not available) might be another option, but then you need someone to build (and maintain!) custom syncs for you. EveryAction makes sense when none of these kinds of alternatives are feasible.