A platform ready to challenge the big guys Of the fundraising platforms in the market today, there aren't too many that can challenge the big guys, and the first that comes to the top of my mind is Engaging Networks. In the six years since I signed on as a client, I've seen the Engaging Networks platform grow while not straying too far from their core product, and doing so by respecting and listening to their customers. As a non-profit marketing technologist, I've worked with software companies of similar size, but Engaging Networks has the best user community, partners, and employees out there. Maybe it's because all their clients want the best for their clients, community, and country, not just profit, and that brings about more transparency and two-way communications between all parties that I haven't seen before. From a usability experience, Engaging Networks has a better backend than others and complete customizability for end-users. Documentation and customer training has been a continuous point of improvement for them and I appreciate their attention to that often missed requirement.

Great system for nonprofits to grow and integrate their digital marketing Engaging Networks is a fantastic solution to grow and integrate your advocacy, fundraising and email marketing. It’s a very sophisticated system with a learning curve, but they offer an easy interface with documentation and support that makes it possible to get the most out of it. They offer great out of the box templates for pages and emails. They maintain political databases that make it easy to build targeted email/tweet/call to target campaigns. Their digital tracking capabilities are extensive. They have everything a small or large team requires to grow and integrate your digital marketing. Unlike some of the alternative solutions, Engaging Networks continues to invest in improving their system and features. They listen to feedback and they are accessible. I’m very excited about the new page templates, the upcoming Messaging Module, and I'm excited to follow Accessible Intelligence and see how it benefits Engaging Networks. Their system is not without challenges. They offer many integrations but like any sophisticated system you’ll have to see how all of your systems fit together. But their system offers so many options that it seems like almost anything is possible.

Innovative, but could improve on client support I like the innovative aspect of the platform and how the company focuses on research and development. That being said, as a medium size organization without a lot of budget, it was hard for us to keep up with the changes on the platform, and sometimes issues that come with those changes. In addition, because of how customizable your tools are, we ended up building a lot of highly customized forms which became difficult to maintain when we switch agency. Finally, while we have no doubt that the team is highly technically capable, we often felt that our needs were not heard or understood, and ignored. Ultimately, we left EN because some of the fundamental needs we had with the platform were not met and we were tired of having to constantly troubleshoot and fix issues when new releases were brought about.

There are some things that Engaging… There are some things that Engaging Networks does well - their tools are robust and, once set up correctly, you can achieve really impressive things. Testing is built in and you can personalise and chain together different parts of the tool (email, donations and advocacy) to create a really smooth, seamless user experience. That said, I have used EN for years in a few different roles, and even I can't deny there's a steep learning curve. While support is friendly and responsive, it feels as though there's a whole language you need to understand in order to understand the tools correctly (for instance, there's a difference between a question and a field, and opt ins are shown separately in some interfaces but in others they're simply a type of question – that's a lot of cognitive load!) Reporting is fairly limited and the data export function is rigid at best (I remain perplexed to this day that you can't simply export all entries to one data capture form straightforwardly). A Zapier integration would be gamechanging, but having suggested this in a previous role, I was told this wasn't on the list (though I'm not sure if this has changed!) The UX of the backend has improved a lot over recent years, but having tried to upskill colleagues, there's still a lot of trial and error involved in mastering it. I think perhaps this is down to the tool trying to do too many things at once. Overall, the unique features of EN and those features' application to your non-profit's requirements remain compelling. But prepare for a lot of learning and time after set up learning the intracices of the interface and architecture. Try Engaging Networks and you'll be impressed by some of what it does, but some of the painpoints are real – though not necessarily dealbreakers – and that means that you end up with an average experience overall.

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