Integrated Ecosystems vs Feature-Packed Platforms

The Siren Call of All-in-One Solutions

It’s easy to understand why all-in-one platforms are tempting. A single interface for all your needs, one vendor relationship to manage, and the promise of everything working together out of the box. For many NGO leaders, this seems like the straightforward choice.

However, as campaigns grow more complex and collaborations more essential, successful organisations are rethinking how they approach their digital infrastructure to better support their goals.

The Hidden Cost of Trying to Do Everything

When platforms try to excel at everything – from supporter management to email marketing, from donation processing to campaign tools – something has to give. Development resources get stretched, leading to compromises across features. It’s the digital equivalent of trying to be a GP, a heart surgeon, and a brain specialist all at once.

In fact, we already often see one area where optimising and choosing the most efficient tool for the supporters is more important than the potential extra convenience for the campaigners and IT team: the donation tool. Many NGOs could measure that a dedicated tool performs better than the alternative and that improvement is worth the potential extra complexity.

We have spent many years optimising our online campaign forms and we know that as for the donation tools, we provide a better conversion rate than generic tools, but NGOs often paid closer attention to the donation conversion than the online actions ones. More critically, we’re seeing NGOs hitting walls when they need to innovate or collaborate on their campaigns. Many find themselves supplementing their all-in-one solution with specialised tools for specific needs, ending up with the complexity they were trying to avoid in the first place.

Another unexpected cost is that most integrated solutions have a price based on the total number of contacts. However, on online actions, many supporters will take action, but will not want to opt-in your communication. In effect, you are paying to store contacts you won’t be able to email. With separated solutions, you only have (opt-in) supporters in your CRM.

The Power of Specialisation: A Real-World Example

Consider RestoreNature, one of the largest environmental campaigns in recent years at the EU level. It brought together nearly a hundred organisations, including heavyweight NGOs like WWF, Greenpeace, and BirdLife. The campaign achieved over a million actions – a scale of success that would have been nearly impossible with traditional all-in-one approaches.

Why? Because each organisation could use the same campaign tool while maintaining their branding and, crucially, keeping control of their supporter data. This distributed approach to campaigning has also proven successful in numerous European Citizens’ Initiatives, where coalition-building is essential for impact too.

Why Specialised Tools Outperform the “All-in-One” Platforms

1. Focus drives innovation: When a tool focuses solely on campaigning, it can rapidly develop and deploy new tactics or optimise classical ones. From petitions to mail-to-target actions, from social media storms to messages of hope – specialisation enables agility.
2. Coalition-friendly by design: Modern campaigns often require organisations to work together while maintaining their independence. Specialised tools can integrate with multiple CRMs, allowing organisations to share campaign tools without compromising their data sovereignty and stay GDPR compliant.
3. Freedom to evolve: As your organisation grows, your needs change. With specialised tools, you can adapt individual components of your digital stack without having to overhaul everything.

Making Integration Work

The key to success isn’t having everything in one platform – it’s having the right tools working together effectively. Modern APIs and integration capabilities mean you can create a best-in-class toolkit that fits your specific needs. Many NGOs are already doing this unconsciously, using separate tools for donations, CMS or website analytics alongside their primary platforms.

Luckily, online campaigns, like online donations, aren’t as tightly integrated with the NGO contact database as other tools, so planning that integration isn’t that time consuming nor complex. In fact, we have already integrated our tool with many CRMs or online donations, it might already be sorted!

Reclaim your right to innovate

Most campaigns you run are likely to use the same proven tactics, like a petition. But every good campaigner will want to try new campaign tactics or adjust existing ones for a specific opportunity, and the biggest frustrations we’ve heard is when the software they use isn’t flexible enough to allow them to do what the campaigns demand.

We’ve tried to anticipate these in our tech stack:

• separate the front-end (the widget your supporters will see) from the back-end. That way, you can adjust and experiment with what your supporters see while keeping the same rock solid back-end which you know will handle the data safely and at scale.
• make the front-end easy to adjust on a per campaign/widget. We can change every text, disable features or add new ones without worrying about the impact on all the other campaigns
• make new front-end improvements developed for other campaigns easy to add to yours. Most of the time, it’s just a matter of changing your configuration and rebuilding the widget
• Opensource licensed. Not only can we develop a feature just for you, but you could acquire that skill in house or find another provider doing it for you.

With more than 180 campaigns so far, we had many which required custom features and we are delighted that we haven’t yet have to say “I’m afraid it’s not possible”.

Looking Ahead

The future of digital campaigning lies not in monolithic platforms but in ecosystems of specialised tools working together. This approach gives organisations the flexibility to innovate, the freedom to collaborate, and the power to create impact at scale.

For NGOs planning their digital future, the question shouldn’t be “How can we get everything in one place?” but rather “How can we build a toolkit that gives us the flexibility to grow, innovate, and collaborate effectively?”