What’s next for EveryAction
A look at our product roadmap and commitments for 2023 and beyond.
In 2022, we shared that EveryAction joined other leading social good technology companies CyberGrants, Network for Good, Social Solutions, and their respective entities to become Bonterra. Since then, we’ve been hard at work bringing together the wide range of tech, tools, and services we all offer, including case management, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and fundraising and engagement, as well as some functionality from our friends at Mobilize.
Our purpose is to power those who power social impact, and we came together for a reason: to better meet the needs of our customers—the doers. For over 20 years, EveryAction has provided technology to support nonprofits working to make the world a better place, and we’re honoring that history through our product roadmap and commitments.
As we move forward in creating a cohesive Bonterra software ecosystem, our top priority remains the same: putting your unique needs front and center by delivering the critical functionality and problem solving you’ve come to expect from us. EveryAction has served thousands of customers over the years, which means we’ve supported you in helping millions of people in some shape or form. Together as Bonterra, we’re continuing to invest in the areas that make your work successful.
As we continue to move through 2023, we’re excited to show you what we’ve been working on and what lies ahead on our product roadmap. Here’s a look!
Table of contents
Engage your community.
Why this matters
Meaningful change starts with engaging and growing your community. We’ve stood, marched, messaged, and canvassed in your shoes as organizers, advocacy managers, volunteer coordinators, and so much more; and we’ve done this work across 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) nonprofit organizations as well as labor unions and political campaigns. We know the right tools are the ones that make your job easier so you can focus on what matters: your mission.
What we’re doing
You might’ve seen that in 2022, after some intensive user experience (UX) research, we made updates to our flagship MiniVAN mobile canvassing app. We also recently made enhancements to our OpenVPB phone bank organizing tool to allow users to set a default script and up to four alternate scripts for their phone banks. Organizations using multiple scripts can create phone banks that can target different scripts to different people and allow phone bankers to toggle between scripts and even toggle between different languages—all of which will help them connect with and activate more support for your mission or goal.
Looking ahead, we’re continuing to make updates to MiniVAN—for example, we’re building a MiniVAN and Mobilize integration, which will allow canvassers to see upcoming events in Mobilize after they complete their shift in MiniVAN so they can sign up for their next canvassing shift or community event right from the app. We’re also working on a seamless EveryAction and Mobilize integration with updates to provide nonprofits with a better view of supporters and to offer better targeting.
To help you work smarter instead of harder in reaching your donors and supporters, we’re also focusing on performance and capability updates, such as the ability to send by time zone and A/B testing for email and mobile messaging. These updates will help you meet what many of us understand to be four of the most important criteria for solid supporter engagement: right message, right supporter, right channel, right time.
Activate supporters with Mobilize.
Why this matters
From its roots in the aftermath of the 2016 election all the way to the present, Mobilize has been there to help organizations like nonprofits, unions, and public institutions meet, engage, and activate the broad base of support they need to get involved and create change.
Once again, we’ve stood where you stand—we’ve scheduled volunteers for shifts, built emails, and anxiously refreshed reporting dashboards to see how well our efforts were helping us meet our team and organizational goals.
Mobilize is here to stay. In fact, as we continue as Bonterra, we’re doubling down on building more innovative tools that meet your needs in order to ultimately help you do more good.
What we’re doing
We’re investing in the Mobilize network, starting with Mobilize.Us—what we call the “front door.” We’re helping organizations reach new supporters, and we’re helping supporters seamlessly discover ways to act on the issues that matter to them through a better search experience that helps them get connected to causes more quickly.
Within our work to improve the search function, some of our focus areas are:
- using data to optimize recommendations and sorting,
- improving search capabilities and the user experience on Mobilize.Us, and
- increasing the organic reach of events and volunteer opportunities through SEO.
We’re also investing in ways to keep supporters up-to-date on new opportunities with improved weekly digests. Right now, Mobilize sends a weekly digest of personalized event recommendations to over a million supporters every week. By increasing the number of organizations on Mobilize.Us and improving the quality of these recommendations, we can help supporters get connected to new causes and organizations.
Some of our focus areas here include:
- improving the relevance of recommendations,
- subject line and email delivery optimization, and
- an improved user experience for updating their location and other preferences.
We’re also helping our customers get their events in front of the right supporters more quickly and make volunteer coordination smoother. We’re improving Mobilize’s self-service onboarding and event creation tools, and we’re specifically looking to reduce the time to sign up for users’ first event, so everyone can get even more value out of the tool. Improvements to the event creation and group signup workflows in Mobilize will save volunteer coordinators time and make it easier to create and manage volunteer shifts. As we build on existing check-in capabilities, you’ll be able to track volunteer hours more granularly and make your volunteers’ hours they’ve contributed more visible to them—all of which will help them understand their role and their impact in driving change with you, which means they’ll be more likely to come back shift after shift.
Ultimately, these improvements will make it easier for organizations to reach a broader base of supporters on Mobilize and drive them to sign up for more of the events that resonate with them, which helps everyone make an even deeper impact.
Optimize your fundraising.
Why this matters
We understand that nonprofits don’t just raise money to raise money—there are real consequences when an organization is able to meet their fundraising goals and when they aren’t.
