Back to UpdatesComplexity: The Enemy of Adoption
There’s a reason so many advancement offices are running major donor programs on spreadsheets and email threads—and it’s not because they haven’t heard of donor engagement platforms.
It’s because they’ve tried them.
Feature bloat. Confusing interfaces. Six-month implementations. Training programs that never quite stick. Systems that don’t talk to each other. Edge cases that require workarounds on top of workarounds. And underneath it all, a wide spectrum of technical comfort across teams—from the database wizard who builds macros for fun to the gift officer who just wants to send a report without calling IT.
Complexity doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates. And at some point, adoption doesn’t fail dramatically—it just… doesn’t happen. The platform gets underutilized. The contract doesn’t get renewed. The next evaluation never gets greenlit.
We know this because we live it. Every day.
What We Believe
At Ovrture, we’ve adopted a design philosophy borrowed from engineering: the best part is no part.
It sounds almost too simple, but it’s not. It means that before we add a feature, we ask whether the problem can be solved without it. It means that when we see friction, we don’t just document it—we eliminate it. It means we’re constantly refactoring the platform, running what you might call a continuous kaizen process: small, relentless improvements that compound over time.
This isn’t about dumbing things down. We support institutions producing 8,000+ reports annually. We handle complex fund hierarchies, multi-contact households, and CRM integrations that span Blackbaud, Salesforce, and everything in between. Power and scale are non-negotiable.
But complexity? Complexity is the tax you pay when you stop asking whether there’s a simpler way.
What We’ve Learned (the Hard Way)
A prospect recently gave us feedback that stuck with me. They’d just rebuilt their entire reporting system the previous year. They’d gotten campus partners aligned, trained staff on new workflows, and finally hit a rhythm. Our platform might have been better in some ways—but switching would mean asking everyone to change again.
Their hesitation wasn’t about our quality. It was about friction. The batch limits felt like a constraint. The workflow didn’t map perfectly to how their team reviews at the fund level. The learning curve, however modest, was still a curve.
We didn’t win that deal. But we did listen.
And here’s the thing: they were right to push back. Because if adopting a tool requires heroic effort, it’s not simple enough yet. That’s on us.
What We’re Doing About It
If you read our 2025 Enhancements Round-Up, you’ll notice a lot of updates that might seem small on the surface: Autofit Photos that crop images automatically so you don’t have to resize before uploading. Toast notifications that replace disruptive pop-ups. Undo and Redo buttons in the text editor. An improved “Approve and Transfer” workflow that shaves steps off the content pipeline.
None of these will make a headline. But together, they represent something bigger: a commitment to removing friction wherever we find it—at all levels and at all costs.
We’re also tackling the bigger structural challenges. The batch building limitations that prospect flagged? We’re in the middle of a project right now that will radically improve the flow for building 10,000 sites or reports simultaneously. When we see an issue, we fix the issue. Not eventually. Now.
The Commitment
I don’t want to pretend we’ve solved complexity. We haven’t. No platform has, and anyone who claims otherwise is selling you something.
What I can tell you is this: we take it seriously. We listen—really listen—when clients and prospects tell us where the friction lives. And we show up every day committed to the hard, unglamorous work of making powerful tools feel simple.
Because the best donor engagement platform in the world doesn’t matter if your team can’t adopt it. Or won’t. Or doesn’t have time to figure it out between campaign deadlines and board reports and the hundred other things on their plate.
Complexity is the enemy of adoption. And we’re not done fighting it.
CHRIS SNAVELY
Managing Partner
CHRIS SNAVELY
Managing Partner
Chris leads the Ovrture team in building, maintaining, and enhancing the platform. He also works directly with clients to build systems, drive adoption, and conceive of new use cases. Believing that the application of new thinking is what drives the world forward, Chris takes great pride in bringing a far more efficient and modern approach to the “digital advancement office.”
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