Engaging NetworksReviews of engagingnetworks.net

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 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.