Those consequences can have local, national, and even societal implications: when nonprofits are able to raise the funds they need to do their work, a whole range of social good programs and actions get the fuel they need:
- People experiencing food insecurity, housing insecurity, or a need for medical care have more of their needs met.
- Animals and the earth are protected and respected.
- Marginalized populations can successfully advocate for their rights and work toward a more just society.
- Education, art, and culture can receive the support they need to flourish.
- And so much more.
What we’re doing
To make a long story short, we’re focused on expanding the channels and integrations through which you can accept payments to help you grow your fundraising in a flexible and efficient way. As a first step, we’ve already released an employer matching integration between EveryAction and CyberGrants, as well as a much-requested integration between EveryAction and Double the Donation, which will help folks raise more for the nonprofits they’re already donating to by allowing more donors to take advantage of employer matching giving programs.
We’re also working on ways to make payments more flexible, intuitive, and useful, so people and organizations who need funds can better connect with people and organizations who can give them. As former fundraisers ourselves, we know payments need to be efficient, secure, and compliant—without forcing you to become an expert in all the technical complexities of payment pathways. That’s why we have two main areas of focus in the payments arena:
- Work to build a more robust payments system that’s not only fully embedded in the EveryAction CRM but that also makes onboarding, adoption of new payment methods and capabilities, and reporting and reconciliation easier for our customers.
- Work that maximizes conversion rates on our forms.
These focuses will encourage more supporters to click the all-too-important “submit” button on your form, and ultimately help our customer organizations accept more payments to support their work.
Oversee and maintain relationships with next-generation constituent relationship management (NextGen CRM)
Why this matters
When your constituent relationship management (CRM) platform meets your needs, it makes it easier to do your work and spend more time on the tasks that really require creativity, warmth, and a human touch. We know how hard it can be to spend hours and hours fighting with technology and repetitive tasks when you really want to be working on projects that move your mission forward—projects that probably drew you to the nonprofit world in the first place.
What we’re doing
On top of efforts to optimize your fundraising through expanded and more flexible payment options, we’re also working to bring our CRM platform to the next level. Some of our focuses include:
- introducing a New Contact Record user interface (UI),
- improving core data objects like Phones and Addresses, and
- enhancing navigation and wayfinding—meaning we want to save you time by making it easier to find what you’re looking for within our tools.
We’re also working on enabling single sign on (SSO) functionality for our CRM. Organizations that adopt SSO can allow their users to log in to their EveryAction instance using their organization’s domain. This will help our customers effectively manage and provision their users, and users won’t need to manage another password—making it an investment in our platform’s ease of use for everyone.
The CRM focuses we have on our product roadmap are all in an effort to improve its usability and scalability, which will help us modernize the platform and ultimately serve your needs in a more effective way.
Q+A
As Bonterra, we don’t just have updates to share about our product roadmap—we also wanted to provide answers to some questions you’ve had for us.
Q: EveryAction’s values are part of what drew my organization to your products. How will those values change or stay the same as you continue as Bonterra?
A: We hear you. As we continue as Bonterra, our original values will remain the same. We have also updated our acceptable use policy, which forbids the use of our platform to promote, encourage, or facilitate hate speech or hate groups, as well as disinformation. We’re still focused on offering great technology to those out there truly making the world a better place; and we’re proud to power those who power social impact.
Q: What are you doing to invest in accessibility as you grow and scale?
A: One very important initiative we’re working on in 2023 that crosses many of our products and tools is an accessibility audit. In order to make an impact on their community, supporters need to be able to access opportunities to get involved, and we can play a role in that by performing audits across Bonterra’s tools to bring core experiences up to a baseline rooted in major standards and best practices. This isn’t just a helpful thing to do—it’s the right thing to do.
Q: How are you actively seeking out input and feedback from customers, partners, and others in this space?
A: We’re committed to making great technology—but a big part of knowing what makes it “great” is going right to the source to find out what would most benefit the folks using our tools. Right now, we have an active partner advisory committee that comprises experts from a wide range of backgrounds who not only work with nonprofits, but who have years of experience themselves in nonprofit fundraising, digital communications and marketing, advocacy, organizing, and more. And we always appreciate product feedback from customers, since that helps us identify the updates and new releases folks most need and want to see. Please send any feedback, including other feature requests, to our product team by logging into your EveryAction instance and using our Product Feedback tool to share your thoughts. (GiveGab, Mobilize, and Network for Good customers now also have their own portals where users can submit ideas directly—and the same will be rolled out across all Bonterra products. If you use any or all of those tools instead of or in addition to EveryAction, we hope you’ll use those pathways to let us know what you’d like to see next!)
The bottom line from Bonterra’s 2023 product roadmap
We have a long list of projects we’re excited to tackle, but if you’re a nonprofit or other social good organization, our goal as Bonterra is to deliver you an ecosystem of excellent tech solutions that meet your needs, so you can focus on advancing your mission.
We’re better together through collaboration and innovation. And we’re so excited to continue this journey with you. Learn even more about our plans for the future in our Bonterra roadmap blog!
