WordFly vs. Prospect2

Very interested in following this thread!

Hi all,

I think this depends a lot on what your organization is capable of managing internally and what your needs are. 

This year we made the decision to move from Mail2 to WordFly. As Mail2 became an increasingly unstable platform, we looked at Prospect2 as an option. For a number of reasons including pricing and the newness/untested nature of Prospect2 we decided to move to WordFly instead.

I can say from an email design and execution side we are very happy with WordFly. The design capabilities are far superior to Mail2. But it integrates with Tesssitura very differently than Mail2 so you will need to add in some hours with a good DBA to make it really work for you.

I think the capabilities of Prospect2's marketing automation are great, but for the most part I think we're able to setup a lot of similar triggered campaigns within Tessitura. From what I heard from other clients, there are a lot of cool Prospect2 features but they can take a significant amount of staff time to setup.

Another option that we're looking at is a tool called Behavior Infused that Capacity Interactive has recently rolled out. (behaviorinfuser.capacityinteractive.com). Not sure if anyone on this thread has any experience with that yet but its a tool that works with whatever email program you have to create targeted leads.

I believe that WordFly is also working on a more robust marketing automation platform, but I haven't heard any updates on when that would be released in a long time.

If you'd like more details specifically about WordFly and switching over to it from Mail2, I'd be happy to answer additional questions by email.

We just switched fro mail2 to prospect2, deploying our first campaign a week or two ago. (And we were on wordfly before mail2, so have much experience in this area!)

Gabriela is right that it really depends what you want to get out of it. Each of our moves was made for specific reasons at the given time, and we don't regret them. Each platform has its own quirks, and it really just depends what you have the capacity to troubleshoot and/or tolerate.

I believe that Behavior Infuser only works with wordfly, but prospect2 has a similar feature that we're excited to start using.

Happy to talk with anyone in person about specific questions about any of the above.

Sara

We are in the process of moving from Wordfly to Prospect2.  

We're switching for two big reasons. One is that we could never get our performance reminders to work. We have a fair amount of custom tables in our Database and specifically the dates were never importing correctly into Wordfly.  We worked with a number of people to try and solve the problem and it just would never work.  Wordfly's help team was less than helpful on this and a few other Tess integration issues we had.  They would just say "look at this other organization. They can do it. Just copy their code." Nope doesn't work like that.  

Prospect2's price tag is definitely larger but the automatons make it worth it.  Abandoned Cart campaigns through other third party interrogations is completely out of our reach for our budget, but we can get some simplified version of this through Prospect2.

I also like the custom dashboard for Prospect2 and that my box office staff can easily unsubscribe patrons and redeploy emails.  Before they would need to have a WordFly login to access anything in the custom screen.

So far I have been impressed with the technical support and training we have received.  Taging vs. lists is going to take some getting use to.  I'm very happy with the testing capabilities compared with Wordfly.  

The biggest thing Wordfly has going for it is the design capabilities.  My graphics team is furious with me or making the change, but hopefully it will be better for our business in the long run.  

Reach out if you want o go into further detail.  We have done one test on Prospect2 and go live next month.  

We switched from mail2 to Prospect2. We liked the freedom of the drag and drop editor in P2, and all of the marketing automations we can do. We are also launching our SMS program this fall and I like the way it integrates with P2 to give me more visibility into who is interacting with us in what ways.

We are currently in the middle of switching from Mail2 to Wordfly.  Wordfly seems to have a more robust offering of tools that my Marketing team is excited for and the price tag is a bit more inexpensive.  So far, so good!

We moved from Mail2 to Wordfly a few years ago and have never looked back. The product is simply better: it's easier to use, the composer/templating is a dream, it's cheaper and more robust, and new features are rolled out regularly. The new Pages functionality should make RSVPs and surveys in Tessitura very efficient.

Yes if you're on Mail2 already you'll need to have a think about how to achieve the same in Wordfly, but it's not difficult and there are a lot of us on board you can tap on the shoulder for help.

Hey Hilary!

Im surprised to read the graphics team was not thrilled with the change as it looks like Prospect2's designer is way nicer. What issues are they having? We currently use Wordfly but are gathering info to make the switch to Prospect2.

Prospect2 has some hard coding that you can't get around.  With that you don't have the option to go in and write the emails in code With Wordfly we could go into the code and fix little bugs.  

Cosign 100% -- I'm always happy to share our experience discuss our work with Wordfly -- we've been happy customers for 6 years.

Hello folks,

Just hoping to reactivate discussion on this. We received an email from L2 this morning advising the retirement of m2, encouraging us to make the move to P2 - which we're considering. I have a few questions for those of you on WordFly and would appreciate your insight!

1. Event RSVPs - do they update Activities in Tessitura?
2. Surveys - does the data get transferred back into the Impresario database?
3. Surveys - is there an "easy" link between a survey respondent being signed up to a publicly available eDM list?
4. Surveys/publicly available eDM lists - is there a function to have a respondent created as a constituent record in Tessitura?
5. Performance reminders - I appreciate that there is a move from a custom database view to an Output Set - how has this worked for you?

If you have made the move from m2 to P2, I'd love to know how you deal with the above.

If it is more appropriate, please (PLEASE!) feel free to email me directly martin.keen@nida.edu.au with your experience. Many TIA!

Martin 

Hi Martin, at the Boston Symphony we made the switch from maiil2 to Propsect2.  Happy to jump on a call with you.  Shoot me a PM and we can schedule a call.

Thanks

Happy to talk to you about WordFly. We currently aren't using pages but I have done a lot of work on triggered emails like performance reminders and can speak to that. You can email me at GabrielaJirasek@goodmantheatre.org. 

In regard to events and surveys, aka Pages in WordFly lingo, there's no integration until you create it.

I worked with Tessitura over the summer to do this, and what we did is a product they will have widely available soon. This is my Mini-Magic about it: www.tessituranetwork.com/Passthrough