Escalator is an automated donor engagement platform for nonprofits. You bring your creative and set the rules. Escalator handles the segmentation and the sending.
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Traditional email platforms send what you write, to the lists you build. Escalator does both.
You describe the campaign the way you’d explain it to a colleague, add your brand guidelines and any facts or quotes you want used, and Escalator writes a campaign’s worth of on-brand emails plus the landing page. You edit and approve.
Then Escalator’s models learn how each supporter engages, what they open, what they click, what they’ve given, and decide who gets which version and when, within the rules you set. Nobody on your team builds a segment.
A traditional email platform doesn’t know what a lapsed donor is. Escalator does.
Both. You set up campaigns in Escalator, and Escalator keeps running them.
Once you approve a campaign, Escalator decides which supporters get which version and when, and keeps making that decision as behavior changes. A supporter who goes quiet in March is treated differently in April. You aren’t rebuilding anything between sends.
Escalator sends appeals, program updates, and petitions.
Escalator only creates the types you allow, and it routes the right one to each supporter based on where the relationship actually is. Not every email is an ask.
Yes. Petition pages are one of Escalator’s three page types, and advocacy asks sit alongside fundraising and program updates in your content library.
Escalator’s models read three things about each supporter: what they open, what they click, and what they’ve given.
From that, Escalator allocates the version of your message most likely to keep that person engaged, and picks the time to send it. A first-time giver and a faithful monthly donor don’t get the same email, because they shouldn’t. As behavior changes, the allocation changes with it, so the plan doesn’t go stale between campaigns the way a segment does.
Escalator learns from behavior it observes, so as you use the product more the models learns your file.
Three per campaign.If you’ve built conditional content before, Escalator works differently. The whole email is the variant, not blocks inside one email. Escalator picks a pre-approved email and sends it at the time that supporter tends to engage.
Everything Escalator writes comes from what you give it.
You describe the campaign the way you’d explain it to a colleague. You can also upload brand guidelines, facts and figures, and quotes for that specific campaign. Escalator pulls only from those. It will not make up a quote.
Before writing a word, Escalator shows you a summary of what it understood, so you can catch anything wrong early. Then it drafts, and you can edit line by line.
No, for two reasons.
Escalator writes from your material: your brief, your brand guidelines, your facts, your quotes. It isn’t reaching for generic language because it isn’t reaching outside what you gave it.
And nothing you write is used to train models. What one organization puts in doesn’t shape what another organization gets out.
You tell it once. Your organization details, brand colors, and fonts live in your Escalator account settings and carry across every campaign. You can add more detail on any individual campaign.
Yes. Escalator uses the images you upload. Escalator does not generate images.
Drafts are built from your own copy, your own facts, and your brand settings, so they start closer than a blank page or a general LLM tool. But you know your voice better than any model does, and the edit pass is yours.
The 30-day trial is there so you can find out on your own material rather than take our word for it. Book a demo and we’ll get you started.
Escalator writes in English today, and multi-language support is on the roadmap.
Not today. CRM integrations are on Escalator’s roadmap. Escalator doesn’t need your donor history to do its job, because it learns behavior as it happens: what a supporter opens, what they click, what they give through Escalator. That’s the signal the models run on. Your CRM stays the system of record for gifts, contacts, and relationships. Escalator runs the email engagement.
Stripe. Card payments go directly to Stripe, and Escalator doesn’t hold card details.
On donations processed through Escalator there’s the Stripe fee plus a 1% platform fee. You can turn on fee coverage so donors have the option to cover it.
Escalator’s Smart Pages sit alongside your emails, so a campaign lives in one place instead of stitched together across different tools.
There are three page types today: donation, monthly upgrade, and petition. More are coming in the roadmap. Each is built from a template designed to convert, and you edit it on the page itself with click-and-edit tools for text and images.
Supporter data lives in Escalator’s application database on Microsoft Azure, UK South. It isn’t copied out of that environment except to deliver the email you’ve scheduled.
The decisions about who gets which email run separately, on pseudonymized data in its own database and environment. No supporter names, contact details, giving histories, or engagement data are ever sent to a language model. What goes to the model is your campaign brief, your organizational context, and the content you supply.
Card payments go directly to Stripe. Escalator’s sub-processors are Microsoft Azure for hosting and storage, Stripe for donation processing, and SendGrid for transactional email delivery. You are the data controller and Escalator is the processor.
Full detail is in our Data Processing and Security document.
Microsoft Azure, UK South. That covers your supporter data and the models that decide what gets sent.
Language models run on Microsoft’s global Azure deployments, so that processing may happen in other regions. No supporter personal data is in those calls, only your campaign brief and the content you provide.
No, and it isn’t used to train anyone’s models.
Escalator uses OpenAI models through Azure Foundry under Microsoft’s terms, which means your content isn’t shared with OpenAI and isn’t used to train any model. Audience selection and personalization run on Escalator’s own models inside the Azure UK South environment, with no third-party language model involved.
No. Escalator starts by learning from behavior it observes rather than importing years of history from your CRM.
There’s a warm start period while the models learn how your supporters engage, which means the first campaigns run on lighter signals and sharpen from there. The trade is a slower start for a simpler one: no data mapping project, no CSV to prepare, and no waiting on your database team before you can send anything.
Every Escalator plan includes a free 30-day trial and a 30-minute onboarding session with a specialist who gets you set up. You’ll create your first campaigns and start to see supporters sent emails right away.
Yes, and starting small is often the easier way in.
Lapsed donors are a common starting point. Most organizations know they should be working that file and haven’t found the hours, so there’s little to lose and the results are easy to read. New supporter welcome series work the same way. You can run Escalator on one group while everything else stays exactly where it is.
Book a demo and we’ll talk through which group to start with.
Escalator has four plans: Basic, Enhanced, Premium, and Custom. Pricing is keyed to your number of supporter records and billed monthly or annually. Each plan includes a set number of user accounts and a free 30-day trial.
On donations Escalator processes there’s the Stripe fee plus a 1% platform fee.
Escalator plans renew automatically, monthly or annually depending on what you pick.
You can cancel at any time. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you’ve paid for, so a monthly plan stops at the end of that month and an annual plan runs to the end of the year. Fees already paid aren’t refunded except where the law requires it.
If you leave, you can export your content and your supporter data within 30 days.
Every plan includes onboarding. You’ll work with our onboarding specialists to get your organization set up, your brand settings in place, and your first campaign running.
After that, our team stays available. We’re also building out a help center so you can find answers on your own when that’s faster.
Everything that went out, and to whom. Escalator’s Trust Tile shows it at a glance, so nothing happens out of sight.
Beyond that: donations, opens, clicks, monthly upgrades, and engagement over time. You can look across your whole account, at a single campaign, or at one supporter. Open a supporter record and you’ll see their engagement timeline month by month, broken out by activity type, alongside every transaction with the amount, the date, and whether it went through.
Everything lives in your dashboard, and additional data is available for download.
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