Tech Review: Affino

A good content management system (CMS) helps you create and maintain a website without any experience of coding, boosts search engine organisation (SEO) and answer engine optimisation (AEO), secures and organises content and data, streamlines workflows and allows for scalability, and broadly ensures the success of articles, videos, podcasts, and more across various channels. A CMS is essential for a well-functioning website. But there are so many CMSs on the market, ranging from the simplistic to the complex, from the drag-and-drop to the bespoke.

 

The best CMS for your charity will always depend on your size, your capabilities, and your mission, but we thought we’d review the CMS we know best. In our latest Tech Review, Charity Digital explores how we use Affino, the strengths and weaknesses, and why it might be the CMS for you.

 

 

In one word

 

Holistic.

 

 

How does Charity Digital use Affino?

 

Affino is more than your standard CMS. It is a CMS deeply integrated with a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, drastically reducing friction between the two pieces of software. The CMS side allows us to publish content in various formats – articles, videos, podcasts, events, reports, webinars, and so on – all of which you can see on the Charity Digital site. It allows us to view the success – or failure – of each piece of content via comprehensive analytics, including page views, new and returning users, bounce rates, average session length, and so on.

 

The CMS analytics provide timed snapshots of your website performance. But it is Affino’s CRM analytics that can really supercharge your content. Affino can monitor the collective experience of your site – as above – and marry that with the individual experience, allowing you to personalise user journeys. You can build individual or organisational profiles to deploy dynamic content recommendations, personalised interactions, restrict or allow greater access, and so on. The personal experience is paramount on Affino – and that’s great news for any organisation.

 

Affino sorts the technical bits so you don’t have to. SEO and AEO are covered – with canonical tags, optimised images, SEO health checks, enhanced links, and broken link tracking – helping you climb search engine results pages (SERPs) and feature on AI-generated outputs. You’ll need to use the right keywords and publish engaging, accessible, and easy to read content, but assuming you’ve produced interesting and relevant articles, Affino will cover the rest.

 

Publishing content and creating personalised user journeys are the main ways we use Affino, but there’s so much more that we rely upon, often without thinking. It can publish adverts and donation options across your site, monetising traffic or pushing people to the best services you have. It has great e-commerce options: we use Affino to sell discounted tech, put on training sessions, and accept payment for our paid events.

 

Charity Digital sends emails through the unified messaging suite, automating certain messages to save us time. And Affino has GDPR baked into its solution, meaning you can rest assured in terms of compliance and compatibility.

 

And then, of course, there’s AI. Affino has a lot going on here, evolving at pace, evolving to match the evolution of the tech. Affino can work with charities to prototype AI services, as they’ve done with Charity Digital. We now have an AI chatbot (see the bottom-right corner) and AI is fully integrated into our search bar (see above). We have AI-generated questions under our articles (see below) allowing readers to continue the conversation. 

 

Our AI is built using Charity Digital content, with detailed instructions practicing caution, so that all our users remain well protected. Affino has made our switch to AI seamless, allowing us to use the tech effectively and ethically.

 

That’s a pretty long list of use cases and functionality. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, as Affino offers so much more, all captured in one unified, fully integrated system.

 

It’s a great investment for any charity that wants to boost their message and their reach, personalise user journeys, and fully integrate their CMS with their CRM.

 

 

The learning curve

 

The basics are easy on Affino. Uploading content and imagery, reviewing analytics, selling tickets and merchandise – all of that is relatively simple. Website maintenance requires no experience with code and most changes to content are super simple, so expect no surprises there.

 

But to fully use the platform requires a bit more effort. Creating marketing funnels to track user experiences, for example, or automating elements of user journeys might require a little training. But, in our experience, you might face friction in the first instance, then it becomes second nature.

 

Affino does offer great training options to help you overcome any friction. They’ve got simple guides to every element of the system, which usually do the trick if you do hit a wall, and their AI support chat has often proved a lifesaver, providing us with quick and easy solutions to queries.

 

If we try to do something new on the platform these days – and we’re always finding new and interesting things to do – then we go straight to the chatbot and often find the right answer.

 

 

Value for money

 

Starting at £430 a month for all the features, Affino offers various pricing models scaling up to millions of users, emails, and page views per month. It is a little pricier than some beginner CMS and CRM systems but ultimately offers far more functionality and helps us to reach more people.

 

It is good value for money: the extra spend has resulted in a massive increase in our audience.

 

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