EveryAction announced its third acquisition within the past six weeks, acquiring the BSD Tools division of Blue State Digital, the digital platform behind President Barack Obama’s campaigns.
The Washington, D.C.-based cause-related marketing firm acquired We Also Walk Dogs, Inc., the creator of ActionKit software, in May and Donor Trends earlier this month. Terms of the deals were not disclosed. Additional deals are expected.
BSD Tools is a digital toolset that pioneered a number of innovations, including one-click contributions and multi-step contribution forms, designed to drive higher conversion rates and help clients raise more money. BSD Tools, will become EveryAction’s Digital Tools. Alex Stanton, managing director of BSD Tools, will continue to run the division. About 35 people will move to EveryAction, which currently has about 300 employees, according to CEO Stu Trevelyan.
Among its 400 clients are larger nonprofits, such as Oxfam America and Heifer. “There is some logic to the clustering; those large organizations tend to focus more and care more about conversion rates because the dollar amounts are higher. A change in conversion rates can be material,” Trevelyan said.
EveryAction officials said the firm has annual revenue of about $50 million, growing 47 percent last year, with more than 15,000 nonprofit clients.
“We’re delighted to see the product we developed join the impressive and innovative digital and other EveryAction tools that power the causes we care about,” Blue State Digital CEO and founder Joe Rospars said via a press release announcing the acquisition this afternoon. Blue State Digital will continue to offer its agency services; only the BSD Tools division of the business is being sold.
The tools will fairly immediately extend across the products, particularly the FastAction network which is now closing in on 5 million stored credit cards to enable one-click contributions, and the ActionProfile network of more than 120 million profiles that prefill web pages, according Trevelyan.
“Digital products will benefit from tighter integrations with the fundraising and organizing products and there will be benefits and efficiencies behind the scenes, for example with email deliverability,” he said. “In the long term, we are looking at ways to extend the best of the products across the entire client base,” he added.
“We’ve made a commitment that BSD Tools will continue to exist at least through 2019 and 2020,” Trevelyan told The NonProfit Times in a brief telephone interview this morning. Technology moves fast, he added, and they haven’t set a clear plan beyond that time period.
EveryAction’s recent spending spree was spurred through a partnership that started last August with venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners, which is providing capital for the company’s growth. EveryAction is a platform investment of Insight Partners’ $6.3 billion Fund X that closed last year and will continue to be active with acquisitions moving forward.
“We’ll do more this year, more for the next couple of years,” as part of their long-term plan, Trevelyan said, adding that EveryAction is part of the firm’s private equity investments. “There’s not a specific set aside or particular dollar set aside but certainly we have tons of dry gunpowder to use,” he said.
EveryAction also announced the EveryAction Innovation Fund, which will award $120,000 annually to client experiments on how to raise more money and spur more engagement. Experiments will be selected each quarter and results shared with the community. “The idea is that some of the things that are newer to the community will get tested and best practices will be formed,” Trevelyan said, with grants of up to $30,000 each quarter.